NORFORK — "Wade Geery? He's my favorite teacher in the country."
That's what David Brooks, professor of math and computer science at Drexel University in Philadelphia said when he heard the science teacher from Arrie Goforth Elementary School in Norfork has been selected to attend the 20th annual LiftOff Summer Institute at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Johnson Space Center in Houston July 12-17. Geery is one of only 46 teachers selected from across the country.
He has been sending Brooks solar data for four years from the weather station he built outside his science classroom.
"There's really very little documentation of solar energy," Brooks said, adding that current solar energy systems are designed primarily from models, not real data. "I look at his data every week."
Geery's students in grades four through six learn about solar energy not only from their textbooks — they get hands-on experience with the weather station in the school yard. It includes a special instrument for measuring solar energy called a pyranometer.
"My pyranometer measures air temperature, relative humidity and solar energy in watts per square centimeter (w/cmsq) every minute throughout the day," Geery said. "From these data we can determine relative cloud cover and even recognize patterns in cloud type such as cumulus and cumulonimbus, which actually re-radiate sunlight toward the sensor causing abnormally high energy measurements."
The daily measurements of sunshine the pyranometer records tell Geery and Brooks how cloud cover and seasons affect the solar energy available to us throughout the year. The quantity is called "insolation."
It is this kind of hands-on student involvement that won Geery a place at LiftOff this summer.
The institute is a collaborative effort between Texas Space Grant Consortium members, its affiliates and NASA.
One of the goals is to infuse the teaching of math, science and technology with the excitement and creative enthusiasm generated by teachers like Geery.
"These days everything is digital," Brooks said. "Grad students don't know how to actually build anything. With Wade, they get hands-on experience building."
The summer program consists of a series of workshops, hands-on activities, field trips and presentations by NASA scientists working on various missions.
Teachers will conduct experiments, tour facilities, network with other teachers and share innovative lesson plans and ideas, according to the consortium's press release.
"I'm looking forward to listening to career NASA employees talk about what they do," Geery said, "and learning more about our solar system and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory."
He's interested in the science that goes into a satellite before it's launched, and how that process is similar to inquiry learning, the method he uses when teaching kids science.
"I get them to ask a question," Geery said, "conduct an experiment to gather data, analyze the data and figure out what it's telling them."
Similarly, he said, NASA scientists will design experiments based on a hypothesis, build a satellite to gather data and discover if they were right or wrong.
Geery's passion for science is immediately clear when he speaks about solar energy and the space industry as a whole, about teaching new tools to get kids to visualize the timeline of the solar system, helping them to put space in their own context. He believes inquiry learning teaches critical thinking.
"How can we use what we see to answer questions that affect our lives?" he asked.
"He's very unusual in that he's truly interested in science himself," Brooks said of Geery.
Geery, 59, grew up near Austin, Texas, bought land in Arkansas in 1972 and retired from the Army in 1992 as a major in charge of Test and Evaluation of Defense Systems at Fort Worth. He's been teaching science ever since.
"People don't realize how much technology we use today came from the space industry," Geery said.
He listed solid state circuitry, Intel computer chips, insulating tiles and energy conservation, citing NASA's need to make things smaller.
"Everything about the space program has been about reaching the technology envelope," Geery said. "Once technology is adapted to NASA, it is picked up for commercial use."
Geery has agreed to send daily updates to The Baxter Bulletin from the LiftOff Institute in July. Watch for his notes in TheBulletin's online edition, www.baxterbulletin.com.
"His intellectual curiosity is rare in elementary teachers," Brooks said. "I'm a big fan of Wade's."