Joyce Clark teacher keeps students looking to the stars

Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Johnny Tackitt

[SandRat]

Astronauts are always looking up at the stars in space. But for a seventh-grade science teacher, her stars are in the classroom.

“I love seeing the kids when they are engaged and their ‘light bulb’ moments,” said Maura Neill, 57. “I get that moment every day, and I absolutely love it. I’ll stand at my desk and look around the room and see that they are all working.

“That is such a wonderful moment.”

However, for Neill, who is in her 20th year at Joyce Clark Middle School in Sierra Vista, teaching science goes far beyond the classroom. For many years, she ran a program that replicated space exploration for her students.

“We planned all the skills they might need,” Neill said. “We wrote a job application to be either one of the astronaut crew or the mission control, and we talked about what the different jobs were.”

Neill said the classes would have a simulation day where they wrote scripts of what takeoffs and landings would look like. The simulation lasted for three days: the launch day, the experiment day in space, and the landing day.

To accomplish this ambitious goal, Neill needed two separate classrooms to replicate a real mission. One classroom was for mission control, and the other for the spaceship.

However, there was no way to communicate between the two rooms, so they had to get creative.

“The video production team from Buena High School set up a camera, so we could watch the ‘astronauts’ and talk to them,” Neill said.

Before Neill taught at Joyce Clark, she taught overseas in Africa, which is where the project was created. When she moved back to the United States, she wasn’t expecting to continue the project because of the larger school size. powered by

However, she didn’t want to let it go that easily, so she made it work.

“I just loved the fact that I was able to translate that from a smaller school overseas to make it work here in America, which I never thought I could do here,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work, but it paid off in learning teamwork and experiences.”

Unfortunately, Neill hasn’t been able to offer the project in the past few years.

“When the two middle schools merged, I lost my extra classroom,” she said. “We’re absolutely filled to the brim.”

Will the project get off the ground again?

“If I pulled it back in again, I would have to go off the calendar and I would have to work with the other two science teachers, but we might have some extra classrooms next year.

“We’re getting to that point.”

[NEMDF]

Thanks for sharing this article. It is refreshing to read a school story that isn’t somehow politically-charged.