Christa McAuliffe was a teacher to the end.
As the space shuttle Challenger exploded in flight, sending McAuliffe and six other crew members to fiery deaths, millions of schoolchildren across the nation learned some painful lessons--space flight is risky, technology is not perfect and pioneers sometimes are killed.
But science and space educators, who have worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for more than two years to bring information from the shuttle missions and other space flights into the classroom, said Tuesday they did not believe that the tragedy would damage efforts to improve teaching about space.
``We wanted to have a classroom from space, a nationwide classroom,``
said Walter Westrum, executive director of Classroom Earth in downstate Spring Valley, which was planning to coordinate the broadcast of two lessons by McAuliffe.
``Instead, we gave 2.5 million children a chance to see someone snuffed out in a second,`` said Westrum. ``We never expected that, but it doesn`t mean that we should stop space flight or space education.``
The catastrophic flight was broadcast live to the classrooms of 2.5 million students whose schools set their satellite receivers to the NASA channel.
The teacher-in-space program was an attempt to put a professional communicator aloft, someone who would be able to describe to a lay audience how the spacecraft worked, what it felt like to be weightless, what space was like up close.
President Reagan, in August, 1984, initiated the search for a teacher to send into space when he said, ``It`s long been a goal of our space shuttle
--the program--to someday carry citizen passengers into space.``
It would, he said, remind America ``of the crucial role teachers and education play in the life of our nation.``
McAuliffe was to continue her work for more than a year after the flight, speaking to school and community groups about the space program. An element of the program is the intense training in space education for McAuliffe and the other 113 semifinalists for the seat she got in the Challenger.
The New Hampshire social studies teacher would have broadcast two lessons from space, one on the workings of the shuttle and one on the history of space flight. As part of the program, 200,000 lesson plans were mailed to teachers around the country.
Instead, McAuliffe became part of history, and taught a different lesson
--one which educators say they hope will not be lost.
``No one wants a failure in which seven lives are lost,`` said Helenmarie Hofman, assistant director of the National Science Teachers Association, who knew McAuliffe and worked with her in developing the lesson plans. ``But maybe this will help us redefine what we mean in science by failure.
``When failure is a part of history, it can become the underpinnings of success. We often get our heroes and heroines in sad ways. Christa is teaching even in death.``
Teachers say they had followed this shuttle flight more than most previous ones because a teacher was to be the first private citizen in space. John Figlewicz, science teacher at Thomas Junior High School in Arlington Heights, had applied to be the first teacher in space. His students had shared his hope that he would be selected and his disappointment when he was eliminated.
Tuesday, Figlewicz and his students clustered around a drawing of the shuttle as the first reports of the disaster came over the radio.
``My knees were shaking as I was pointing out to the students the parts of the shuttle the announcers were talking about,`` said Figlewicz.
McAuliffe, 37, a high school teacher and the mother of two, had been selected from 11,146 teacher applicants to be the first to fly in the NASA`s citizen-in-space program.
In Illinois, teachers who were state finalists in the competition expressed disbelief at the tragedy, but many said they would apply again if they could.
Raymond Dagenais, math teacher at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora and one of the 10 Illinois finalists, said he had to tell his students three times what had happened before it sunk in.
Lynne Haeffele, biology teacher at Bloomington High School and one of two Illinois teachers who were among the 114 national semifinalists, said her thoughts when she first heard the news was ``of the people involved. I have a numbness and shock. Christa was our representative, so in a way we were there.``
Teachers reported that their students, who weren`t born when the last astronauts were killed in a fire on an Apollo mission launch pad 19 years ago, found it hard to comprehend the reality of the tragedy.