Space Camp...

My name is Paul Strauss and I am an 8th grade Science teacher at Sunset Ridge School in the Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix, Arizona. With this site I hope to share just how incridible it was for me to attend the Educator Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center this past summer. Never before have I experienced such a melding of personal fun and professional development all rolled up in one.

I guess my journey began back in January when the parents of one of my students, who both worked at Honeywell, sent me an email letting me know that Honeywell sponsors middle school math and science teachers to go to Space Camp and if I was interested they gave me the link to the application. Well of course I was interested, wrote my essay and sent it off. To be honest I really forgot about it until I was notified a couple of months later letting me know I was selected. What really blew me away was the fact that instead of a one week program, Honeywell decided to sponsor two weeks for a total of 200 teachers which ended up coming from 43 states and 19 countries!



Well it was one thing to be selected but then I was blown away realizing that this would truly be an international experience (click here for a map to see where all the teachers came from). The most interesting thing about spending a week with teachers from all over the world is that I was amazed that even though we all came from so many different cultures and customs, we all go through EXACTLY the same things in the classroom. Being a middle school teacher in Phoenix is pretty much the same as being one in Honduras, Ireland, Newfoundland, India, etc. But to make things more manageable, we were broken down into groups of 15-17, each with an international flair, with my group being Team Exploration (seen in this picture) - and I could not have asked for a better group!

The rest of this blog will break down each of the different components of the week. I will first talk about the facilities at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, then go into our astronaut training and missions we went through, next I will cover the speakers we had followed by the educational classes we took; finally I will cover some of the experiences along the way. Feel free to click on any of the pictures for a bigger view and know that comments are ALWAYS welcomed.