GREGG K. KAKESAKO / GKAKESAKO@STARBULLETIN.COM Miami history teacher Rita Kaplan, left, and teacher Mary Ruch of Idaho examine core samples gathered on past survey expeditions conducted by the Navy's oceanographic survey vessel USNS Pathfinder.

Sea of knowledge

Teachers get to see science at work on a Navy research ship

FLORIDA SCIENCE teacher Rita Kaplan just found out why sailors call bathroom facilities on a ship "the head."

"In olden days, there always was a head on the bow of wooden ships," said Kaplan -- one of 13 school teachers who are participating in a decade-old Navy-sponsored education at sea program. "When sailors had to go, they would do it off the front of the ship -- the head."

Nautical lore is just part of the Sea Scholars program, where math, history and science teachers attend classes on a Navy oceanographic survey ship and work closely with oceanographic surveyors.

This morning, Kaplan and 12 other teachers will sail from Pearl Harbor on the 329-foot Navy survey ship USNS Pathfinder, participating in a program coordinated by the Naval Oceanographic Office and the University of Southern Mississippi.

Sheila Brown recruits the teachers and coordinates the university side of the program, "designed to help teachers merge real-life scientific applications into classroom topics."

For the next 2 1/2 days, Pathfinder with its crew of 10 merchant mariners will cruise the Molokai Channel along the southern coastlines of Maui, Molokai and Lanai. The boat also will do survey work at the Loihi seamount, the small underwater volcano off the southeastern coast of the Big Island, before heading to California.

Mark Jarrett, senior scientist with the Naval Oceanographic Office, said more than 300 teachers have participated in the summer cruises in the past 10 years. "It's a very competitive program," Jarrett said. "We get up to 50 applicants a year."

Jarrett said the teachers will work with scientists as they survey the ocean bottom and collect core, water, plankton and other marine samples.

Kaplan, who has been teaching history for the past 30 years in Miami, hopes to tie in what she learns about the ocean and the weather in the Pacific with her future history lesson plans.

"Being a history teacher," Kaplan said, "I am a blank page.

"But in teaching the history of sailing, or the history of exploration, and astronomy and ocean currents then and now, I can talk about the ways Magellan was able to navigate the seas and get around without having all the elaborate instruments on this Navy ship."

Saralee Lamb, a Miami middle and high school science teacher who has sailed on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, said, "The Pacific can be wonderful but also unforgiving."

She crewed on a 36-foot yacht to Tahiti several years ago, and learned to paddle on the Big Island while taking graduate courses at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii.

Lamb said she hopes to develop a multidisciplinary curriculum at the end of the 10-day cruise.

The teachers will be part of the scientific crew deploying over-the-side sensors, launching weather balloons, processing bathymetric data, examining mud, listening to underwater ocean noises through sonar buoys and studying plankton.

Jarrett said his boss, Rear Adm. Timothy McGee, who heads the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, believes "the key to have good sailors in the Navy is by encouraging science and math in the classrooms. It's not just good for the Navy, but the country as a whole."

GREGG K. KAKESAKO / GKAKESAKO@STARBULLETIN.COM Thirteen math and science teachers will spend the next 10 days on the Navy oceanographic survey ship USNS Pathfinder, which left Pearl Harbor today.* PATHFINDER AT A GLANCE Length: 329 feet Speed: 16 knots Crew: 28 civilians, 27 scientists Displacement: 4,762 tons Source: U.S. Navy