If she hadn’t wandered into that bookstore during her senior year at Stanford and stumbled across that book, Barbara Morgan, CRE ’74, would never have come to NDNU (then the College of Notre Dame), might never have become a teacher, and might never have gone into outer space.
The 56-year-old astronaut, who became the first teacher in space with her historic flight aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in August 2007, almost didn’t become a teacher even though it was a profession she felt drawn to in her early years.
“I really fought against the idea all through high school and college,” Morgan recalls. The reason, she said in a recent interview with NDNU Magazine, was “I grew up at a time when the roles for women were pretty much limited to teacher or nurse. So, even though I was always drawn to teaching, I really fought against it.”
So there she was in her last semester at Stanford browsing the shelves in the university bookstore. She still wasn’t sure exactly what she would do with her degree except that she felt it would have to be something to do with public service. “At the time I was studying human biology and the structure of the brain. One of my classes had been in memory and learning theory, and I was fascinated by it. So I was wandering through the bookstore, and I found my way over to the education section.”
That was when her life changed: she picked up a book on learning theory by Maria Montessori. “I read it cover to cover and, because of that and the classes I’d recently taken, I began to reexamine the idea of teaching.
I wanted to learn more, and what better place than in a teacher education program. And there was College of Notre Dame, right up the road.”
“It was a wonderful experience—the start of my whole career,” she says of her year at CND, adding however that “it was a tough schedule because we would student-teach all day and then come back to campus for classes at night. She recalls how helpful all the teachers were but especially remembers Margaret Blackford, her master teacher at North Shoreview School in San Mateo. “I learned so much from her from the moment I walked into her classroom.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Morgan spent her first year teaching on the Flathead Indian reservation in Arlee, Montana. From 1975 to 1998 she taught second, third, and fourth grades at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School with time out for a year of teaching in Ecuador in 1978-79 and training as Christa McAuliffe’s backup for the ill-fated Challenger flight in 1986. In 1998 Morgan was selected by NASA as a mission specialist and became a full-time astronaut. It would be five more years before she would be named to the crew of a space shuttle and another four before she would finally fly.
Was the experience worth the wait? Most definitely. “It was wonderful,” Barbara laughs. “Everyone should do it.”
Morgan’s job was to operate the robotic arm that was used to load the 5,000 pounds of instrumentation and other gear and supplies Endeavor brought from earth, onto the space station. “The work was challenging and fun,” she says. “In many ways it’s like teaching. It’s very complex work, dealing with complex issues and working with people who have very complex minds. It’s a natural place for a teacher.”
Her most vivid memories of space, besides the floating which she says is “fun and challenging,” are the views. “I quickly run out of adjectives when I try to describe what it’s like,” she says. “I’ve never seen a black as black as space. It’s black like obsidian but without the shine; it looks as if it has the consistency of cream.”
The views of Earth were equally spectacular. Morgan remembers one pass over the Mediterranean. “There were a number of what looked like isolated thunderstorms. But then as you watched you’d suddenly see a flash in one of the cells that would set off another flash in another cell and another and another. They weren’t isolated at all.”
Morgan didn’t get to teach an actual lesson from space, although she and several of her crewmates did field questions from children in the U.S. But there was an educational piece to the mission. “We took up 10 million basil seeds and we will be distributing them to classrooms all over the country.” The seeds will be made available to classes from kindergarten through high school, and the challenge is to help NASA find ways to grow food in an artificial environment such as it might have to create on the moon or Mars.
Morgan would like to return to teaching some day but also wants to continue doing her current work for NASA. “I haven’t figured out how to do that yet,” she says.
Asked what she would teach now that she’s been into space, if she were standing before a class, Morgan replies: “Well, first of all I wouldn’t be standing. I’d be sitting on the floor with the kids. I’ve always tried to instill two main ideas into my classes. First, we’re a family, a family of learners, and we’re going to work hard and work together to learn. Second, always keep the doors open. Opportunity is going to come and knock when you least expect it.”
Which sums up Barbara Morgan’s life pretty well.
Originally published in NDNU Magazine, 2008, pages 6–7.
Photos courtesy of NASA.
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