Two recent news events from around the world have proven to be teachable moments in local classrooms.
The first wasn’t just an around-the-world topic: It went around the world 5,830 times.
The space shuttle Discovery landed Wednesday, ending a career that included 39 launches and 365 days in space.
Camas astronaut Mike Barratt helped bring Discovery home, but he wasn’t the only local representative aboard. The signatures of more than 1,000 Clark County students were part of the cargo.
The Evergreen district’s Shahala Middle School and the Vancouver district’s Chinook Elementary took part in this round of NASA’s “Student Signatures in Space” program. Only about 10 schools from each state were chosen.
About 800 pupils at Chinook and about 300 sixth-graders at Shahala signed posters at their schools last spring.
“The sixth-graders were studying planetary science,” said Joyce Gambill, a sixth-grade science teacher at Shahala. It’s the only time that the middle-school students study space.
The spring sign-up event worked nicely at Chinook. That’s when they teach about space, teacher Talina Borchers said back in the fall, when the Discovery shuttle was originally scheduled to launch.
The signature-filled posters were scanned onto a disc that was part of Discovery’s cargo. When the posters are returned, they will be put on permanent display at Shahala and Chinook, along with official NASA certificates verifying that the signatures flew in space.
There’s more payoff than posters, however. One of Gambill’s former students — they’re seventh-graders now — wants to become a scientist and an astronaut.
“That’s the light” that can go on, Gambill said.
Learning from tragedy
Some teachers used the tragedy in Japan to discuss earthquakes and tsunamis. (According to references, “tsu” means harbor and “nami” means wave).
At Battle Ground’s Maple Grove Middle School, seventh-grade math and science teacher Glenda Griggs also talked about the nuclear plants in Japan that are in danger because of the quake. It included a discussion of the former Trojan Nuclear Plant, which some of the students recalled having seen just across the Columbia River from Kalama.
Battle Ground High teacher Mary Metcalf had a lot to talk about with her Japanese language class. At one point, Metcalf asked the students: “What’s the Japanese word for tsunami?” No one fell for it.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
