Space for students
By Patricia Rifkin/Special to the Press Dispatch
“To inspire, to explore, to learn...the essence of a good teacher. To be inspired, to want to explore, to want to learn...the essence of a good student.” Challenger Mission Statement.
As I read the Challenger Center’s mission statement while there for a week-long training this past summer, I was grateful for the opportunity to be one of 17 teachers chosen for the MESSENGER Fellowship and take back to my school at the Lewis Center, the lessons and excitement of the training. The NASA education and outreach program I attended trains science teachers, grades K-12, in hands-on, standards-based lessons that address the solar system, planetary observations through history, and engineering associated with building and sending a spacecraft to another world.
Every student should encounter something in their educational career that sparks the imagination – that pushes the envelope of the known into the realm of the unknown. As our students memorize names, dates and accomplishments, it is necessary that they realize these individuals were once dreamers and the accomplishments were once somebody’s dreams.
In today’s beginning 21st century our students have the chance to “ride” along with scientific investigations and progressions that daily make our universe and our “home,” the planet Earth, more understood and more majestic. The goals of NASA and the Challenger Center are meshing as NASA prepares to launch another discovery mission to the planet Mercury. MESSENGER, launching in March of 2004, will investigate the forces that shaped Mercury and provide further explanation and understanding of the terrestrial planets and their journey in our solar system.
MESSENGER is an unmanned spacecraft that will arrive in orbit around Mercury in 2009. The name highlights the scientific topics of the investigation (Mercury Surface Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) as well as the fact that this little planet is named for the ancient Roman messenger of the gods. It will only be the second time in history that humans have endeavored to rendezvous with Mercury.
As teachers and parents it is so important to encourage the continuing quest for knowledge related to space exploration and our earthly part in it. Encourage your children to simply LOOK UP at the night sky; learn and appreciate it, follow the accomplishments of the daring explorers of today as they launch into space leaning on the shoulders of “giants” who came before them.
Space exploration is more than just watching in amazement and incredulity when a disaster occurs. It should be part of our classroom consciousness, our dinner-table conversations, and Friday night gatherings at the local observatories. We, as adults, should encourage our children to question, to wonder, to seek ways of answering these questions because this is what truly makes our children educated and responsible members of our society.
Making our world a better place to live is what we all aspire to in educating our children. Exploration in the classroom should lead to exploration everywhere else in a child’s surroundings. It is the essence of real learning. Every explorer throughout history steps across their personal line of comfort and in so doing takes the entire human race with them. Maybe some of our children will be these future explorers.
Patty Rifkin has been a math and science teacher for 17 years and is in her second year at the Lewis Center. NASA chose Ms. Rifkin to be one of 17 teachers nationwide for the two-year MESSENGER Fellowship.
If you would like further information about MESSENGER curriculum and/or would like a presentation at your next group function please contact Patty Rifkin at the Lewis Center, prikin@lcer.org or (760) 946-5414 ext 202.
Used with permission by Daily Press, Freedom Communication, 2003