El Estoque Article:
Taking Flight

Senior Joy Yeh, lead teacher and ambassador of the Monta Vista Robotics team likes to begin each lesson with a question. From experience, she knew she needed to start broadly. She asked her thirteen eager students to, "Define physics." A fifth grader from the front table said, "It's a class you take at De Anza." Conrad, a fourth grader, defined it as "The pylons that hold the nucleus together." Yeh knew the first boy, but the second reminded her of the best of last year.

Oct. 3 marked the start of the second year of Monta Vista Robotics Team's entirely student run GATE education program at Lincoln Elementary. The program is currently led by senior Rijuta Ravichandran, Public Relations Director for the team. She occasionally supervises the classes and contacts the program's school staff consultant for the year, Jackie Browning. Browning facilitates outside organizations on the campus and helped the program stay on between years. Otherwise, the team of student-teachers drawn from volunteers provides the only Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program on campus.

There are five staff members total, all veteran members of the club. This year Yeh does most of the teaching while senior Nancy Tsang helps with the lab demonstrations. Two rookie teachers, Vamsi Chitters and Nishant Srikanthan, both sophomores, observe and provide support. Only Yeh and Tsang remain from the original team.

On the first day Yeh, to her dismay, had to deliver a purely mathematical lesson. Yeh tried to engage the students, but most just wanted to do their math homework rather than be force-fed another lecture. "I can feel their boredom," she said after class. The first day had been a disappointment, last year everyone felt an excitement for the new experience.

In the initial year of the program all the students started off fresh. Not one student knew all the ways to express multiplication. "We wrote fg on the board, force times gravity. They thought we meant [the sound] 'fug'," Ravichandran said. The teaching team didn't know what to expect from these young minds. They worked for more than two years for that amazing first experience of teaching a foundation for a lifetime.

In late 2005 Robotics club alumnus Vannett Li, a senior at the time, began drafting the curriculum for the GATE program. Then-sophomore Ravichandran helped develop the curriculum with Li, trying to incorporate basic principles of high school physics. After a team of volunteers led a trial lesson the parents were swayed. The children clamored for another chance to build marshmallow bridges under the guidance of MVHS students.

With a revised lesson plan to accommodate for last year's students, the focus will be on letting their natural inquisitiveness drive the class.

The second week's experiment revolved around the mechanics of flight as demonstrated through paper airplanes. Yeh raised the question, "How do airplanes fly?" Conrad lit up and tried to explain propulsion. He finished, "I know gliders fly when they pass over thermals, but I don't know how they stay up otherwise."

While some display an amazing openness about their learning, others can clash with the teachers. Srikanthan tried to coax a few pupils to explain the aerodynamic principles behind the design of their paper airplanes. They completely snubbed him, it was their little secret.

Yet Srikanthan and Chitters were shocked by how much the students knew. "These kids are smarter than they look. You try to teach them something, but they figure it out so fast," Srikanthan said. Chitters was amazed by their inquisitiveness. "I wish I knew more so I could teach them. They constantly want to learn," he said.

Conrad desires to know the very essence of matter. He knocked on the concrete and said that he wanted to get to the very core of matter. Although he checked the library on the subject, "[The books] are on the elements and I want to find out about elementary particles." His passion reminds Yeh of why she values her job as teacher most of all her pursuits.

Yeh sees the children as intellectual inspirations. "They are more intelligent than we are because they take in all these things. Their spectrum is much broader," Unlike high school students Yeh finds that the children check new information against their entire range of experience and make uncanny connections.

Last year when she explained the relationship between mass and energy a student asked if the relationship could be looked at as the transfer between body and soul. "They have no objective. They are here to learn and discover. Working with them you realize that it's the knowledge that matters. It puts things in perspective." As teachers, Yeh and her colleagues just have to try and keep up.