Students gaining some hands-on experience
10-week program puts 7th- and 8th-graders’
lessons to work
Chris Kelly Jaleasa David, 13, looks over her notes while working at the meteorology/weather computer station at Eatontown’s Memorial School.
EATONTOWN — They learn about ailerons and the Internet, engineering and meteorology, computer-aided drafting and computer animation, laser and fiber optics, electricity and robotics.
They are the students of Art Perri in his applied technology class for seventh- and eighth-graders at the Memorial School. And for 10 weeks of the school year — one full quarter — they sit, two by two, in front of a computer in a desk module set up for one of those disciplines.
Atop the module for flight technology sits a collection of model airplanes. The two girls seated there are learning about ailerons, a pilot-controlled airfoil attached to the trailing edge of an airplane wing for controlling the rolling movements of an airplane. In the meteorology module next to them, two other students are peering at a weather map downloaded from a satellite.
The kids at the electricity module are measuring amps and ohms and learning about circuits, while one of the students at the fiber optics module sprinkles baby powder over what had, until then, been an invisible laser ray and watched as a thin, straight line sparkled red.
Chris Kelly Maureen Kawas (foreground) and Nikki Aromando, both 13, look over their notes at the aviation computer work station at Eatontown’s Memorial School.
Students at the robotics module have an actual robot next to them which they learn how to program using a computer. After students at the computer animation module learn the moves and draw an example of "squash and stretch," they make a 30-second comic strip.
At the Internet module, Carlos Rosado and David Glover were getting a handle on how to use the Internet. They have had computer classes, but were just starting to surf the Net.
Glover explained the practical application of what they were learning.
"When we go home and do reports, it makes it easier to find stuff," he said.
Across the aisle from them, Asha Jones and Melissa Reese were exploring the wonders of engineering beneath a sampling of small model bridges previous students had made.
Asha said her father is an engineer, which piqued her interest in the subject.
The bridges were a spin-off of the problem-solving aspect of the class.
Perri explained that the students, who usually work their way through two modules during the course, are given a problem to solve, such as building a bridge that meets certain specifications. He said they used to test the bridges by setting the spans up between two tables. But now, he pointed out, the classroom has a testing device that was commercially made.
Samples of a popular exercise — the construction of a maze for marbles from a cereal box — stand throughout the classroom. The mazes, with their twists and turns, are truly amazing.
Perri said the problem put to the students was to get the marble from top to bottom in 6 seconds.
"Not 5.9 seconds, or 6.1, but 6 right on the button," he said.
Another exercise is the egg drop. The students fashion a small square box and are told to design it in such a way that an egg put into it won’t break when dropped off the roof of the school.
Perri said he climbs up to the roof and personally drops the boxes for the waiting students.
In a recent class, he said, the successful students suspended their egg in rubber bands.
In yet another exercise, the students are given a piece of 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper and a 12-inch piece of tape and are told to make the tallest tower out of them that they can.
"Sixty-two inches is the record," Perri reported and showed a photo of the winning structure.
The class this day was all seventh-graders; eighth-graders were on a trip to Washington, D.C.
"They learn how to communicate with one another and a little about physics," Perri said, "and they get extra points added on to their grade" if they win any of the problem competitions.
The students work from notebooks with step-by-step directions on how to proceed in the discipline they’re working in. When they have questions, they turn on a flashing light to get Perri’s attention.
"It’s a lot of self-paced stuff," Perri observed.
Perri said that at the end of the year, a medal is given to the seventh-grader who was the outstanding student and a plaque is given to the outstanding eighth-grader.
He is proud that his students have gone on to all four of the Monmouth County career academies: the Marine Academy of Science and Technology at Sandy Hook, the High Technology High School on the Brookdale Community College campus in Middletown, the Academy of Allied Science and Health in Neptune and the Communications High School in Wall.
The last of the 10 stations in his classroom houses the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which lists the earnings, training, working conditions, skills required and advancement opportunities of a wide range of jobs.
Perri, who also coaches wrestling and soccer, came to the Memorial School in 1973 as an industrial arts teacher, who taught students woodworking and metal casting. The switch from those disciplines to the applied technology course he teaches now occurred in 1994.
Perri said the change, after 21 years, was the idea of the administration at that time.
"They kind of persuaded me this was the way to go," he said. "They sent me to Georgia for a week where the company who makes the equipment [used in the class] is located.
"It was a crash course," he said with a laugh. "It was good."
Perri said he hopes to add another station next year to the applied technology class that will use hand tools such as the hammer, screwdriver and torque wrench, and a small engine. He said it would be helpful for students to know how to do home repairs such as on a lawnmower.
Former students of his woodworking and steel-casting classes tell him they still have the items they made, he said.
"I had one boy come back the other day, and he said he still has the eagle he made in casting," he related.
His present classroom is one of two that the old industrial arts lab was broken up into.
"We had a wood lathe over there," he said, pointing to a spot by the windows.
The classroom also has a link to the other side of Perri’s teaching career. On the inside of the door to a storage locker for supplies in the front of the room, he has posted pictures of wrestlers Kurt Angle and Bruce Baumgartner, both Olympic gold-medal winners, who made appearances at the Husky Wrestling Camp in Matawan where Perri taught for 13 years. He said high school wrestlers from all over the state came to the camp, which has since dissolved.
Perri noted that Angle wrestles professionally now and said his students get a kick out of his knowing somebody in the WWF.
Perri comes by his passion for teaching naturally. It runs in the family.
His brother, John, is vice principal of the Long Branch Middle School and will be principal next year. His sister, Angela, is the elementary applied-technology specialist in the Neptune school district. And his wife, Pat, teaches kindergarten at the Strathmore School in Aberdeen.
As this school year winds down, Perri looks forward to the journals his students will file as they near the end of the course.
"They’re going to give us a picture in writing of what they did," he explained of the year-ending exercise, "and then I ask them questions about it."