Why school should be like Space Camp

In mid-June, I had the opportunity to visit Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama as part of the Honeywell Educators at Space Academy scholarship program. I’d been excited about it for months, and like any wannabe astronaut, I had expected the shuttle simulator to be the highlight of my week. Complicated, challenging, exciting — my simulated rocket ride would be a true adventure. I had loved space exploration as a child, and my time in the simulator would almost certainly be the closest I would ever come to spaceflight. It had been a dream of mine for many years. Like many other American children, I had at one time been obsessed with NASA. Posters of astronauts and satellites had hung on my walls; books about spacecraft and rockets had laid scattered about my room. Space travel was the ultimate adventure. How surprised I was, then, to find that other people, rather than machines and rockets, could become the most memorable part of my week. My simulated shuttle time was wonderful — indeed, the experience far exceeded my expectations — but it wasn’t the best part of my time at Space Camp.  My experiences with other teachers were the most meaningful and unforgettable parts of my adventure.

I’ve met many educators during my years of teaching, and I’ve been a part of some teacher groups that have truly impressed me with their intelligence and passion. But never have I been part of a group as consistently impressive as my Space Camp peers. We only had a week together. I wish they were my coworkers. It was a delight to be around people who were so adventurous, so creative, so fun, and so smart. I enjoyed talking to my teammates about life in their schools, and I learned a great deal about effective teaching from the stories they told. But I learned something far more important from these people: I discovered that science and learning can be a passion for anyone.

My teammates had a wide variety of life experiences and a wide variety of personalities. Had we not met at Space Camp, I would never have guessed these people were passionate about space exploration. American society, and its school population especially, sees science and math as nerdy interests. Overcoming that stereotype is a challenging task in any classroom — how are we supposed to help kids understand that being interested in biology or astronomy doesn’t turn you into a nerd, when television and popular music say just the opposite? Take a look at nearly any high school science faculty in America, and you’ll find teachers who reinforce the traditional stereotype. But sitting across the table from me at Space Camp was proof that science doesn’t have to be nerdy. My peers were easygoing, fun, and friendly people who just happened to have an interest in science.

Nobody demonstrated this better than my group leader, Amy McDowell. Amy is the ideal teacher. She is confident, poised, personable, intelligent…and more interested in space science than anyone I’ve ever met. If every student in America had a teacher like Amy, our nation’s negative stereotypes about science would quickly vanish. Amy is smart enough to have a deep understanding of science and math, she’s confident enough not to care what other people think about that, and she’s charming enough to be able to connect with anybody. Amy’s not just the type of teacher I would want my own children to have — she’s the type of person I would want my own children to become. She’s a role model for what it means to follow your passions. I’ve never been to Amy’s school, nor seen her teach a lesson to children, but it’s clear to me that Amy empowers her students to pursue their dreams. We all need someone like her.

This was my true learning from Space Camp. I expected to learn about rockets, to learn about astronauts and satellites and Apollo and shuttles. And I did. But I could have learned about those from a book or a movie or a magazine. What I learned at Space Camp — and could only have learned at Space Camp — was that we teachers have the power to help make our students’ dreams come true. Whether in science or engineering or English or drama, we have the ability to help our students find and follow their passions. If we as educators want to make a difference in the future, we need to do more than just teach our students about textbook knowledge. We need to show our students what it means to chase a dream. The best teachers know this already, of course, but in an age of standardized tests and state curricula, spending time teaching students about state-of-mind seems frivolous. Instead, we just hope that the best parts of our personalities will somehow transfer to students. We spend time and money on better curricula, better books, better buildings, better supplies. Maybe all we really need is a better sense of what we’re really trying to accomplish.

The people at Space Camp understand this. Space Camp isn’t about learning how to fly the shuttle or design a Moon lander. It’s about getting kids interested in science and math and teaching them to follow their dreams. The shuttle is just the hook, the thing that gets people in the door. How many Space Camp attendees will go on to become astronauts? Virtually none. But that doesn’t make the experience a waste. Rather, just the opposite — sitting aboard the shuttle simulator may direct kids to an interest in engineering they never knew existed. We can do the same at school, but we need to move beyond the idea that textbook learning prepares our kids for life. We need our politicians, our principals, our school boards, and our society to understand that the topics presented in textbooks are just a hook — just some ideas to get kids interested in learning. The real value of education is in who we teach our students to be, not what we teach them to know.

