How 8th Grade Detention Led to a Google Partnership
Were you a troublemaker in school?
I swear I wasn’t, but I did get detention exactly one time. The date was May 10, 1994. I was in eighth grade. My crime? Going outside to watch a solar eclipse.
My gym teacher — we’ll call him Mr. C — was in charge of lunch supervision that day. That’s when the eclipse was happening. Mr. C forbade any students from going outside, even looking out the windows to observe the eclipse. “It’s too dangerous,” I remember him asserting indifferently.
Dumbfounded and appalled, I defied his orders. I knew you could observe it safely and there was no way I was going to miss this rare event. I got up, walked outside and watched the eclipse, using eclipse glasses I brought from home.
Mr. C was furious, and I got detention. It was worth it, even if it was just a partial eclipse of the sun.
But even back then I knew that the real prize, astronomically-speaking, was not May 10, 1994. It was instead a date which seemed positively futuristic to me: August 21, 2017. This was the date listed in my astronomy book, which I lovingly memorized when I was eight years old. August 21, 2017 would be the first total solar eclipse to cross the United States in my lifetime.
This “futuristic” date is now fast approaching. I’m a grown adult and the co-founder of one of the fastest growing science education companies in the world. Not only am I going to watch this myself with my own children, but I’ll be damned if some kid out there is forbidden from participating in this moment!
That is why I am so excited to announce that our company, Mystery Science, has partnered with Google to ensure elementary students across the U.S. get to experience the upcoming solar eclipse. Together with Google, we’re helping elementary teachers across the U.S. get access to solar eclipse glasses for their classrooms. In addition, the Mystery Science team has created open-and-go lesson materials for teachers (available at mysteryscience.com/eclipse).
It’s difficult to appreciate just how much of a “moment of awe” this eclipse will be. Not only is it rare, but for those in the path of totality, the sky literally will become night in the middle of day. Stars will become visible. The air will cool. Crickets will start chirping. As if things couldn’t get stranger, you’ll be able to see flames of hot gas shooting off the sun’s edge.
Think about it: somewhere among all the children out there right now is the next Marie Curie or Albert Einstein. Experiencing this eclipse might be the kind of singular event that alters the course of a child’s life, creating the next problem solver who accelerates human progress. Certainly this will be an event that every child will remember for the rest of his or her life. We have to make sure as many children as possible get to experience this.
I’m so proud that we get to leverage all the progress we’ve made with Mystery Science to help make this happen. The full announcement about our partnership with Google has been written up by TechCrunch. You can check it out here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/mystery-science-partners-with-google-to-bring-eclipse-glasses-to-elementary-school-students/.
