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The GK-12 Earth Project at Heritage Middle School could be subtitled 'Science Geeks in the Real World' or 'How to Make Sense of All That Stuff in the Book.'

GK-12, which stands for Graduate, Kindergarten through 12th grade, is a three-year program funded by Department of Graduate Services of the National Science Foundation and administered by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Ten teachers were selected from Blount, Knox, Jefferson and Sevier Counties to receive GK-12 fellows in the classroom. These fellows are graduate students at UT who want to hone their communication skills by taking their research knowledge and classroom training into middle and high schools alongside the regular classroom teachers. At Heritage Middle School, science teacher Greg Metcalf is in his third and final year of the project, and so is science teacher Oscar Osorio. Two teachers at Carpenters Middle School have also been participating.

Jean Sakulich is working on his Ph.D. in physical geography at UT and has been in Metcalf's classroom since fall. For him, it's one more opportunity for professional development in an environment he hasn't been part of.

"As a graduate student, I get the chance to come out to a K-12 classroom and interact in a way that I have never really done before," Sakulich said. "As a graduate student, you are used to talking to other graduate students, talking to faculty and talking to professors. You are not used to talking to middle school students or even their teachers."

Sakulich has been part of Metcalf's classroom for two days each week. Metcalf gains an extra set of hands during lab work, etc., but said the benefits go far beyond having a warm body.

"This is an honor that we were selected for this," Metcalf said. The kids want to look at me like I am a scientist and I'm not. I have a bachelor's degree in biology and a minor in chemistry. Even then I have learned mostly from books. I wasn't out doing research. These guys are our resident scientists."

More than facts, figures

While the focus of GK-12 is on the graduate students, Metcalf said he also gets professional development from the experience. He is able to show his students that science isn't just what you read in a textbook. It is a process that can involve some neat and interesting things, he said.

"If science is just a set of facts, how boring," Metcalf said.

On a recent morning, Metcalf was explaining to his classroom how to track a hurricane on a map using longitude and latitude. While he was at the front of the class making the assignment clear, Sakulich was spending his time walking around to each table, offering answers to questions and observing the lab work. It is a team teaching approach that has worked well all year, the two said.

This science teacher has established a great relationship with the university and spent one recent summer doing research in Costa Rica. This summer he will travel to Ecuador for research in the grasslands region. While he doesn't know exactly what that will involve, Metcalf said he can't wait for this learning experience.

Sakulich's goal is to become a research professor once he graduates from UT in 2011. His research is on tree rings and he will be working on his sites in Georgia and West Virginia this summer.

When he is writing future grants, Metcalf said he hopes Sakulich will remember how important it is to reach out to students like his and challenge them to look beyond what they think they know.

The major goal of the NSF, Sakulich said, is to improve the quality of science education and get more students to think about science as a career.

While GK-12 ends with this school year, Metcalf is hopeful there will be something else to come along that will serve to excite his classroom and his own enthusiasm for both learning and teaching.

"I have gained a tremendous amount from this," he said. "The fervor will not last forever. It just won't. You have to feed something like this."