FOSTORIA - Watching two of your teachers dressed in fat suits trying to knock each other over with their padded bellies is one way to learn about mass and acceleration.
Seeing three young performers sing and dance to hip-hop tunes about inertia and motion is another.
Either way, middle school students from Fostoria, St. Wendelin, and New Riegel schools were fully engrossed yesterday in what can only be called the coolest science class they've ever had.
"I think it was good because I like music and science," said New Riegel fifth grader Austin Hoepf after the show for New Riegel students wound up at Fostoria Middle School.
Eighth grader Megan Mathias admitted she prefers life sciences, but this particular physics lesson certainly grabbed her attention.
Sponsored by NASA and the Honeywell Corp., which has a plant in Fostoria, FMA Live! brought Sir Isaac Newton's three laws of motion to life.
Billed as a "science/hip hop concert tour," the show is intended to inspire middle school students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.
New Riegel seventh-grade science teacher Bonnie Burns - one of the lucky ones who got to don a fat suit for her students' amusement - said she was thrilled when Fostoria Middle School invited her students to see the show.
"If we try to hit this age group when they study this material, this is the way they'll remember it," she said. "It's kind of boring unless you make it exciting like this."
Students and staff took part in the show beginning with a young man who was Velcroed to a big yellow wall to demonstrate inertia - that objects keep doing what they're doing unless they're acted on by an outside force.
In this case, performers J.J. Hopson, Laine Melendy, and Will Tijerina were that force. They pulled him of the wall and plunked him on the stage.
To demonstrate Newton's law that force equals mass times acceleration, they had another student kick a soccer ball into a net, then a bigger soccer ball that took a harder kick, then a gigantic soccer ball that she couldn't budge. The reason it didn't budge was "because of its massive mass," students were told.
Enter the fat-suited teachers.
For fifth-grade teacher Lynsey Tilse to knock Ms. Burns over, she needed to add acceleration - to run straight at her colleague.
She did and - Plop! - Ms. Burns went down.
The kids loved it.
And they cheered when eighth-grade science teacher Dan Beisner was placed on a hover chair and propelled into a giant crme pie, which stopped the chair in its tracks.
Mr. Tijerina said it's great to see students' faces as the show unfolds and know that they're getting a valuable science lesson. "If we had something like this when I was growing up, I'd probably be a scientist," he said.
And that's the whole point.
Contact Jennifer Feehan at:
jfeehan@theblade.com
or 419-353-5972.
First Published October 20, 2007, 9:52 a.m.