Lessons Learned from an Out-of-this-World Opportunity Lisa Werner

LESSONS LEARNED FROM AN OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD OPPORTUNITY

BY LISA WERNER

Have you ever had an experience that you looked back on and thought “I can’t believe I just did that!”? When’s the last time you took a flying leap way outside of your comfort zone? This year I had a few amazing opportunities present themselves to do just that. I am the girls scout co-leader for my 2nd grade daughter’s brownie troop with a few other moms, one of whom is a science teacher at our local middle school. She told me about a new program that was running through Carthage College in Kenosha, WI that is called the Embedded Teacher Program, and encouraged me to apply. I filled out the relatively short and easy application in August, and didn’t bother to tell my husband I did it. I figured I didn’t have a chance of getting selected, since they were only accepting 10 teachers from around the country into the program, and the requirements said you had to be a STEM teacher to be eligible.

Fast forward a week and a half later when I got email acceptance into the program. Participating in the program got me a 2-day workshop that featured information on the current NASA Artemis mission, microgravity facts and experiments from the National Space Society, and a tour of the Carthage microgravity lab. At the end of the workshop, we were invited to submit proposals for experiments to fly on a parabolic flight through the Zero G Corporation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I submitted a series of band studentdesigned experiments for round 1 and was denied. I found out 3 days before the deadline for resubmission that I needed to start from scratch, as my experiment ideas were not supportable on the flights. This also happened to be 4 days before my Catholic school’s first Christmas concert in person since 2019. It was a stressful week, to say the least. I spent that whole weekend doing sound and music experiments to see what might be able to be adapted in an interesting way for zero gravity. I eventually found a few ideas and submitted them, after having the band students I work with pick out what they were most interested in learning.

In all of the winter festivities, I forgot about my proposals for a while, which was appreciated after all of the stress that weekend. On January 12, I received an email from the program director inviting me to fly my experiments in the spring! I was awestruck. I went from thinking I would not even get into this program to getting to be one of four teachers who gets to fly in the zero-gravity flight! whole school, it was music centric. I created sound waves using my trombone. I looked at what drumming was like without gravity and used a metronome to measure reaction time. I created a dice rolling probability experiment that mimicked Mozart’s chance compositions when I paired the results with student-composed melodies. Throughout the whole process, my students learned so much. However, I learned some pretty

Lisa Werner serves as Band Director at St. Bruno Parish School in Dousman, Wisconsin and Senior Symphony Orchestra Manager with the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. She has an instrumental music education degree from UW-Whitewater, and a masters degree in conducting from the American Band College through Southern Oregon University. Lisa enjoys performing in jazz ensembles and local pit orchestras. Mrs. Werner is a National Board Certified teacher and is also certified by National Geographic and as a Google Educator. Lisa is constantly looking for new ways to connect music to other content areas for the students in her classroom.

Lessons Learned from an Out-of-this-World Opportunity, Lisa Werner, cont.

powerful lessons as well:

1. It would have been very easy to get distracted by my thoughts of not being good enough to be in this program. I have not had a science class since 2000, so my science isn’t as strong as those teachers who are teaching the subject every day to their students. There were many moments where I wanted to give up and say ‘I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve this.’

Instead, I remembered that this is how some of my students feel in my classroom when they are learning to cross the break on the clarinet or lip trill on the trumpet. If I expect them to hang on and keep trying, then I had better work to persevere as well. Also, all of that insecurity was coming only from myself - the other teachers in the program were incredibly encouraging and supportive of the music teacher amongst them.

2. Because of my involvement in this program, I received an offer to attend the Space Exploration

Educators Conference in

Houston last February through the Wisconsin Space Grant

Consortium. This was an incredible experience meeting educators in all subject matters who had a love for space exploration. I got so many fun and engaging ideas from teachers who don’t teach music. It was really cool to hear how science, math, and technology teachers use music in some of their classrooms to help teach their content standards!

3. Also, at this conference I had the opportunity to meet a few astronauts. While my STEM educator colleagues were asking questions like “how can I better prepare my students for a career with NASA?” I chose to ask,

“were you a musician, and if so, how did those skills help to get you where you are now?” All but one astronaut had played instrument(s) at one time, and many of them still perform.

The astronaut who did not play an instrument had a story about how music factored into his mission anyway - he was orbiting the earth due to a bad

Lessons Learned from an Out-of-this-World Opportunity, Lisa Werner, cont.

weather delay before returning from space, and he listened to the Moody Blues album “Days of Future Passed.” The first track is about day beginning and lined up perfectly with the sunrise he experienced in orbit. The whole album is about the passing of time during the day, and the final track played as the astronaut experienced sunset. He said it was so perfectly timed that it caused such a deep emotional reaction for him. One of the astronauts who played an instrument mentioned that the same skills necessary for improving as a musician are the skills you need as an astronaut. Where musicians need to work over and over on a musical passage or skill to get it as close to perfect as possible, and train the muscles to do it consistently, astronauts train the same way. They do things over and over again for muscle memory, because if they ‘forget’, their lives could be in danger.

