Published: March 10, 2008 08:57 pm            

Teacher’s great expectations

There’s an old saying we like – one parents and teachers should take to heart: “Give a dog a good name, and it’ll live up to it.”

Northwestern High School’s Patty Zeck is such a teacher. She requires every student in her honors biology class to enter both the Howard County and East Central Indiana science fairs.

Northwestern students have qualified for the international science fair each year since 1987. 2008 was no exception. Two of Zeck’s charges qualified for the international fair in Atlanta the week of May 11. Another qualified for the state fair.

In total, Northwestern won six first-place awards, three seconds and all 15 special awards handed out in the fair’s senior division.

“We have a two-part methodology where we do literature review and checking articles related to the topic in order to design good methodology,” Zeck said. “We try to implement a sound scientific method with something the student is interested in.

“When we started doing it that way, we won a lot.”

Eastern High School also saw four of its students win awards at Ball State University’s Ball Gymnasium March 1. Incidentally, chemistry teacher and fair-proponent Ben Cox is one of Zeck’s former students.

Like his onetime teacher, he requires every chemistry II student to participate. He said students gain “real world” science experience from developing projects that interest them, rather than just learning state standards.

More science teachers should follow Zeck’s and Cox’s lead. At the East Central Indiana fair, students at any public or private school in Blackford, Delaware, Fayette, Franklin, Grant, Henry, Howard, Jay, Madison, Randolph, Rush, Tipton, Union or Wayne counties are eligible.

In the senior division this year, only students from Eastern and Northwestern participated. At these schools, several science students delivered excellence, in part, because excellence was expected of them.

        

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