Not long after school started again last September, students started to talk.
As Kathleen Ryan, a science and mathematics teacher at Philip Vroom School, walked down the hall, kids would whisper, “There goes the egg lady.”
This is not because she carried eggs in her pocket or had a flock of chickens in her homeroom, but rather because of an unusual way of teaching she had brought back from a summer conference.
“It had kids talking,” she said during a school board presentation late last year. “Anytime you get kids talking about a lesson, you know you have their attention.”
This, of course, was the point, according to fellow teacher Gerald Murphy, who has become almost as famous for the rice and beans he carries into his classroom.
Both lessons were byproducts of the trip more than a dozen Bayonne teacher’s took this summer to what is called the Michelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy, a five-day program held in Virginia and elsewhere to help provide teachers with the knowledge and skills to motivate students in science and mathematics.
The Bayonne teachers joined teachers from districts from around the United States invited to take part in workshops that helped generate original and thought provoking approaches to teaching.
The secret is to get a student’s attention, Murphy said.
In this case, word of mouth about Ryan’s egg lesson spread through the school because students could not stop talking about it.
When Ryan showed the school board the lesson, it was clear why.
Ryan put a glass of water on the table. She covered the open mouth with a paper plate. Then she put on top of the plate, end up, the cardboard center of a roll of toilet paper. Finally, she produced the egg, and fitted it lightly in the hole of the tube.
She said the challenge is to get the egg into the glass of water without breaking it. The limitation was: students could not touch the plate, eggs or glass of water with their hands. The only thing they could touch was a broom Ryan produced.
To prove it could be done, Ryan did it. She placed the bristles of the broom under her foot, then using the handle like an upside-down pendulum, she banged the plate. The plate and tube flew to one side. The egg dropped into the glass of water.
At this point, had the experiment failed, she would have sat with students to calculate why. But why it had worked was also a remarkable lesson in physical science.
Murphy who had become the coordinator for the program in the district, said the idea is to find provocative ways to capture kids interests and then to extrapolate the lesson from the results.
“We use a method called the ‘5 E’s,'” he said.
This involves engaging activities; then exploring the concepts, processes and skills involved; then explaining the concepts; elaborating on what these mean in the large context; then evaluating the students understanding.
Although the models offered through the ExxonMobil program can apply to a large range of materials, Murphy said this year the teachers are focusing on Newton’s three basic laws of physics: to make something move you have to push it; to stop it, you need to use force; and any time you push something, it naturally pushes back with an equal force.
As in the early 1950s, young people today seem to be moving away from careers in fields such as medicine, computer science, energy and other science based professions.
The concept behind ExxonMobil’s academy is to find a way to reverse that trend, teaming up with professional golfer Phil Michelson and his wife, Amy, to create a new, more engaging approach to teaching the sciences.
“The academy is an opportunity for teachers to share the best practices with colleagues and pick up tools to positively impact the science and math education that students receive,” Michelson said during a recent appearance in Bayonne.
Murphy and Ryan said they not only got a lot from the conference, but the whole group has continued to share information over the last six months over an ongoing Web log, where they talk about things they have tried or ask advice from other teachers who might generate ideas of their own.
“This is hands on science,” Murphy said. “We want to find ways to get students talking about math, science and problem solving. We discuss a lot of possible approaches.”
Some things are not quite as dramatic as Ryan’s egg, but are effective because they involve real things that students look at and evaluate, and then later draw larger conclusions from.
This brings us to Murphy’s rice and beans, and how they demonstrate the concept of volume.
Does a cup hold the volume of rice or beans?
“A cup is a cup,” he said. “A cup of rice and a cup of beans is the same.”
These lessons are not added onto the basic curriculum, but included in as approaches to make lessons clearer.
Lessons could include rocks and minerals to Rice Crispy Treats, each generating a buzz that kids often take home with them.
Ryan said the new approach has given her confidence and a new way of reaching students.
Vroom School Principal Maryann Connelly, who has become the liaison with the Bayonne School District, said the camp wasn’t a program that the district could apply for.
“We had to be invited,” she said.
Last year, ExxonMobil celebrated its 150th anniversary as a corporate entity, but officials noted that Bayonne’s history extends back further than incorporation. Standard Oil’s (the parent company of Exxon) first American facility was built in Bayonne, and generations of Bayonne residents have worked for ExxonMobil ever since.