COURTESY PHOTO
Hawaii teachers Dewey Gottlieb, Jill Namba-Mauricio, Clifford Lee and Joel Truesdale received Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science.
Four Hawaii teachers have received Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science based on innovations in their classrooms. Math and science
teachers honoredBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.comThey are Jill Namba-Mauricio, science teacher at Kipapa Elementary School, Mililani; Clifford Lee, Iolani School elementary mathematics teacher; Dewey Gottlieb II, Pearl City High School mathematics teacher; and Joel Truesdale, Kamehameha Schools secondary science teacher.
The prestigious awards included $7,500 each from the National Science Foundation to improve science and mathematics instruction, a citation signed by President Bush and a trip to Washington, D.C., for the awards ceremony held March 21.
The Hawaii teachers were among 167 honored for their teaching methods in the 50 states, District of Columbia, U.S. territories and U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity.
All visits to the White House were canceled when they were there, but first lady Laura Bush, a former teacher, asked to see the award winners to express her appreciation for teachers, the Hawaii group said.
The trip was "fabulous ... a dream," and even more so because they were in Washington at a historic time, said Namba-Mauricio.
People were surprised they were allowed to go to the White House, said Lee, who believes while the teachers were meeting with the first lady in the East Room March 19, President Bush was elsewhere in the White House with advisers.
"It was the same day the attack began. We were right in the middle of it," Lee said.
Truesdale said the teachers were treated like royalty and that one of the best things was meeting with scientists at the foundation and other government branches.
"It's given us some really good ideas," she said.
Truesdale and Namba-Mauricio had to submit videos to show a normal lesson as part of a foundation pilot project in some schools to see interaction and excitement of students.
"What I tried to do was to address the multiple ways kids learn," Truesdale said, with demonstrations, laboratory work and assessments where they analyze what they learned to see if they could apply it.
Truesdale teaches chemistry to 11th- and 12th-graders at Kamehameha Schools and conducts a summer research program for ninth- to 12th-graders, working on projects for the state science fair.
"My program starts kids doing Hawaiian medicinal plant studies, and in the summer I start kids on DNA research and cellular biology," he said, adding that it is cultural as well as scientific.
Lee teaches mathematics to second-graders at Iolani, where he was once a student. When he began teaching there in 1978, he said, "We had very traditional kinds of math classes, out of textbooks."
He and a colleague, Jeanne Chun, who has since retired, decided after 10 years to develop their own math curriculum, he said, adding that part of his award belongs to her.
He teaches kids metric measurement, in particular linear measurement, trying to make it relevant and fun, he said.
Although the United States is one of three countries that has not adopted the metric system, he feels it is important for children to know it.
He said he and Chun built activities on a system developed by University of Hawaii professor Irvin King using monster cartoon characters to teach children about metric measurements.
Gottlieb teaches calculus and pre-algebra to ninth- and 12th-graders at Pearl City High School, where he was a student.
He tries to make mathematics come alive for students "so it's not just stuff in a textbook. It can be used to make decisions about the world and your life."
In his award application, he showcased a trigonometry lesson in which students gathered climate data from the Internet on cities around the world.
They used graphing calculators to look at the data and explain the trends mathematically to represent a pattern, he said. They extrapolated the data to look at the global climate picture and relate that to global warming, he said.
Namba-Mauricio submitted a video on "The Death of a Damselfish," which died in a saltwater aquarium in her second-grade class.
She had the students set up the aquarium as part of a broad, year-long study of coral reefs with reef walks and field trips to Sea Life Park and Waikiki Aquarium.
The children are responsible for maintaining the aquarium, recording daily observations of the animals, feeding and water quality. "They become passionate, and they find that research has a purpose," Namba-Mauricio said.
Their challenge is to keep the marine specimens alive, which involves understanding their diet, habitat, method of protection and enemies, she said.
When the damselfish died, Namba-Mauricio said she recorded the children going through a scientific inquiry process to examine possible reasons for the death.
Conservation is stressed, and the children debate the ethics of whether animals should be taken from the ocean for the class aquarium, she said.
Hawaii School Web Sites
