Science Teacher's Super Bowl

I know.  I know.  The last thing you need on August 22 is another post on the eclipse.  Following NASA on Twitter means I have read so many posts and articles that I can't keep them all straight.  Then, there were the frightened people who kept posting the same article from "an ophthalmologist" (I teach my students if the source is vague, it is suspect.  Don't post something where someone hasn't shared their name.)  Last night, my feed was filled with photos from the path of totality as well as our local 93%.  You've seen everything you can possibly see regarding the moon's path across the sun.  That's fine.  I'm writing this one for myself.

Our school bought every student a pair of eclipse glasses; we even ordered them back in March before they became solid gold.  After spending the first few weeks of school fielding emails about whether we got the right ones, reassuring people that the ancients did not all go blind, and teaching some basic lessons on the cause and frequency of eclipses to my students, the day was finally here.  I'm a science teacher, but I'm also a yearbook advisor, so I enlisted the help of other teachers and parents to take shots of the kids in their glasses or with their pinhole arrangements.  My camera was solar filtered, so I asked the people who couldn't get the eclipse itself to get the kids watching.

I set out a few minutes early to set up my tripod and camera, expecting to get nothing.  Thank goodness, someone suggested bringing out a chair because I would have had difficulty squatting by the tripod over and over.  I took about 75 photos in the hour I was outside, but I didn't want my attempts to photograph the event to interfere with having the experience, so in between shots, I leaned back in the chair with my glasses on and enjoyed the eclipse as a human being, thankful that our administration bought glasses for us.  The experience was so much more real than the pinhole setup I had in third-grade.

The best part of the day, however, was being with and listening to my students.  They hovered around, asking questions of me and each other.  Since we didn't get blackout darkness, they had some difficulty describing what the sky looked like.  To be fair, since it doesn't look like anything else, it is difficult to describe.  Among my favorite descriptions were, "It's like a storm is coming, except it's still blue" and "It's like the beginning of that one Harry Potter movie, where he's on the playground."  I have e-mails pouring in with photos from our elementary students, who went home to watch it with their parents as well as group shots of kids in the glasses.  It's going to be a fun yearbook page, but my memories of enjoying it with my kids cannot be adequately captured.