Hodes Introduces Resolution to Honor Challenger Crew
CHALLENGER
Union Leader
Matt Negrin
Boston University Washington News Service
31 January 2008
WASHINGTON — Christa McAuliffe’s 1986 space mission aboard the Challenger was supposed to be her “ultimate field trip.”
The 37-year-old Concord High School teacher had sent her 11-page application to NASA’s Teacher in Space program just before the deadline. She would compete against — and defeat — 11,500 others, among them notable doctors and scholars.
McAuliffe’s life in space lasted 73 seconds. Her sudden death, along with the other six crew members aboard the Challenger, stunned the country with shock and sadness but helped enforce perhaps her most valuable principle: The best way to learn something is to see it for yourself.
Those are the feelings U.S. Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes is trying to revive as part of a House resolution to honor the crew aboard the space shuttle that exploded above the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Jan. 28, 1986.
Hodes’s resolution will appear on the House floor in two weeks. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Science and Technology Committee have each approved it.
In Concord, memories of the Challenger explosion may not be fresh, but the inspiration left behind is, said Jeanne Gerulskis, executive director of the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, an institution opened four years after the shuttle disintegrated and dedicated to teaching students through experiential learning and field trips.
“When it first happened, it was very much a tragedy, but as the years have gone on, people have drawn a lot of inspiration from Christa,” Gerulskis said.
Construction for the planetarium began in 1988 after a Northwood teacher suggested the idea as a way to honor McAuliffe. Instead of a monument or museum about the astronaut’s life, the planetarium encourages students to learn by doing and seeing — one of McAuliffe’s philosophies that embodied her journey on the Challenger.
McAuliffe was to teach two lessons from the shuttle to schoolchildren. Though she never got the chance, she may have still reached her mission objective, said David McDonald, the planetarium’s education director.
“I think there’s a great deal of interest among teachers for experiential learning,” he said. “I think just spending hour after hour in the classroom with lectures and PowerPoints and things like that is not the only way that teachers want to teach these days.”
Hodes said he also introduced the legislation to spur a “new generation of scientific pioneers.” Aboard the Challenger, the astronauts were scheduled to deploy a satellite, perform an experiment on Haley’s Comet and observe fluid dynamic tests.
Hodes lamented the pressures on teachers to meet No Child Left Behind requirements, often forcing them to forgo field trips.
“They’re under pressures from many different directions,” he said. “There’s a lot of pressure to reduce time to do things like experiential learning, and I think that’s the important part of an education.”
Gerulskis hailed the resolution as a reminder that McAuliffe was an “Everyman” who appealed to the masses because of her teacher status.
“She wanted to show people that everyday people can go into space, that everyday people should know about what’s going on, that this is for all of us,” she said.
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