The Baseball of Learning

I am seated in the lobby of the Marriot, located on the Chesapeake Bay.

Nearby, the start-up of another baseball season is underway for the Baltimore Orioles. The lights are shining brightly in the stadium as they play some other team. Pendants are up along the main streets, signifying the connection that the city has with their team. People roaming around the town are dressed in orange and black clothing. A band is playing in an outdoor ampitheatre.

People come and go, indicating their busy-ness. But for the most part, the number of individuals found in this hotel on this particular day are here for the NARST conference currently in session.

The ages vary, as do the ethnicity and socio-economic levels represented here by the attendees. However, we all traveled from a variety of places to meet here on this day to learn more about our profession, about our passion. Because of this, the field upon which we play is not related in anyway to baseball - but to science education. Wait - you know, as I think about it, there is a direct correlation between baseball and science education. We can link it in many different ways: physics (the speed of a ball thrown, the spin placed on the ball, the point of impact), engineering (the material found within a ball or bat), technology (the type of big screen television found throughout the stadium, the lighting system, the bar code scanners found in the souvenir shops), earth and space science (the weather and its impact upon a game), even biology (the science of human beings and our ability to hold a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, run the bases).

With as much connection as that between baseball and science education, I can't imagine how anyone could find the topic boring. What if we handled learning like they handle baseball? PR people work long hours to find and keep alive the connection between humans and the all-American sport. It is done through advertising and promotion, such as designing T-shirts, caps, bobble-heads, and the like. Then we, because we want to be connected to our team, pay large sums of money to collect the trinkets.

What if we did that for learning - for science education? What if someone designed T-shirts and caps, and created bobble-heads of our favorite teachers? Would that make the public love us even more? Probably not. But what a wonderful world it would be if we had pendants hanging from street lights at the beginning of the school year...if bands would come out, announcing the start of another opportunity to learn.

And I bet we wouldn't have to have any more bake sales to raise money for supplies - if we had PR people creating trinkets for us.