4. My favorite lesson happened on the zero g flight. I was playing my trombone for my first experiment, and people from around the plane started coming over to see what I was doing. It wasn’t that my experiment was that ground-breaking…it was that even in zero gravity music draws an audience!

For those of you who are not familiar with a parabolic (or ‘zero g’ flight), an adapted commercial airplane flies in a series of parabolas, or hills, to create moments of zero gravity followed by double earth’s gravity (also called 2 g). Each moment of 0 and 2 g is roughly 22 seconds. I got to experience 30 of these parabolas. The challenge is finding experiments that can be done in that time period.

I performed 4 experiments. The first experiment involved a container of cupcake sprinkles in a deli container, topped with an onion saver from the grocery store. I attached this to my trombone and played notes from the harmonic series to see the change in the sprinkles’ behavior as the pitch went higher.

My second experiment jumped off of that same idea but took things a bit farther. I had a clear plastic tube that was sealed on one end and filled with Styrofoam beads. I then closed off the other end of the tube with a rubber band and attached this to my trombone. The middle school band students and I calculated the resonance of the tube (it turned out to be an E on my trombone), and I played that note into the tube on the parabolic flight. This produced a beautiful 3-dimensional standing wave in the tube. I was able to create additional standing waves using other pitches while in 0 g, despite only the E working for me on the ground.

The third experiment I did involved drumming at different tempos, testing how easy or difficult it is to respond to stimulus and also determining how challenging it may be to control stick rebound in zero gravity. Shocker: it actually didn’t feel any different at all!

My final experiment was much less scientific. I had a cheese ball container with a big foam die inside. As the die experienced 0 g, it would float and roll, and as we came out of that, it would land on a random number - a simple probability exercise. I linked this to concert band by first teaching the students about Mozart’s chance compositions. I then had the middle school band students compose two measure melodic ideas using the Bb blues scale (they picked the scale from choices I gave them). The students were actually asked to write a one-measure idea, but they found they had more to say, so they begged for 2 measures! I then split the band into groups and assigned them a number to correspond with each side of the die. When their number popped up in their parabolas, we put that student’s musical idea into our composition. We then performed this piece, which the students named “Dicey Breakfast” because they weren’t sure how I would fare on my morning ‘vomit comet’ ride, on our spring concert 7 days after my flight.

I also used this with the beginning band I teach as well. We took the concert Bb pentatonic scale and assigned each note to one side of the die. Before I left, we worked together to compose rhythms for our composition. After my flight, we took each roll of the die, translated it to the pitch assigned to that number, and dropped it into our rhythmic composition. These students also performed their composition on the same spring concert, calling their piece “Gonna Fly Meow.” Both pieces turned out really well, and the students couldn’t believe how well their compositions sounded.

Throughout this whole experience, I worked to tie this adventure into every grade level and subject at

Lessons Learned from an Out-of-this-World Opportunity, Lisa Werner, cont.

our school. The art teacher and I teamed up to have each student create a mission patch for this flight. The Physical Education teacher incorporated ‘astronaut training’ for the students. The Spanish teacher taught the students music and spacerelated words in Spanish. I went into the 3K and 4K classes to teach them about the moon with puzzles. I visited the 1st graders to show how each instrument makes sound in their sound wave unit. The 8th grade science class worked with me to design the holsters for attaching the experiments to my trombone. The older students demonstrated our experiments to the younger students in the school, and for the parents and community at our spring concert. Throughout the whole process, every student in our school was engaged in the entire journey, with the band students leading the experience.

Student engagement and reactions were awesome. At the end of the school year, I surveyed the students to see what the whole experience had taught them. Some of my favorite answers were:

• “I felt like I had been involved with every aspect of this experience, even though I couldn’t go on the flight with you.” • “I learned to never give up on my dreams, no matter how impossible they seem.” • “Music is so cool that it can be connected to everything, even space!” • “You can do anything if you put your mind to it.” • “Even researchers like to listen to the trombone- probably because they know it’s the best instrument.” • “Keep working hard on what you really want to accomplish, because you can get there with the right amount of work.” • “I thought writing music was hard, but it’s so much fun I want to write longer stuff.” • “This was super cool to be a part of.

It changed me because it showed me that you can do anything.”

Interestingly enough, I know we all worry about the amount of time we have to rehearse with our students. It often feels like it is never enough, and this probably causes music teachers to hesitate to do more of these experiences with the students they work with. Let me assure you that even with my students having not played at all in the last year and a half due to Covid-19, and these experiments/projects going on during class, the concert band students learned their music faster and deeper than they usually have done. However, the most priceless part of this amazing experience was watching the deep connections they made with their music, their instruments, and their classmates as a result of this shared adventure. The motto for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is “Dare Mighty Things,” and is often used in many of the space education materials I have received. I issue a challenge to you all to “dare mighty things” for you, the students you work with, and your band programs! You never know where your next adventure will take you and your band program!