Here's an idea of how good Britta Culbertson is. The science and art teacher at lower Queen Anne's Center School beat out 970 other educators and environmentalists around the world to be a part of the Toyota International Teacher Program's trip to the Galapagos Islands.
A fluke? Hardly. She's been an A student all her life but spends far more time beyond the pages of any book. She spent two years in Africa volunteering for the PeaceCorps, teaching Kenyan families new agricultural techniques and learned a little Swahili on the side. She majored in biology and minored in art at Iowa State University. She studied snakes and lizards in the deserts of New Mexico south of the Carlsbad Caverns. She taught and ultimately earned the respect of tough, intercity high school kids in Santa Fe, N.M., while at the same time commuting two hours each evening to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she earned a master's degree in teaching. She's been to Turkey, taught kids in Costa Rica. Oh, and she climbs mountains, too (the pictures of her atop the snowy peak Mt. Rainier are quite real).
And then this last July, the amiable school teacher earned a two-week trip to the place where Charles Darwin pieced together his theories of evolution and survival of the fittest, where giant lizards share the terra with sea lions, giant tortoises, marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies. Yeah, you could say Culbertson had come home.
The notion of the trip began when Culbertson was thinking about new ways to engage the students at Center School, where she had been teaching science and most recently art. In fact, she often incorporates art into her science lessons. For example, she might have students illustrate some of Newton's laws by performing one-acts in front of the class. She was skimming education programs and opportunities online when she came across Toyota's program. The car maker contributes more than $57 million to U.S. programs including environmental/educational trips to Japan, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, the latter a property of Ecuador jutting out of the heart of the Pacific Ocean 600 miles west of South America.
Figuring she had nothing to lose, she filled out the dense application, which required she tell Toyota about an environmental lesson she taught and then an impact plan on how she would bring the Galapagos Islands and its microcosmic features of the world back to her classroom in Seattle. In Kenya, she'd learned how precious water was, how locals bathed in water then used the same water to wash dishes and water crops. She brought that lesson in conservation into her classroom. Her impact plan would be to blog to her students and have them comment in real time on her observations. She would also set up lessons for the spring about the ecology, fragility and evolution of the island, its postcard beauty but also its trash problem and lack of potable water.
She found out in June that she was a semi-finalist and by July, after returning from a hiking trip in Canada, she learned she was chosen.
"I was ecstatic," she said.
For the next five months she worked online with Dr. Arturo Keller a professor of environmental biogeochemistry at the University of Santa Barbara, who helped get her up to speed with the status of the islands. She also boned up on her Spanish. When she finally arrived after a long flight that took her from Seattle to Los Angeles to Chicago to Quito to Santa Cruz, the main island of the Galapagos, she was awestruck by what was basically a menagerie of animal life peacefully co-existing and relatively unimpressed by their two-legged guests donning tropical shirts and sunglasses.
"It was awesome and mindblowing," she recounted from her Center School classroom. "There were animals everywhere. There were two flightless cormorants in a mating dance while a marine iguana walked by a lava lizard. I was just watching it and then in the background, a sea turtle swam up shore and a sea lion swam up behind the turtle - crabs too. I was thinking, 'OK, when is a whale with a penguin on its back going to swim by?'"
For the next two weeks, Culbertson bore witness to moments of utter beauty, transformative sunsets, sweeping seascapes, Eagle Rays swimming in formation, drowsing sea lions, waddling blue-footed boobies and a variety of other creatures. As amazing as it was, she wondered what the untrammeled version would have looked like when Charles Darwin was applying his theories of evolution and natural selection.
Preserving that beauty is crucial, and islanders are trying to figure out how to manage trash problems and water issues, that's partly why Toyota is paying more than $10,000 a pop to bring educators to the islands and learn about the place and maybe even solve issues such as a lack of potable water, desalinization plans, and growing trash problems.
Inspired by the islands' issues, Culbertson wants to make her art classes at Center School a little more green so there's less waste and less going down the drain and into the Puget Sound.
In the spring, Culbertson wants to teach her science students all about the Galapagos Islands, about its evolution and its pollution so that, however indirectly, she'll have done her part in preserving it.
"I will have the kids do short plays using props of found or recycled objects," she said. "My vision is that the characters in the plays will be the plants, animals, tourists, the people who live there - even Darwin - and they'll tell the story of the Galapagos Island through their eyes."[[In-content Ad]]
