New Haven Independent

About 25 New Haven Public School science teachers gathered in a student-free Career High School Monday afternoon for the in-service training, called “Educating the Energy Consumers of Tomorrow” — i.e., the students. It’s part of a program called “eeSmarts” where the e’s stand for “energy efficiency.” United Illuminating presents the workshops for free (paid for by consumers in their electric bill) in towns in New Haven and Fairfield counties that it serves. They include a background on electricity and magnetism and dovetail with the Connecticut Department of Education’s Science Framework for each grade level. This workshop was geared to ninth grade, and with some modifications could be used in eighth or tenth grade.

Each teacher got a three-ring binder filled with more than 100 pages of information, experiments, quizzes and energy-saving tips (and all printed single-sided — what kind of energy efficiency and conservation message is that?). UI notes that a CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb uses 75 percent less energy, lasts up to ten times longer and can save $30 a year over the incandescent bulbs still in common use.

Presenters from Wesleyan University’s Project to Increase Mastery of Mathematics and Science (PIMMS) quizzed the teachers on the connection between electricity and magnetism (a magnetic field produces an electrical field and vice versa), what’s a watt (a measure of electrical power) and what’s a volt (a measure of electrical pressure). This was all almost too much for this reporter, who hadn’t confronted these terms since her own high school freshman days back in the dark ages when computers were as big as apartment buildings.

But these teachers were clearly up to the task. They responded to PIMMS instructor James Sulzen’s promptings, and enthusiastically made the rounds of the experiments set up in the back of the science lab where the training took place. (Click here to listen to the “aha” moment during an experiment.)

The other PIMMS instructor, Sandra Justin (pictured) worked to set up another of the experiments.

Karen Calechman (pictured), outreach coordinator for “eeSmarts,” said Connecticut and California are in the forefront of energy education. “This is one of the ways we can help students change their own behaviors and help parents understand, if the students understand, the science and the math of it, then hopefully they’ll see, ‘by changing my behavior I can actually be a change agent and empower myself to change the world and be an environmental steward.’”

That’s an inspiring goal, and a tall order.

“Students are concerned about global warming because they’re going to inherit the planet,” said Jeff Alpert, a teacher at the Sound School (pictured with his student teacher, Deborah Best, working on another experiment). “Whether they’re so interested in electricity, I don’t know. They’re certainly like the gadgets they use, but I don’t think at this point there’s a connection between the gadgetry [like] the iPods, and the increase in the amount of fossil fuel usage, or the desire to want to have alternative energy sources.”