At The Start

The first thing that occurred to me was that the beginning of a school year is always a new adventure. Whether the school has been around for a hundred years or if it just opened yesterday, it is still new to the child. There is certainly no guarantee that every teacher and every curriculum is going to be a good match for every student. One of the nicest features of Springhurst is that you choose to be there. Furthermore, because we view curriculum as a process, you can be assured that it is first of all intended to meet the varying and changing needs of each child.

Is the student at our new school a guinea pig in an experiment? No, because, unlike the design of a new car or the formula of a new medicine, Springhurst and its inner workings are flexible and can respond to child and their family. This is also unlike many established schools where the curriculum and structure are static and it is up to the child to be conform.

Because Springhurst is a school for gifted and highly capable children, the school community benefits from having a director who also grew up as a gifted person and who has studied gifted education. There are few educators who meet these two criteria.

Is there any risk involved in sending your child to a new school? Certainly there is some. But we have tried to minimize or eliminate as many of these risks as we can control. First, we made the decision to operate out of our home for the first year. As a result, we do not have to hold out for a minimum number of students. Springhurst will open regardless of enrollment size. Second, we are keeping our student-to-teacher ratio as low as possible in order to provide the most responsive leadership. Third, we are committed to listening to parents and taking their concerns seriously. Education is a group effort.

It is certainly possible that I have overlooked some concerns that parents may have. It is my belief that keeping a dialogue open with parents will allow these concerns to come out and be addressed along with new ideas. This is the beginning of something wonderful, remarkable, and important to all of us.

World Gifted Conference

Also, it would be helpful to have the Teacher Recommendation form (part of the application packet) filled out by your child’s current teacher, if they have one.

The Mars Pathfinder Mission

Mars Pathfinder, now eight days away from landing on the surface of Mars, performed the last of its scheduled trajectory correction maneuvers at 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, June 25.

The correction maneuver was performed in two phases occurring 45 minutes apart. The first burn, lasting just 1.6 seconds, involved firing four thruster engines on one side of the vehicle. The second burn lasted 2.2 seconds and involved firing two thrusters closest to the heat shield. The combined effect of both burns changed Pathfinder’s velocity by 0.018 meters per second (0.04 miles per hour), which places the spacecraft on target for a July 4 landing in an ancient flood basin called Ares Vallis. Pathfinder is scheduled to land at 10:07 a.m. PDT (in Earth-received time). The one-way light time from Mars to Earth is 10 minutes, 35 seconds, so in actuality, Pathfinder lands at 9:57 a.m. PDT.

A final health check of the spacecraft and rover was performed on June 20. All spacecraft systems, including science instruments and the critical radar altimeter, remain in excellent health from the last check about six months ago. The rover received a "wake up" call, woke up on command from the lander, then accepted a software upgrade. Flight controllers next loaded the 370 command sequences that will be required by Pathfinder to carry out its surface operations mission. The spacecraft is now ready to begin its entry, descent and landing phase. It will be commanded into that mode at 1:42 p.m. PDT on June 30 by an onboard sequence.

Mars Pathfinder is currently about 180 million kilometers (111 million miles) from Earth and about 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Mars. After 202 days in flight, the spacecraft is traveling at about 18,000 kilometers per hour (12,000 miles per hour) with respect to Mars.