ORONO – Despite more than a dozen years of experience as a teacher, Julie Ferriss didn’t become a learner until she visited Space Camp.

It was an experience that completely transformed the way she interacted with the children in her Mississippi classroom, Ferriss said Saturday in an address Saturday before some of Maine’s top educators.

Ferriss, Mississippi’s Teacher of the Year for 1996 and 1997 and now director of education for Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., was the keynote speaker for the third annual Distinguished Educators Forum.

The daylong conference at the University of Maine involved more than 100 award-winning teachers and principals from every corner of Maine, as well as some educators who are new to the classroom.

In other forum activities, educators participated in panel discussions and learned from one another in workshops covering a range of teaching and student assessment topics. Saturday evening, winners of the Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award were the guests of honor at a dinner at the Four Points Sheraton in Bangor.

In her address, Ferriss said that her experience at Space Camp reminded her what it is like to be a student. And that, she says, made her a better teacher.

As an award-winning teacher in her state, Ferriss was invited to take part in Space Camp’s program of simulated missions, experiments and discovery.

“I became a learner for the very first time in my life,” Ferriss said. “And it was the first time I experienced joy in learning.”

She acknowledged that during her own school days, she was a “memorizer” who earned straight A’s and promptly forgot much of what she learned.

Excited by some of the things she learned about space, Ferriss was eager to share with her second-grade pupils. It was while trying to demonstrate the concept of propulsion that she experienced another professional epiphany. It happened while she was using air-filled balloons to show how boosters propelled rockets and space shuttles, a demonstration she replicated Saturday for the benefit of her audience.

As she released air from a balloon tucked inside a plastic bag, the bag moved along a length of twine strung across the room. When she first demonstrated this for her former second-graders, one of them observed that space shuttles had more than one booster. Wouldn’t two balloons make the bag move along the string farther and faster?

“And it did, and I thought, ‘I’m so proud of these kids!”‘ Ferris recalled with relish.

Then another pupil suggested that the class try making the bag move upward, like an actual shuttle, as opposed to sideways. This time, however, the theory failed. She and her pupils had failed to take another space-related concept – gravity – into account. Rather than allow themselves to become deflated by the failure, the group launched into a new area of exploration.

“It was the first time I felt free to teach something, even if I didn’t know it,” she said. “I was a learner on the same level as my kids.”

The “old me,” Ferris said, would have told her class that their theory didn’t work and she didn’t have time to show them why.

Eventually, as she kept finding herself drawn to space and as her trips to Huntsville became more frequent, she found herself at a professional crossroad. When offered the position with Space Camp, she agonized over whether to accept it because it would remove her from the classroom setting she loved and would require her do develop some managerial skills. But after much soul searching, she did.

Though she admitted that she is far from “content and comfortable” in her current post, Ferriss said she is learning to enjoy the journey. Today, she shares her joy of learning with thousands of youngsters, and a good number of adults, as Space Camp’s education director, the managerial aspect of which, she observed, sometimes encroaches on her teaching time.

Though she used to resent that, she said, Ferriss has come to realize that the occasional interruptions mean that others want and value the experience of a teacher, an observation that resonated with the more than 100 educators she addressed.

Ferriss said that while she misses her second-graders’ hugs, sweaty palms and eyes filled with wonder, she can still experience the joy of learning, as opposed to the fun.

Fun, she said, is like Disneyland. It’s gone once the experience ends.

“Joy, it is a place that can be revisited over and over,” she said.