“We saw a cadaver,” Potter said, recalling the first Math Science Partnership institute that he attended.. “He was 55, about 6-foot-8, and was wrapped in a sheet. He looked like a mummy.”
Teachers from throughout Eastern Washington are once again on the receiving end of many teachable moments during the second set of Math Science Partnership summer institutes at WSU. Two identical four-day institutes (June 22-25 and June 29-July 2) are part of an effort to prepare teachers for the state’s new science standards, which will dictate what their students should learn.
A total of 43 elementary and middle school teachers are participating in the institutes at WSU. Faculty members who lectured were Kathy Baldwin, Lisa Carloye, Ann Kennedy and Kirsten Peters, on geology; Shelley Pressley and Kara Yedinak, on air and weather; Kirk Reinkens, on solar energy; Guy Worthey and (from the University of Idaho) Paul Allan, on space; Lynda Paznokas, on dinosaurs and fossils; and Skip Paznokas, on water. Alice Boerner, a Hoquaim school teacher and WSU Vancouver instructor, explained the use of notebooking as a teaching method.
The institutes include visits to Pullman’s Palouse Discovery Science Center and to WSU’s Jewett Observatory and Planetarium. And, with sun hats and clipboards in hand, participants head out to the Snake River Canyon for a geology tour led by Peters, who is both a geologist and writer with a syndicated column called “Rock Doc.”
Mueller also enjoyed learning for her own sake. “When I went through college, I wasn’t that interested in geology.”
The teachers listened attentively and asked lots of questions, although not, Peters noted, the one she has heard from many college-age students: “Is that going to be on the test?”
