Science Camp Is Absolute Alchemy
Jay Turner’s assignment was simple: His principal wanted a blurb for the school newsletter on the weekend outing at Astrocamp.
You know the drill.
Turner started sifting through his notes. Let’s see, the 70 seventh-graders from McPherson Magnet School in Orange looked through a telescope. They studied Newton’s laws. They built a rocket from two-liter bottles and learned about pressurized air. They did an electricity experiment and talked about the light spectrum.
Good, solid science.
But Turner knew that the weekend of Jan. 16-18 in Idyllwild was about much more than science. Truth is, he’d been on the same trip for the last several years and had seen the same thing every time: Something happens to the kids and, in a way, to him.
“The only thing I can tell you, and I don’t know how to explain it and it probably sounds really cheesy, but it’s a magical trip,” Turner, 35, says. “It changes our school.”
Maybe, he says, it’s because the parents aren’t there. Maybe it’s because the trip, which includes two nights in dorms, throws students together who don’t normally hang out with each other and joins them as teammates in activities.
And maybe it’s because teachers come to see the students differently than they do back on campus.
And maybe, as Turner says, some of it just can’t be explained.
“We sell this as a science trip,” he says, but it produces results far beyond what a day trip to a museum yields.
“It always dawns on me,” Turner says, “that this trip and our Catalina trip for eighth-graders really change our children. And they make me a better teacher too, because you get to know these kids and can reach them in different ways, because you have these things in common [from the trip].”
Science isn’t Turner’s long suit. He teaches history and graphic design. What he discovers is that students who aren’t so hot in his classes have other talents and traits he may not see during his 40 minutes a day with them in his classroom. It might be something as simple as “a total love of life” that he sees in them for the first time.
The biggest payoff, though, is watching the students’ interaction. “They have bonds with each other as far as their own clique of friends,” Turner says. “But because we’re in a large group and we split them up, they get in with people they don’t know very well. We don’t have the super-cool dorm or the unpopular dorm. What happens is kids tend to realize [about each other] that, ‘I didn’t know you or I had some sort of conception about who you were and it’s completely different from who you are.’ ”
It’s on weekends like this that real education happens. It’s worth noting that the teachers who go along on the trip give up a weekend of their own and do so without pay.
Not that Turner is complaining. What happens up there in Idyllwild is different from what happens back on campus in Orange.
“I don’t know exactly what it is,” he says. “I’m trying to figure it out so I can bottle it up and bring it back to class. But what you find after the trip is the relationship with the kids changes. Your relationship with these kids grows.”
That is not to say that good teachers don’t have strong bonds with students on campus or in their classrooms. But, let’s face it, not many teachers see their students on two-night sleepovers.
Turner always feels the difference the first day back on campus after the outing. “Honestly, it’s night and day,” he says. “It really is. You walk on campus and kids who normally don’t go out of their way to say hi all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ And they mean it. It’s really interesting. So you have all these kids, and it’s like you’re all sharing a secret.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.
