The world as a science classroom

By David Boyce The Almanac Almanac Staff Writer

Much-honored science teacher Jill Baumgartel engages students with real-world experiences

If science seems a dry affair with stories of interest coming along only occasionally, it may be that you had uninspiring science teachers who, like many scientists before them, preferred the ivory tower over the open door and lecturing over collaboration.

Not so in the classroom of Woodside High School chemistry teacher Jill Baumgartel, where the energy and ferment of the open door and collaboration permeates the room.

Passing through her door have been students from many cultures and socio-economic situations. Some have built working rockets, with her advice and help. Others have designed and built experiments for the space shuttle, with her advice and help. For her efforts, she has received many honors.

And she brings the world to her classrooms and occasionally takes her classrooms to the world. In an era in which knowledgeable high school science teachers are a scarce resource, Ms. Baumgartel has two of the prime ingredients for effective teaching: credibility and good stories.

She had her first chemistry set at 8 years old; by 11, she had an advanced set, she says. After college in Michigan, she did graduate work at Princeton University under Hubert Alyea, a colleague of Albert Einstein, who, Prof. Alyea said, would sometimes audit his chemistry class, according to Ms. Baumgartel.

During her 22-year career, Ms. Baumgartel has been recognized by the University of California, MIT and the National Science Foundation. She has won several teaching awards, including, in October, San Mateo County Teacher of the Year. Space science

Ms. Baumgartel has a deep and abiding interest in space and space exploration. She's been recognized by nine times by NASA and again by the Cosmonaut Federation of the former USSR. On Friday, March 28, she attended a black tie dinner in Washington, D.C., to receive the 2003 National Space Club Space Educator award.

"It's the pinnacle of my career," she says. "I'm pretty honored that an educator is being recognized."

One outlet for her interest in space is amateur rocketry. In one corner of her classroom sits a thin cylindrical finned rocket body, a device that can capture the interest of reluctant science students, she says. They've made rockets from deodorant bottles, Crayola markers and empty whipped cream cans, she says. Some rockets have reached a height of 1,500 feet and have carried moths or beetles as passengers. Of the two, beetles seemed to enjoy the ride, she says.

In the past two years, Ms. Baumgartel has advised two teams of Woodside students in designing life-science experiments that won highly competitive slots on upcoming space shuttle missions, if and when they resume.

The first experiment studies the behavior of earthworms in space; the second looks at the effect of zero gravity on antibiotics. Both experiments have relevance for human beings living in zero-gravity environments, she says.

Ms. Baumgartel has twice been a crew member on NASA's airborne observatory. A specially equipped Boeing 747 takes scientists to 45,000 feet, where the air density is 20 percent of what it is at the Earth's surface, allowing astronomers to use onboard telescopes to observe space with much less atmospheric interference. And if you put a can of soda down on the floor of the plane, it freezes, she says.

The 14-hour missions are "real science," she says. "You have a problem with the telescope, you have to get in there and fix it. Science is not just working in a lab." On the mission, her ability to identify gases in the Orion nebula allowed her to bring her chemistry expertise to bear, she says.

Science may be her passion, but it is not all-consuming. She's now on her seventh passport. Over her career, Ms. Baumgartel, 45, has been to more than 35 countries, including 14 visited on a teaching sabbatical and several to which she was accompanied by Woodside students. Worldly science

With its dry formulas, abstract theories and rapid rate of change, science can be a hard sell to students.

Popular culture can be problematic too. Entertainment-driven mass media can drown out interest in subjects that require dedication and disciplined thought processes. Add a genuinely multi-cultural student population to the mix and a science teacher can be left wondering which way to turn.

And while a well-traveled history or language teacher can relate international experiences to the classroom, what does being well-traveled bring to a teacher in a field in which English and mathematics are the primary languages?

Ms. Baumgartel says her travel anecdotes help generate interest among her students.

For example, for a lesson on Boyle's Law, which concerns the behavior of gases at different temperatures and pressures, Ms. Baumgartel says she can talk about her hikes with Himalayan sherpas. "They're amazing. They climb in flip-flops," she says. Sherpa endurance has been attributed to larger lungs that enable them to cope with thinner colder air.

Such a simple example is easily demonstrated with a trip to the thin cold air of Lake Tahoe, she says, where local students can validate Boyle's Law by sensing how different they feel after exercising at that altitude.

In a discussion of the chemistry involved when matter changes from solid to liquid to gas, Ms. Baumgartel says she can mention the three days she once spent in the Rajasthan desert in India, traveling by camel and watching the normally invisible micrometeorites vaporizing and lighting up the night sky. A context like that can make the difference between a remembered lesson and a forgotten one.

Her travels have also shone light on her teaching methods, she says. During her ten-month, 14-country sabbatical in 1993-1994, she saw regional similarities and differences that caused her to reconsider her ideas.

"In Asia, science is a very serious matter," she says. Whereas in the United States, serious science education normally begins in the junior year, it's taught in all four years of secondary school in Japan, she says.

Science teachers are also revered there, she says. In Malaysia and Japan, students stand in appreciation at the end of class. But classes are often pure lecture and many kids go from regular school to "cram school" and don't get home until 10 p.m., she says.

She says she found kindred spirits and validation of her practices in Russian and Turkish classrooms, where science classes are a mix of lecture and demonstration with some humor thrown in. "It is something I like to use also. I try to include everyone. It's more of a light treatment of science," she says. Life on the road

Ms. Baumgartel grew up out of the country, spending her early years in Venezuela and some of her teen years in Singapore. When in Venezuela, her dad, who worked for General Motors, would take her for hikes high up in the Andes mountains, she says.

She also visited the Amazon rain forest and had her own collections of exotic insects, some of which she still has, though they have been turning to dust. In her Venezuelan backyard, she could find the horned rhinoceros beetle, the world's largest. It was in Venezuela that she was first struck with a love for science.

Singapore was somewhat less alluring. "They don't tolerate anything," she says. "There's a fine if you don't flush a public toilet. You spit on the sidewalk, big problem." It's a clean city, she says, but at a cost. "They take the filth from the city and they put it in the [harbor] water," she says.

But she appreciated the tiny one-room temples and the shaman-like characters who, from a trance-like state, would write answer to questions from passersby using blood drawn from their own tongues. Heroes

Albert Einstein is the first of her heroes, not just for his scientific prowess but because, against his father's wishes, he wanted to be a teacher. And, she says, because he could measure the universe "on the back of a matchbook," a reference to brevity of E = mc2, the special theory of relativity.

Another of her heroes is Madame Curie, who coined the term radioactivity and won two Nobel prizes.

But she reserves her greatest praise for her students. "They teach you things that you can't even fathom. I'm pretty certain that thee kids are going to make Earth a better place."

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