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Thursday, March 26, 1998 IDYLLWILD -- For some of these city kids, a sky full of snowflakes is more foreign than Saturn's rings. They're supposed to be learning about space--you know, doing their bit to make American students more competitive with their science- and math-oriented peers worldwide. Outside, though, the night looks as if it is embroiled in a cosmic pillow fight. Knowing that only destabilizes this already volatile adolescent energy mass. And that's fine with Astrocamp instructor John Keller. Temporary exiles from Eagle Rock's junior high magnet, these students are at an age--and of an Age--when cool rules. Overt displays of enthusiasm are seen by some as the antithesis of that quality. But now they're in the mountains for three days. They've been hurling snowballs at one another and their teachers--"That's for the C you gave me"--and this has eroded the cynical force field with which they protect their fragile psyches. Keller swoops in like a Jedi pilot. First, he persuades a preternaturally hip ninth-grader to spin on the floor in imitation of the spiral galaxy we inhabit. Then he cajoles seventh- and eighth-graders to slam dance about like the particles that make up Saturn's rings. Simultaneously, working at light speed--186,000 miles per second--he flashes slides and fires facts into the students' unusually vulnerable cortices. Keller, 28, has seesawed from teaching to research since getting his master's in 1992. He had participated in NASA science-enrichment programs as a high school teacher, then went on to pursue a PhD in planetary science, when he decided that sharing science with kids meant more to him than Europa, a moon of Jupiter that he'd been exploring through information beamed back from the Galileo spaceship. Astrocamp, he says, reminded him of the stargazing field trips that had first inspired him to explore astronomy when he was an adolescent in Idaho. Astrocamp's hope, Keller says, is to plant ideas that will later ignite an explosion of interest. Sometimes, he suggests, one can almost hear the fuses hissing. "If Saturn is, like, a gas planet, is it, like, all gas?" a student asks. "I mean, if I stood on it, would I fall through?" "If you were to stand on it, you would start falling," Keller says. He makes his lanky frame flail. " 'Whoa! I'm falling! Cool!' "But you wouldn't go right through. Why?" "Gravity pulls the gas together?" "Yeah, the center would still be gas, but really dense gas." The students stare at the shed-sized slide of Saturn, shot from the Voyager spacecraft. For another moment they seem to forget that snow falls outside. Then Keller dismisses them to their next class, and the snowy mayhem begins anew. The Astrocamp philosophy is simple, says director Dave Goodsell: "We're not trying to fill their heads with a bunch of knowledge. We're trying to expose them to a field of knowledge. Those are two very different things." Astrocamp, says Goodsell, is the creation of a former Orange County high school biology teacher and football coach named Ross Turner. Over the course of his teaching career, Turner had come to realize that the most powerful education often occurred on field trips, Goodsell says. So, 20 years ago, Turner and his wife, Kristi, sold their home to finance a marine biology camp on Catalina Island. Their nonprofit educational corporation, Guided Discoveries Inc., expanded its Catalina Island Marine Institute to three sites on the island and in 1991 took over a failing private boarding school at Idyllwild. Under Goodsell's direction, they transformed the 90-acre campus into Astrocamp. Guided Discoveries now has about 75 instructors at its four facilities, and about 25 or so maintenance and cooking staff members. About 30,000 fourth-grade through ninth-grade students from Southern California and several Western states attended the programs last year--13,000 of them taking the stomach-sloshing bus ride up to Astrocamp. Both public and private schools attend, with about 70% of the students at any time coming from the larger public school population. The maximum number of students on campus at one time is 300. Goodsell says one of his regrets is that so few schools from poor neighborhoods attend the camp, so few disadvantaged students get the camp's science jolt. Tuition for the program runs about $40 a day per student (including dormitory housing and cafeteria meals in the camp's lodge-like dining hall), and a bus from Los Angeles goes for about $750. So unless a school has private funding or a highly motivated staff and parents, the cost can seem prohibitive, Goodsell said. Once a school does attend, he says, the return rate is about 90%. Teachers attending the camp gave credence to that percentage, saying that they lobby to return year after year. "The students experience things here we could never do in a