Most Baltimore-area students aren?t giving much thought to how their teachers spend their summer vacations. But a handful of local teachers are turning out-of-this-world vacations into fodder for their classrooms this fall.
Katie Maloney, a fourth-grade teacher at Broadneck Elementary School in Howard County, spent six hours as part of a simulated space shuttle mission at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., then suited up in SCUBA gear to practice space suit maneuvers 26 feet under.
“I thought that was the highlight,” Maloney told The Examiner. “It was so exciting to watch the shuttle launch” after spending some time in the astronauts? shoes.
The trip ? all expenses paid by technology giant Honeywell ? promotes science and tech careers by getting to the children at a young age through their teachers.
“We all have the same mission, which is turning kids on to math and science,” Maloney said.
This was Maloney?s second trip to space camp, and she plans to send postcards to her students before school starts, getting them excited about a new year and her Broadneck Leaders at Science and Technology or BLAST club. “I?m already building a new [rocket] launcher.”
Sending teachers to exotic locations is growing popular for science and tech companies.
Lyondell Chemical Company sent Anne Arundel teacher Laura Kvech of Lindale Middle School to spend two weeks assisting marine biologists in the study of seals in Southwest England. Aerospace company Northrop Grumman is offering zero-gravity flight experiences to teachers out of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
There is space for 40 teachers from the Greater Washington region in the program scheduled for mid-September, said Northrop Grumman spokesman Brooks McKinney. “The aerospace industry in this nation needs to maintain their competitiveness worldwide.”
Currently India and China graduate anywhere from three to four times as many scientists and engineers as the United States, he said, and we have had to import talent from these countries.
In addition to getting young people excited about science, public support is also crucial to the future of space exploration, McKinney said.
“Building a spacecraft for NASA is not that hard to do. There needs to be a consensus among the American people that space exploration is important and something that we need to do.”