Not all kids will become mathematicians, just like not all kids will become authors or athletes. Why waste time worrying about whether or not students understand the quadratic equation or onomatopoeia or electrolytes, when what we really care about is whether or not they’re learning to think, create, converse, and present? (High school graduates, be honest…how many of you can explain the quadratic equation now?) We need to put some serious time and effort into teaching students how to develop interpersonal relationships, how to manage finances and families, how to set and achieve goals, and most importantly, how to live and learn independently. We use literature and drama and space and democracy to get those ideas across, and if kids pick up some facts along the way, that’s tremendous. Do kids need to understand how to read and write? Absolutely. They also need to know how to find information, create products, and communicate with others. But our nationwide focus on trivial concepts — Krebs cycle, atomic structure, and Newton’s laws, to name a few from my own subject expertise — is showing kids that school is pointless. Instead, we need to focus on what we really want our students to be able to know and do, and that can’t include fluff like the War of 1812 and vector summation. Future engineers will still learn about forces and motion, and future authors will still learn about dialogue and denouement, but it will because our students are choosing to do so, rather than being forced to do so.

This is what Space Camp showed me…that school should be like Space Camp. Not literally, of course: Space Camp costs big money, and some of its features can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the idea that students have a series of intensive experiences, each with a subject-specific focus, is something that can change education. Deep, real learning occurs when schools decide to teach students concepts instead of trivia. Yep, it’s harder to teach, and it’s harder to grade, but it’s the only way we’ll get our kids thinking critically and creatively. We need to be deliberate in how we prepare students for the future, and we can’t just hope they’ll turn out all right.

How do we make this happen? We start with interdisciplinary studies. We treat our classrooms like Space Camp. We teach kids about rockets and robots and teamwork and trust. We teach them how to solve problems with math and science, and we give them a sense of what it means to be an engineer or an astronaut. We tie in history and language and art and design, and we do it all through the lens of space science. And then, we start something new. We run a drama unit, or a storytelling seminar, or a study of local ecosystems, or a solar car challenge. It doesn’t matter. The point is not that kids learn about monologues or predators or electrons. The point is that students get a chance to do real-life work and learn real-life skills. Our goal is to get kids interested in learning. Our goal is to inspire the next generation of engineers and biologists and fashion designers and publishers. Teachers will say we’ve been doing this for decades, and in a way, they’re right. But we’ve been doing it as an afterthought. If America wants the best for the future, we need to recognize that the entire purpose of school is to inspire kids to achieve, and anything that isn’t focused on that central tenet doesn’t deserve a place in our classrooms.

Most kids love elementary school. They love learning to read and write and count; they love learning how to tell stories and how to make friends and how to build and how to draw. And when middle school begins, and students transition into textbooks and end-of-chapter questions, we’re surprised that kids are no longer interested in school. Would you be interested? We tell ourselves that students need to learn what’s in the textbook, that they won’t be ready for high school or college or work if they can’t grasp the ideas textbooks hold. But the truth is, they’re not going to be ready for the future unless we can prepare them for something far beyond textbooks. Bringing space science and drama week and democracy and dinosaurs into our classrooms – using the same strategies in our middle and high schools as we use in our elementary schools – will give students a chance to see how the world works and how to be a contributing part of it. As students age, the problems they solve become more sophisticated, and the topics they address become more complicated, but the model remains the same. Our singular goal, with every student in every classroom in America, must be to ignite a passion for learning. Everything else is a means to that end.

Schools across the country talk about interdisciplinary work and project-based learning, but most teachers have no idea what that really means. They grew up in classrooms where students read textbooks, answered questions, took tests, and earned grades based on how much information they had learned. Most teachers do the same in their own classrooms…it’s all they know. Most teachers have never experienced true project-based learning, where the topic of study is of less importance than the fundamental learning it leads to. I was impressed by Space Camp. It provided a very real, very compelling window into how we can get students interested not only about science, technology, engineering, and math, but also about the excitement of learning. Space Camp was a true project-based learning environment and a model for what American classrooms should be. Until we change our mindset, until we start giving kids realistic experiences and teaching them to complete real-life projects, as Space Camp does, we’ll be stuck with underperforming schools and disinterested students. There’s a way out, and it’s going to take a lot of work, but it’ll change the way our students view learning and the way our citizens feel about their country. Thanks, Honeywell. Thanks, Space Camp. And thanks, Amy. You’ve lit my fire.