‘They Grew Up a Lot,’ Teacher Says : Students See Sad Lesson in Shuttle Explosion

Live television and videotape Tuesday brought the Challenger tragedy to San Diego schoolchildren anticipating two outer-space lessons from teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first private citizen on a space shuttle mission.

But instead of “The Ultimate Field Trip” and “Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why?”--originally scheduled to be beamed from Challenger Tuesday--the screen was filled with the fiery explosion that claimed the lives of the seven-member crew.

It was a rude awakening for a generation too young to remember the 1967 fire that killed three Apollo astronauts, a generation that has grown up considering manned space flight another of the almost routine advances of the computer age.

“We were taping this (liftoff) and cheering and laughing and saying ‘Don’t you wish you were there,’ ” said Brenda Lantow, media technician at Gompers Secondary School, a science and mathematics magnet school in Southeast San Diego, “and then it blew up in our faces.”

“We tried to squeeze tons of alibis out,” said Jack Aldridge, a 17-year-old senior who was assisting Lantow with the tape that was to be played before the lessons from space that had been delayed and were to be presented on Friday. “We had made our excuses--maybe this, maybe that. But then . . . they replayed it. And you knew what had happened.”

In classroom after classroom, shock and disbelief, and sometimes tears, replaced the fascination with the shuttle that was to carry a schoolteacher aloft. The inclusion of a teacher, an idea that originated with the Reagan Administration, had rekindled interest that had waned because of the shuttle’s routine successes, teachers said.

“It’s not like the ‘60s, when we’d all go in the auditorium and watch the Apollo,” said Kevin Buck, who helped coordinate plans to watch McAuliffe’s experiments for the San Diego school district. “It’s just not done. But there was a lot of interest in this because it was emphasizing education.”

“There was more of a sense of personal loss in that we knew more about (McAuliffe),” said Bob Cizek, a physics teacher at Gompers who had applied for the teacher-in-space contest. “It let each of us non-Ph.D’s think about becoming involved in the program.”

“They grew up a lot at that incident,” said Gompers seventh-grade teacher Bill Hicks of the students who watched the explosion.

La Jolla High School students said the disaster affected them especially because Gloria McMillan, who teaches humanities to the school’s gifted students, could have been on the shuttle. McMillan, who reached the final stage of the competition that McAuliffe ultimately won, watched the liftoff along with other finalists at Cape Canaveral Tuesday.

“The reason it came so close to home is because our teacher could have been on it,” said junior Robert Martin. “People were running around and . . . asking ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ and there were tears in our eyes.”

At Jerabek Elementary School in northern San Diego, sixth-graders in the nationwide Young Astronauts program dedicated a model rocket launch competition scheduled for today to the shuttle crew.

“This launch is dedicated to the astronauts that risked their lives to explore our universe,” the children wrote. “We cannot forget that they died trying to help their own country. The American spirit is to go on. America is an adventure. We hope everyone in America remembers to try new things and remembers that life will go on even after the hard parts.”

At the San Diego County Office of Education, which had sent out booklets on McAuliffe’s experiments to every school in the county, elation at showing the liftoff to schoolchildren via microwave signal and cable television turned to despair when “we suddenly realized that schools were also taking part in the tragedy,” said Jere McInerney, coordinator of educational technology.

School officials said that students were so shocked by the disaster because they had begun to take for granted the technology that brought 24 previous shuttle crews home safely. “I’m not sure that they have the real appreciation” for the technology involved, said Vance Mills, mathematics and science program manager for the San Diego Unified School District. “They see it as the way life is, and that’s the way life should be.”

“Most of the people just stood there like ‘This can’t be happening,’ ” said Alec Draper, 15, who saw the explosion live on the library television at Gompers. “It’s something you can’t imagine happening.”

“I think the whole safety issue is going to be raised considerably,” Mills said. “And youngsters are going to learn that (a shuttle flight) is not an ordinary experience.”

Times staff writer Sebastian Dortch contributed to this report.