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 ANSLEY - Students in Ansley will benefit this year from three teachers' summer vacations.
One went to space camp in Huntsville, Ala., another learned about the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South and about literature and culture of the Great Plains, and the third spent a week in Colonial America.
"Whether (teachers) go to a new workshop or a summer internship, they just bring back so much to our students," Principal Lance Bristol said. "It's a win-win situation. It develops their talents further and provides better instruction for kids."
Sixth-grade teacher Kaci Johnson applied to NASA's space camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on a whim. The application deadline was midnight Dec. 31, and she submitted her application at 11:30 p.m.
"It was something I never thought I'd have a chance to do," she said. Of about 1,200 applicants, only about 250 were chosen. Honeywell paid for everything, including her tuition, food, lodging and travel expenses.
"It really was a special experience, one that I'll never forget," she said.
One of the things she believes helped her get selected is that NASA is inaccessible to students in rural Nebraska.
"We're isolated here, and there are not a lot of opportunities for students to be around NASA," Johnson said. "It was important for me to be able to bring that back to my students, to go there and experience it and allow my students at least a little piece of it."
Her favorite things at the camp were the realistic simulators that let her experience an uncontrolled spin, the sensation of parachuting or crashing into water, and a gravity chair.
"It was exhilarating," she said. Even though she never left the ground, she felt like she could be an astronaut for a day.
Johnson brought back lots of materials and met many new teachers from around the country to network with for new ideas. Her goal is to use space as her theme this year and to branch it out into all subjects to see how NASA and the space program affect all parts of our lives.
"It really does touch our daily lives," she said. So, it's important for students in rural schools to know there are jobs available in science, technology, engineering and math.
Johnson hopes to host "Space Night" sometime this fall for parents and others. She also would like to start a scholarship to send an Ansley student to space camp every few years. The camp costs about $1,500.
Carol King plans to use the cultural information she learned in Cleveland, Miss., to help students with writing projects and literature selections.
While there, she learned a lot about blues music and civil rights.
"We're talking the DEEP South here," she said. "It was kind of a culture shock."
King teaches high school English and is the school's librarian.
Her trip, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, took her to plantations and juke joints. Some of the Southern writers and musicians her students already talk about are from that area, including author John Grisham, King said.
King was in the same Mississippi county where in August 1955 a young black man named Emmett Till was murdered by two white men because he whistled at a white woman. The men admitted their guilt after they were acquitted of the crime.
National Endowment for the Humanities conducts about 40 workshops a year. In the last five years, King has gone on trips to learn about the Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Henry Ford in Detroit, life in a cavalry fort near Crawford and the Civil Rights movement in Alabama.
She said about 40 people are selected for each workshop. The ones she attended have about 400 applicants, but as many as 6,000 have applied for the workshops on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
"It's worth the effort to apply," King said. "It's like getting paid to go on vacation."
Also this summer, King learned about the literature and culture of the Great Plains on a trip to Boulder, Colo., sponsored by the Gilder-Lehrman Foundation. She applied to that one because studies included Nebraska pioneer and author Willa Cather.
She said about 10 percent of applicants are picked for Gilder-Lehrman workshops.
Sue May, a family consumer science and special education teacher at Ansley, was selected by that group as well. She traveled to New Haven, Conn., and stayed on the campus of Yale University while she learned about Colonial America.
On her application to attend, May wrote that she'd bring back to Ansley students information about the way people lived and made do with what they had.
She visited some of the oldest residences in Deerfield, Mass., which have been turned into museums. One of her professors invited the group to his 1700s colonial home, which has d |
