March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Lessons of flight are helping Orono educators teach 3 Rs > Two teachers mean it when they tell their students to go fly a kite.

From their portable classrooms at the back of the Asa C. Adams School in Orono, teachers Chris Chilelli and Richard Glueck have let their students’ imaginations soar, taking them into space aboard the Gemini project and back in time to the first flights of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

They have brought the world to the small school of about 450 pupils. Through satellite communications and computers, students have tracked weather worldwide and followed earthquakes, discovering for themselves plate tectonics.

Learning has taken on a new dimension for Orono’s sixth graders who, inside their classrooms, have constructed a cloth and balsa wood replica of the Gemini spacecraft from scratch using only a photograph for a reference.

Last spring sixth graders designed, built and flew a replica of a Wright brothers’ biplane glider. The 125-pound glider with its 33-foot wingspan stayed aloft for six seconds on Cadillac Mountain in Bar Harbor, covering a distance of 60 feet. It reached an altitude of 12 feet.

Aviation and flight for the two nationally-recognized teachers represent more than an intense interest and a platform from which to teach science, history, social studies and mathematics. It serves as a metaphor for their educational philosophy.

Like the Wright brothers before them, students need to be able to take chances even if they make mistakes along the way, Chilelli explained. Getting a man airborne wasn’t easy and meant trial and error for the Wrights. Their airplanes crashed, and wind and nature hampered the brothers’ efforts. Despite these problems and mistakes, the Wright brothers forged ahead.

“We’re definitely teaching the kids to take that risk to take the chance to be right and wrong, take the chance to fail and to succeed,” said Chilelli, who has received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching. Glueck was a finalist for the award that carries a $7,500 grant from the National Science Foundation.

All too often, the two teachers said, young people are told that failure is unacceptable when it should be seen as a learning experience.

In many ways, the two teachers are like Peter Pan, the young boy who never grew up. Peter tried to persuade young people that they could fly if they believed and thought good thoughts.

For Chilelli and Glueck, getting students to fly takes a little more work than thinking good thoughts.

“If you teach them to think and act upon what they do know, then they do fly,” Glueck said. “Here, by learning and by thinking that they can be someone, they can fly.”

In the classroom, he pointed out, there really is no failure for students who try.

“If they never fly off the ground, if they can only journey in their minds, then we’ve taught them a skill they are going to carry on into the next century and hopefully pass on to the rest of the world. And, basically, that’s what teaching is.”

Both admit that, like Peter Pan, there is still a child inside of each of them, a curiosity and eagerness to try something new, an unwillingness to grow up.

“What you find is that a lot of people tend to suppress that (child) as you grow up because you have to fit certain rules and certain expectations,” Chilelli said.

For Glueck, 42, and Chilelli, 38, flight is a dream they have never outgrown.

“Everybody has that dream when you’re a kid that you’re running along the sidewalk one day and you suddenly put out your arms and you can glide above everyone else,” Glueck said.

Their classrooms are full of aviation memorabilia, pictures and photographs of astronauts and space flights as well as flags from a variety of countries. One sign reads:”There is no such thing as failure, only an opportunity to try again.”

As well as capturing the interest and imaginations of their students, the two Orono teachers have brought the Asa Adams School into the national news. Earlier this summer, ABC’s “Good Morning America” covered the flight of the glider in Bar Harbor.

Both have been to Russia to exchange ideas with other educators. Over the years they have made connections with such organizations as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. A piece of the glider was carried in the space shuttle Endeavor.

For the glider project, students first researched the origins of flight. They studied Greek mythology and the flight of Icarus who perished after he flew too close to the sun while wearing waxen wings that his father Daedalus had made.

The young people also studied how birds fly. They delved into the mechanics and forces and laws of flight as well as the history of manned flight.

Glueck and Chilelli taught the students the basic mathematics skills they would need to construct the gliders. Public speaking was essential if the students were to solicit materials for the projects from area businesses.

Students were tested with traditional pencil and paper exams, but they also gave oral reports and had to construct model gliders that worked. They had to demonstrate that they knew about yaw, pitch and roll in flight.

“All this stuff was tied in there,” Chilelli said. “They may not have realized it initially, but then they saw how it fell into place and said, `Oh yeah, this why we learned the different subjects.’ ”

The projects have been learning experiences for students and teachers alike. The young people aren’t the only ones having fun.

“I’ve got one of the most wonderful jobs in the world because they allow me to play everyday,” Glueck said.


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like