Project Helps Students Learn a Grave Lesson

There’s a cemetery in this city with epitaphs such as “In loving memory of the nuttiest man who ever lived” for peanut researcher George Washington Carver, and “He went out with a bang” for Alfred B. Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

It’s not as disrespectful as it sounds. These faux tombstones belong to the Scientists Cemetery at Arcadia High School, a research project mixing science with some ghoulish fun.

About 1,000 tombstones--in shapes from the double-helix of a DNA strand to the particle structure of an atom--were the culmination of five weeks of student work.

The project was due the day before Halloween--appropriate, said teachers, for this celebration of the dead.

In years past, students were assigned term papers to study scientific accomplishments of the past 500 years. But this fall, science teachers Janel Coats and Laurel Fretz proposed students in chemistry, physics, biology and human physiology classes re-create scientists’ lives by making birth certificates, journal entries, newspaper articles and other memorabilia.

“A lot of the kids, they’re so used to just getting facts and putting them on paper,” Coats said. “This really kind of stretches them and stretches their creativity.”

When senior Jemie Saekoo heard of the assignment, she was not too thrilled. “I’m not a kindergartner,” she said was her first reaction.

But as she researched Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s life, Saekoo found her excitement growing.

Her tombstone is shaped like the periodic table of the elements, which the Russian chemist Mendeleev created. Saekoo cooked up a dye of coffee and tea to make her documents look faded and old. She also tried to write the journal entries in Old English.

“It was probably totally out of whack,” she said. “But it was fun.”

That was the whole point.

“The reason we did this was to show science doesn’t have to be boring,” Fretz said. “It can be creative, not just memorization.”

Baran Pal’s tombstone of Carver was shaped like a peanut.

“It was more fun, but also more stressful,” the sophomore said. “A paper I would have written in one night. This took time.”

Senior Mike Sego agreed.

“It took four hours and $40,” he said, holding Nobel’s tombstone, which was flanked by two fake sticks of dynamite. “I really hope they’re not grading us on artistic ability.”

Principal Martin Plourde said the project fits with the school’s vision--stimulating intellectual curiosity and fostering enthusiasm for learning.

“We keep talking about designing work that gets kids to understand knowledge and get excited about it and stimulate their intellect,” he said. “I think this is an example.”