classroom," says Liz Hein, a teacher at Santa Monica's science magnet. As she speaks, her eighth-grade students spout through snorkels and gesture silently in an awkward effort to construct a "space station" in the "microgravity" of the camp's pool. Next door in the gym, Donna Lucas, a teacher at Glendale's Zion Lutheran school, makes the same point as one of her fifth-grade students whirls upside-down in a red, white and blue gyroscopic "space ball." "Often kids go through the whole week and don't even know it's science they've been studying," says Astrocamp instructor Sara Swedlund, 25. "They think they've been playing all week." Like Keller, Swedlund says she sees the camp as a place to apply education theory, a lab in which to work on applying fervid counterforce to some students' ingrained resistance to science. "I want to get them excited," she says. So Swedlund grins as one student puts her hand on a beach ball-sized Vandegraph generator in the electricity and magnetism lab and sees her hair shoot out straight in a static-charged halo. And she laughs along with the students when they all link hands and then recoil as a shock rips through their arms. Their muscles are controlled by electrical impulses, Swedlund explains. "This room is overflowing with excited electrons," she says. On the last day, when the sky turns blue, Swedlund is beside the students as they look at the sun through barrel-sized computer-directed telescopes. Those squiggles--prominences--leaping from the sun's surface are examples of the strength of the sun's magnetic field. Sometimes the science link is obvious, as when students design their own Mars landers and drop them onto a rocky surface, or when they launch rockets made from plastic bottles and use trigonometry to calculate the altitude attained (200 feet is a common height). In one class, Keller lectures on lights and lasers, letting the kids experiment in a dark room that fills with artificial fog and the music of R.E.M. At one point, the students look through diffraction glasses as lights containing different gases--hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, neon--break up into rainbows. "What makes light?" Keller asks. "Jiggling electrons!" a student answers. And different colors, Keller says, represent different temperatures and compositions--which is how astronomers determine what stars are made of. "Astronomy," he concludes, "is all about light." That night his students hike silently through the forest, their wet high-tops crunching in the snow. When the clouds briefly part, an earlier lesson resurfaces. "Look," a student whispers, pointing to a glaring new light source. "Orion!" There are, however, parts of the Astrocamp curriculum that never quite loop back to astronomy. At first, Goodsell says, the camp tried to integrate its "ropes course" by saying it simulated astronaut training. Now, the instructors admit that the only connection to science is to psychology. "Students are often afraid of physical challenges, and often they're afraid of the sciences," Goodsell says. "If they do things that give them higher self-esteem, maybe they'll feel they can accomplish more in life." So it is that squeals and chants often infiltrate the serious science talk, as students in rock-climbing harnesses clamber about on poles and cables suspended up near the tree line. The task that stirs the greatest buzz among campers is the "power pole." With snow still blowing and temperatures dipping fast, Keller's 12 charges approach a towering post stuck into a meadow. The routine has been standardized. "My name is Thanh, and I accept this challenge. Do you support me?" an eighth-grader asks. As his classmates cheer, he climbs skyward. At the top of the 30-foot pole, each student struggles to take the last step and stand upright on the pinnacle. A few back down. One girl in another group reaches the top and then sits there sobbing in terror. Most, however, wobble to their feet. Then, at their instructor's urging, they leap into the air, grasping for a trapeze that dangles a few feet from their fingers. When all the students have been lowered to the ground, Keller gathers them and asks for "one word to describe what you're feeling now." "Cold!" several shriek, huffing steam and patting their mittens together. Keller grimaces and adjusts the assignment: "OK, any word that isn't thermal?" "Glad." "Relieved." "Surprised." "Confident." Brittany, a seventh-grader, looks up beaming. "It's a thermal word," she says, "but . . . ." "Go ahead," Keller says. "How'd it make you feel?" "Cool!" she yelps. PHOTO: Richard Truong, right, prepares to leap off a 30-foot pole toward a trapeze at Astrocamp, as another student, below, jumps above the
cable she is traversing. Below right: Edlyne Nicolas, from left, Lisa Bauer and Diane Louie cheer on their brave buddies. Copyright: Los Angeles Times
Last Updated: 6/16/00 |