March 16, 2009
Teacher-astronaut? Astronaut-teacher? Does it matter any more?
NASA's Educator Astronauts: Mr. Arnold (top), Mr. Acaba, and Ms. (Dottie) Metcalf-Lindenburger
Should we be surprised that the first “Educator Astronauts” to fly in space won’t actually be teaching lessons from orbit? Maybe it’s a sign of progress. Ricky Arnold and Joe Acaba, who were both classroom teachers before joining NASA in 2004, will be plenty busy on their two-week STS-119 mission. They’ll each go out on two spacewalks, including one together on March 21 to do routine maintenance on the space station. Rookie astronauts don’t often get to spacewalk their first time up. NASA must have a lot of faith in these guys.
And that, really, is the point. We no longer question whether an “ordinary” teacher is capable of doing the work of an astronaut. When Christa McAuliffe was chosen to fly on Challenger in 1986, she was an outsider, a civilian daring to venture where only square-jawed professionals (okay, and the odd politician and Saudi prince) had gone before. McAuliffe aimed to make the shuttle her classroom, and would likely have done a fine job with the many lessons she prepared.
But 100 shuttle flights later, the distinction between amateur, professional, and educator astronaut seems far less important. Science lessons—good ones—are routinely beamed down from orbit by career astronauts like Don Pettit. Richard Garriott, a paying space tourist who could have spent his whole trip turning zero-g backflips if he’d wanted to, conducted interactive lessons for the Challenger Center instead. Do we really need a separate category of teacher-astronaut any more?
(By the way, the same goes for the outdated notion of a “journalist in space.” What could Anderson Cooper tell us about life in orbit that Charles Simonyi and Anousheh Ansari haven’t already?)
So even though NASA’s first Educator Astronauts will undoubtedly put in many long days visiting schools after they return, for the next two weeks let’s just consider them astronauts, without the qualifier. And somewhere, a former middle school student will be watching and saying, “Wow, that’s Mr. Arnold!”
Dear Tony,
This educator-astronaut category is so artificial. Astronauts are drawn from fields which produce talented, skilled, capable people. Education is a field that has its share of those talented people. Astronauts in the shuttle program have come from educational backgrounds — Tom Akers and Terry Wilcutt, for example. And every shuttle crew in the early 1990s undertook educational film-making onboard, and even broadcast live science or history or cultural lessons from space.
My point is that we don’t need teachers to fly in space to connect with students and young people. I’ve never believed that teachers need special representation among members of the astronaut corps. Instead, we just need to hire good communicators. Some will be teachers, some will be scientists, some will be engineers. ANYONE who flies in space SHOULD be capable of generating excitement among young people, and of transferring the experiences of spaceflight to a classroom environment.
Congratulations to Barbara Morgan, Joe Acaba, Ricky Arnold, and Dottie Metcalf-Lindenberger, capable astronauts all. Being teachers helped get them to space, but their other astronaut colleagues are wonderful teachers themselves.
Comment by Tom Jones — March 18, 2009 @ 3:19 pm