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My name is Joanne McGrane. I have taught fourth grade in Bangor since September 1979, and for most of those years my classroom has been Room 12, at the end of the hall by the library. In 1985 I was one of the more than 11,000 teachers in this country who applied to fly on the Space Shuttle. I didn't go. Christa McAuliffe did. Every January since 1987, my fourth graders and I have spent a week remembering her and the six people who flew with her. Other teachers kept asking me for my January plans, so my husband Fred helped me put them on the World Wide Web. The activities are on their own page. This page is the history, as I would tell it to a new teacher over coffee.
1. My application In August of 1984 President Reagan announced that the first private citizen to ride the Space Shuttle would be a schoolteacher. I heard it on the car radio on the way home from getting my classroom ready and almost drove into a snowbank, except that it was August. When the application packet came that fall it was as thick as a county phone book. There were the usual forms, a medical history, and then the essays: why you wanted to go, what you had done in your teaching, and what you would do from orbit and after you came home. I wrote mine at the kitchen table over Christmas vacation with the radio off. I was twenty-seven and had been teaching for five years. My idea was a lesson I called "Winter From Up There." Every child in Maine knows a great deal about winter, and I wanted to show them their own winter from two hundred miles up: where the snow line sits, how the rivers look when they freeze, how a storm turns as it comes up the coast. I wanted to keep a notebook every day in orbit the way I make my students keep science notebooks, in pencil, with the date at the top, and then visit every school in the state that would have me. Fred typed the final copy because his typing is better than mine, and I mailed it in January 1985 from the post office downtown. Each state chose two finalists. In the spring a letter came saying I was not one of Maine's two, and thanking me. I was disappointed for about a week and relieved for about a day, and then I put the letter in the back of my plan book, where it still is. That July we heard that the teacher would be Christa McAuliffe, who taught social studies at the high school in Concord, New Hampshire, one state over. Doris Stoudt, who taught across the hall from me for twenty years, said, "Well, at least it's a New Englander," and that was how most of us felt. 2. Tuesday morning, January 28, 1986 The launch had been put off several times that month, and by that Tuesday the children had stopped believing it would ever happen. The librarian wheeled the television cart into Room 12 at eleven. It had been a bitter night in Florida, cold enough for ice on the launch tower, and the announcers kept talking about the cold. My class had made a banner out of butcher paper with all seven names on it, and two of the boys held it up in front of the screen as if the crew could see it. Challenger lifted off at 11:38 in the morning. The children cheered. About a minute later, seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the shuttle broke apart. I knew something was wrong before the man on television said so, because the smoke went in two directions. I turned the set off. Then I turned it back on, because the children had seen it and needed to know what they had seen, and I did not know either. I told them the truth as far as anybody knew it that afternoon: that something had gone very wrong, that the astronauts had died, and that people were going to work very hard to find out why. We wrote letters that afternoon, and the principal let them stay in from recess. I drove home that night and sat in the driveway for a long time before I went in. That spring a presidential commission found the cause. A seal in a joint of one of the two solid rocket boosters had failed, and hot gas had leaked out through the joint. The seal had stiffened in the cold. The shuttles did not fly again until the fall of 1988. 3. The seven My students learn all seven names, not just the teacher's. Here is a little about each, the plain facts we use in class.
4. The Challenger Learning Centers The families of the crew did not let the mission end there. In 1986 they started the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, led by June Scobee, Dick Scobee's wife, and in 1988 the first Challenger Learning Center opened in Houston. Since then centers have opened in cities all over the country. Each one has a mission control room and a space station, and a class splits in two and flies a pretend mission together, solving problems as they come up. The people at mission control have to talk the people on the station through everything, and the people on the station have to listen. It is the best lesson in teamwork I know of. If there is a center within a day's drive of your school, go. 5. Barbara Morgan Barbara Morgan was Christa McAuliffe's backup. She taught second grade in McCall, Idaho, trained right alongside the crew, and was at the Cape that morning. Afterward she went home to Idaho and went back to her classroom, which is the part of the story I like best. In January 1998, NASA announced that Barbara Morgan would train as a full-fledged astronaut, a mission specialist, and that August she reported to Houston with the new class. My students that year made her a card the size of a door. We are waiting, all of us, for her turn. Thirteen classes have come and gone through Room 12 since that morning, and the fourteenth started this month. The children in it were born in 1989 and 1990. To them the Challenger is history, the way Pearl Harbor was history to me. That is all the more reason to teach it carefully. Next: Our January Lessons, the week we spend on all this, with what we do each day. Another page I like: Why I Look Up, by Hazel Grimes, who taught earth science in Florida for thirty-four years and watched Apollo 11 go up from the causeway. She wrote the date on the board every September. I understand completely. You are visitor number Teachers, write to me any time:
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