By HAYLEY HARMON
6 News Reporter
KNOXVILLE (WATE) - A group of teachers from across East Tennessee is going back to school hoping to make their own teaching skills a little bit better.
The Aerospace Excellence in Education Program at the University of Tennessee is about making learning fun again.
The aerospace workshop for teachers put nearly a dozen area educators back on the other side of the desks so they could better learn how to teach their own students this fall.
Jim Snyder is a substitute teacher for Knox County Schools, but on Thursday he was the one doing the learning as he tried to prevent a falling egg from cracking.
He was one of 13 Tennessee teachers in the workshop, learning some interactive ways to teach.
Thursday was the group's final test. Would their eggs survive a fall from the top of the physics building?
It didn't go exactly as Snyder planned, but he says trial and error is how his own students will learn. "It's done in a fun environment. The end result is they learn the principles, but they had a good time in the process," he said.
That was the goal of Lt. Col. Dave Garner, who founded the UT Aerospace Workshop for teachers 17 years ago.
"Kids already have an inherent interest in aerospace education so all we have to do is teach the teachers how to teach it," said Garner, who's the director of aerospace education at UT.
He wants to get each teacher energized again "and then give them the resources to teach it in their classroom, whatever grade, K through high school, whatever grade."
Garner hopes that excitement will trickle down to the students. "We need our young people to begin getting excited again about science and math."
During the three credit hour course, the group also got to fly with the Tennessee Air National Guard and do a rocket launch.
Sign-ups for next year's class start on August 1. Applications are posted online.
The teachers were learning some interactive ways to teach. (source: Civil Air Patrol)
