Teacher Lets Students Put Their Toes in the Water
By Lauren Donovan
Bismarck Tribune

HETTINGER, North Dakota -- It drives Harriet Howe crazy to think her science students don't have what they need to succeed. She can throw everything she's got as a teacher at them, but she still hits that brick wall where a small school budget separates the haves from the haves not.

This week, Howe made sure for at least one day, her kids got to experiment with the best science equipment money can buy, if money could ever be found. Then, she went one more step and invited kids from other schools near Hettinger -- Bowman, Mott-Regent and Lemmon, S.D.

She called it the "drought consortium," because all the schools are similarly impacted by tough economic times right now. Howe said the equipment kids used for a day is what they'll find when they get to college. What she dreads is a scenario in which one of her former students walks into a college science lab and finds himself at a disadvantage.

The equipment came from PASCO scientific, a California company.

A sales representative brought it in and set it up in different classrooms around the school. It allowed kids to do things like test Newton's Third Law -- come on, you know the one, for every action there's a reaction -- with a crash track hooked up to a computer. At another table, students measured the acidity of a solution with a probe linked to a computer.

Teacher Harriet Howe

It was a sharp learning curve for the kids, who had to figure out how the computer software worked in relation to the experiment. At Hettinger, like a lot of schools in the state, there are no computers in the science room. That's zero. None.

David Meier, a Hettinger senior, said he liked having a chance to use a computer to analyze an experiment on harmonic motion. A motion sensor was linked directly to a laptop computer. "If I use it later in life, or in college, I'll know what to do," he said. He plans to go to either the University of Minnesota or Notre Dame.

Linda Doe is Hettinger's computer coordinator. She's got top-notch equipment for students' use, but she realizes it's time to take computers to the next level. "Now we have to go into the other departments," she said.

Howe said even Hettinger's textbooks show experiments being done with computers to analyze results.

School Board president Ellen Elder came up to the school to watch the kids experiment with computer-aided science experiments. She worries about things like equality in education, where all kids get the same advantages no matter which district they're from.

Hettinger's losing enrollment, but at less of a pace than anticipated. She said there's nothing contradictory in spending money for better school equipment, even if the enrollment numbers are going the other way "We're spending it for the kids who are presently here," she said. "We can't write off the kids who are here."

Tom Kuhn, the PASCO representative, said Hettinger could spend from $1,000 to $40,000 on equipment like the kids used Tuesday.

"Teachers can lecture all day, or the kids could be doing something," he said. Hettinger, with its absence of computers in the science room, isn't unique, he said.

Howe said it's scary to think her students are a step behind in technology. Still, she figures they have what they need to overcome that disadvantage, things like competitiveness and stick-to-itiveness.

"It doesn't take them long to get up to speed," she said.