ARTICLE/PROGRAM: Teachers Defying Gravity to Gain Students’ Interest
This video promoting the program is as creepy as the defense technologies Northrop Grumman is known for ...
Read on...
December 22, 2009
Teachers Defying Gravity to Gain Students’ Interest
By KENNETH CHANG
NORWALK, Conn. — Before showing a video to the 11th and 12th graders in his physics class, Glenn Coutoure, a teacher at Norwalk High School, warned them that his mouth would be hanging open, in childlike wonderment, almost the whole time.
Mr. Coutoure then started the DVD, showing him and other science teachers floating in an airplane during a flight in September. By flying up and down like a giant roller coaster along parabolic paths, the plane simulated the reduced gravity of the Moon and Mars and then weightlessness in 30-second chunks.
The teachers performed a series of experiments and playful stunts, like doing push-ups with others sitting on their backs and catching in their mouths M & M’s that flew in straight lines, that they hoped would help them better explain to their students the laws of motion that Sir Isaac Newton deduced centuries ago.
“You see the ball just hangs there,” Mr. Coutoure said.
“That’s hot,” a student interjected.
The Northrop Grumman Foundation has sent science teachers on these flights of weightlessness in the last four years to excite teachers and students about science and mathematics.
“All of a sudden, this teacher becomes a superhero,” said Sandra Evers-Manly, the foundation’s president.
When the foundation polled the 205 teachers who flew in 2005 and 2006, nearly 92 percent reported an increase in overall interest in science among their students. About 75 percent said more students expressed a desire to continue studying math and science.
The flight on Sept. 29, aboard a modified 727 operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, which offers commercial weightless flights at $5,000 a ticket, took off from Stewart International Airport in New Windsor, N.Y., and headed south. Off the New Jersey coast near Atlantic City, the jet began its up-and-down gyrations — one parabola at Martian gravity, two at the lesser gravity of the moon and then a dozen weightless ones.
Anyone can feel weightless by falling. During the zero-gravity portion of the flight, the plane flies toward the ground at the same free-falling speed and acceleration as the passengers. The plane has few windows for viewing the approaching ground, and passengers feel as if they are floating in level flight instead of a downward plummet. When the plane pulls out of the dive, the passengers, who were told to lie down on the floor quickly, felt twice their usual weight.
For most of the teachers like Mr. Coutoure, this mouth-open experience was the closest they would ever get to space. (One, however, Rachael Manzer, a Suffield, Conn., middle school teacher, might get there. She has been chosen as a candidate to fly on one of the suborbital spacecraft being designed and built by private companies.)
As President Obama did last month when announcing $260 million in public-private education initiatives to generate interest in math and science, the teachers on the flight repeatedly spoke about engaging and inspiring their students. They talked specifically about those in grades six through eight, who typically seem to lose interest and proficiency.
Geoffrey Bergen of Whisconier Middle School in Brookfield, Conn., a teacher on the flight, said traditional teaching methods struggled to hold students’ interest in the age of video games and fast-paced technology. “It’s really hard to teach out of a textbook when you consider the world we live in,” Mr. Bergen said. The zero-gravity flight, he said, “gives you a new tool for Newton’s laws.”
Seeing their teachers performing astronautlike feats, the students, he added, “certainly are engaged.”
After the flight, Adrienne Manzone, a teacher at Captain Nathan Hale School in Coventry, Conn., beamed. “My coolness factor will go up 100 percent,” she said.
Francis Q. Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, said programs like Northrop Grumman’s zero-gravity flights were helpful in improving science education. “It helps revitalize educators’ passion for science,” Dr. Eberle said. “The goal is to help them take that excitement back and work with their students.”
But others, like Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the federal Institute of Education Sciences, wonder if the emphasis on engagement and inspiration for students can be somewhat misplaced.
“It certainly does no harm to do this,” Dr. Whitehurst said of the Northrop Grumman program. But, he added, the $5.1 million that the foundation spent on the program the last four years perhaps could have been more effective elsewhere. “If they had hired me as a consultant, I wouldn’t have imagined spending it on zero-gravity flights,” he said. “The question is, Does it really improve their teaching? Does it have an impact? Those questions are not asked and answered with nearly enough frequency.”
Dr. Whitehurst said the efforts to make math and science more appealing to more students could even be counterproductive if the message that hard work is needed to master the subjects was diluted. He pointed to the tests called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss. Countries in which a higher fraction of students said they liked math generally performed poorly, while some countries where students disliked math, like South Korea, scored among the best. (There are a few exceptions like Singapore, where students liked math and also did well.)
The notion that American science and math education is in crisis is overblown, Dr. Whitehurst said. In the most recent Timss tests, American students performed well above average and have improved over the past decade, although some other international comparisons show American students in the middle of the pack.
In Mr. Coutoure’s classroom, the video of the weightless flight was shown toward the end of class, after he had lectured about the physics of motion, from Aristotle’s mistaken belief that heavier objects fall faster to Galileo’s more rigorous observations and deductions.
He also performed simple demonstrations to illustrate the concepts, dropping a softball and a piece of paper, then crumpling the paper into a ball and showing it then dropped as quickly as the softball.
Jamie Heverin, one of the students, said, “I’m curious about what he will pull out next time.”
FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/space/22teachers.html
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