everyday heroes

Happy Feat

by Ellie Spielberg

Mar 29, 2007 12:14 PM

‘Penguin superstar’ returns to her classroom from Antarctic research

Ross Island, South Pole, 77° 50' 0” S, 166° 40' 0” E: A woman at McMurdo Station in Antarctica is extracting and analyzing ice cores with an international team of research scientists.
Bluff City, Tennessee, 36° 27' 48” N, 82° 16' 30” W: In a snug brick house in the Appalachian Mountains, three people check the e-mail from time to time as they do their chores.
Madison Avenue at 103rd Street, East Harlem, New York City, 40° 47' 11.95” N, 73° 56' 39.95” W: Twenty eight pre-K kids at Central Park East II elementary school waddle down the hall with rubber balls between their ankles.

It’s a small world.
The woman in the South Pole, Vanessa Miller, was one of six teachers from around the globe selected to spend two months in a research immersion program run by Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL). This group of more than 200 scientists, students and educators drills back in time to recover the ancient history of interglacial changes to better understand a future scenario of global warming.
Because it was 17 hours later in Antarctica, it was difficult for Miller to call her parents and sister in Tennessee. From her perch in the land of icebergs, she kept in touch with family, friends and her 4th- and 5th-grade students by e-mail and by ice-blog [www.andrill.org/iceberg].
The children at Central Park East II read the blog, or had it read to them, and e-mailed questions to Miller: Will you see any penguins? If you are at the bottom of the world, are you standing upside down? Have you seen any penguins? Do you have very, very, VERY warm clothing? Is the time there really the future? Will you feed penguins?

Miller felt more than a little lucky to be living at the bottom of the world. Roughing it never fazed her much, anyway. “I grew up in a house 40 minutes from the nearest grocery store, we heated with wood, and when the power went out our water froze,” she said.
The extreme outdoors of Antarctica was a source of joy and wonder to her.
Although she spent much of her time inside the warm buildings at the large McMurdo Station complex, she did spend two weeks in a tent on the ice during her survival training course in temperatures that sank as low as minus 25 degrees with an added wind chill. She shared survival gear with a partner, wore standard ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) clothing and what she describes as “big bunny boots.”

Penguins were also on the minds of kids who don’t know how to write sentences yet. The pre-K children marching down the hall of the East Harlem school with rubber balls between their ankles were being father penguins carrying the family egg on their feet to keep it warm, while somewhere off in the wilds of their imaginations the mothers hunted for fish. And somewhere off in a very cold place a really lucky teacher was living in penguin land.

Staying alive meant staying warm. It meant learning how to prepare dehydrated meals and melt snow for drinking on a feather-light camping stove, and building a “snow city” — a wall and structures made of snow for protection from the bone-chilling wind. It meant learning the basics about frostbite and hypothermia and constantly being on the alert for symptoms.

The air was so dry that her skin itched constantly and she would wake up thirsty in the middle of the night.
“It’s hard to describe the cold, and the wind chill was biting,” she says. “It is also hard to describe the breathtakingly beautiful, pristine land. One day I hiked up on a ridge during heavy cloud cover and I felt like I was sitting in the clouds. I could see the Trans-Antarctic mountainscape; it was truly unreal. It is humbling to know that you are not in control, you are completely at the will of the environment.”
Miller says that the landscape was “one of two big beautiful areas” of her experience.
“The other beautiful area was all the science content; I was so immersed as a learner, and as a teacher that was really important. I was struggling with concepts I knew nothing about. That was also humbling and it took me to a place that my students often are in.”
“When Vanessa came back from the South Pole and walked into my classroom,” said kindergarten teacher Valerie Edwards, “she was the penguin superstar.”
Although Miller returned at the end of December, Antarctica lives on in the intimate pre-K-4 school of 208 children who call their teachers by their first names. Every teacher created a way to make Antarctica part of the curriculum. Lisa Shaffner and Valarie Watson gave their pre-K kids a zoology lesson and showed them the “March of the Penguins.”

Science teacher Andrietta Sims taught the older students all about light and energy. Vida Nazemian’s class wanted to study native cultures. “I had to explain that there were no native people in Antarctica and we studied the Arctic Inuit to see how people survive in a similar climate,” she said.
Lauren Baum talked about 3rd-grader Jovan, who is fascinated by weather. “On his own at his home computer he mapped temperatures and became the school temperature expert, teaching other kids how to research Antarctica on the Internet in the library.”
Principal Naomi Smith, a former UFT chapter leader, didn’t bat an eyelash when a scientist from Queens College presented her with Miller’s application for ANDRILL and wrote a recommendation right away. She doesn’t bat an eyelash now as a few teachers grab some onion rings off her plate. The crew is taking a lunch break in Miller’s lively classroom, which she shares with a colony of crickets and the reptiles who eat them: Ruby the corn snake and Rocky the bearded dragon lizard.

When Miller takes them out of their tanks to be handled, there are plenty of takers. From another terrarium she picks up a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, a.k.a. “Extreme Cockroach,” which perches on her finger. Uh, there aren’t too many takers for that fellow in the city classroom. “I work on getting the kids used to bugs and all kinds of wildlife,” says Miller, who takes the older students to Ashokan Field camp in Upstate New York for a few days each year.
Miller, who has lived in Manhattan for nine years and has taught at the school for seven, is an avid backpacker and loves the outdoors and all creatures that inhabit it.

And yes, she did see penguins in Antarctica, hundreds of them, all different varieties in their rookeries. They were friendly with no fear of humans. Miller couldn’t feed them, however, as the kids hoped she would, because of strict wildlife protection laws.
And what did Miller want to feed herself as soon as her plane hit the runway, after two months in a barren landscape so cold that fish have a natural form of anti-freeze in their blood stream?
A slice of New York pizza? A bagel right out of the oven smothered with cream cheese?
Guess again.
Sushi.
Hold the anti-freeze, please.
Must have been all those days of watching penguins eat cold raw fish.
“But you know what I really, really missed, what I craved, while I was gone?” she says, standing by some posters of Antarctica.
“My classroom.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE — For an amazing read you can share with your class, that includes her poem for her students, “If You Could See What I've Seen,” log on to Vanessa Miller's blog at www.andrill.org/iceberg.