SHAKING IT UP
We took a 10-year-old to NASA with us to interview and photograph a rocket scientist.
It seemed like a good idea at first, but I was wrong.
It was brilliant.
Our 10-year-old photographic assistant is crazy about space, already booked at Space Camp this summer. She’s the daughter of our best photographer, who was essential to the shoot.
But this was no field trip joy ride junket to NASA. I needed Paige to contribute as part of the team. I knew that Mike Patterson ’82, who conceives, designs, builds, and tests the ion propulsion engines for NASA’s deep space missions, would be explaining concepts my C-minus-in-algebra and flunked-physics brain would struggle to grasp. Could Paige’s presence and fresh sense of wonder spark the teacher in him in a way I could translate into the story?
It did. Paige asked the best question of the day, and inspired a couple of helpful analogies.
But the photos she took, and the way she paid attention to things I missed, blew me away.
Mike’s NASA office is a semichaotic room with a white board and equations you’d expect from a guy whose joy is thinking up, building, and testing ion thrusters. But while I was busy knocking the autographed photographs of astronauts off his file cabinet, our space kid apprentice was noticing all the awards he had lined up on the floor because there was no more room on the walls. Click! As we walked into the electric propulsion lab she photographed posters about Deep Space 1 and the Dawn mission, projects driven by Mike’s thrusters. She took pictures of the old push button phone, the fire escape plan, and the thruster’s power supply unit. She captured the enormity of the vacuum chamber where the engines are tested and the way the lights make rainbows on the padding inside it.
She framed and took one of the best profile shots of the day. The visual notes she and her mother gathered were better than anything I could write down. Their photos drive the story.
at nasa’s exhibit in Cleveland’s Science Center after our interview, Paige flitted from activity to activity like a hummingbird sipping nectar, landing a Space Shuttle simulator (almost) and leading us through hands-on activities of some of the principles we’d heard about from Mike. But the shadow wall— which had nothing and everything to do with what we had just learned—was the icing on the cake. A strobe light flash captures on the wall for a few seconds the shadow of whatever pose you strike. Paige’s poses prompted us. Her mom’s cartwheel (well, half-cartwheel) pushed the envelope, and pretty soon after every 5,4,3,2,1 countdown we were trying something new, laughing at the results, at each other, and playing. Playing while visions of ion thrusters, space missions, and the words of a man who makes it all possible danced in our heads.
The trip reminded me of immersion trips I had taken with students. A little like the Wabash liberal arts education, that, as Ward Poulos ’96 says, “gave me the confidence to think of things from a different angle and come at a problem with a wacky idea that eventually comes back around to something that works.”
It’s the way our students came at this Spring Break’s immersion experiences to Iceland, Scotland, France, New York City, and Italy—all those modes of learning: visual, auditory, verbal, logical, kinesthetic, social, solitary, and personal.
It’s the fellowship of the road. We are travelers, not tourists.
It’s the power of questions, a life examined.
And it’s the importance of play, as Professor Tom Cole ’58 saw it— “a synergy between the classroom and extracurricular activities,” including sports—the way play sears learning into the synapses.
we’ve tried to bring that lightheartedness, those liberal arts “different angles” to this issue. Yes, a theme like “Movers and Shakers” includes alums at the tops of their fields. But we also played with that phrase. Took it literally. With his thrusters powering spacecraft up to 200,000 mph across the solar system, Mike Patterson is certainly a mover. Greg Hoch ’94 writes about a sky dancer. Our photos from Spring Break immersion trips show some of the ways Wabash learning is moving around the globe. Our Big Question asked readers for a moment that “shook up” their world.
Does it work? You tell me.
But the next time we need an interview and photos that shake up the way we do things and teach us new ways to see—always a good idea when you’ve been at something for a couple of decades as I have—we’re taking a kid!
Thanks for reading.
STEVE CHARLES Editor | charless@wabash.edu