Ocean View teachers get their feet wet on Bay tour

NORFOLK

Martha Guisinger peered at the scarab like mole crab she'd just netted from the Chesapeake Bay surf on a recent afternoon with the same wonder as the children she teaches.

The Ocean View Elementary teacher wanted the creature to move. Suddenly it did, with wildly skittering legs that will help it to explore the aquarium it will inhabit as part of the school's special maritime theme.

Just two blocks from the Bay, Ocean View has incorporated maritime study into in all grades and subjects for 15 years.

In good weather, teachers and their students often prowl the maritime forest on a giant sand dune behind the school on Mason Creek Road, or they explore the Bay's ecosystem.

Students board the Baywatcher research vessel to collect marine specimens, and grow oysters on floats at Nauticus. The oysters - 300,000 to date - ultimately are planted on local reefs.

The maritime dimension is so intrinsic at Ocean View that before the start of each school year, new teachers tour the forest and beach with Principal Lauren Campsen and Charles Hughes, a marine expert and veteran teacher.

For Guisinger, who came to Norfolk from her native West Texas, the excursion was eye-opening.

"The beach is about seven hours from where I lived," said Guisinger, who applied for her new job after the Navy transferred her husband to South Hampton Roads.

Though the bay was gray and white-capped, Guisinger grabbed a dip net on an aluminum pole and waded in shorts into the surf. The first-time teacher gamely dragged the mesh through the water and returned with her trophies: a lot of grit and the inch-long crab, which went into a collection bucket.

Fa rther down the beach, more intrepid teachers went in waist-deep with a long, flat seine net, held at both ends, that filtered critters from the shallows.

Their catches went into a bucket that eventually held a baby oyster cloaked in barnacles and tube worms, several minnow like silver sides and a baby drum, all destined for some of the 17 aquariums in the school's maritime lab.

Another new teacher, Dana Hicks, is a former educator at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center who often worked with children. She used to see the Ocean View grade school as she drove by on Interstate 64.

"I'd think, 'Wouldn't that be a great place to teach, because the beach is right there, and it would be my dream to actually go outside and do stuff,' " she said. Now, like Guisinger, she's poised to teach kindergarten at the school.

At the aquarium, Hicks was surprised to learn that many of the Norfolk children she instructed had never been to the beach, including some who lived in Ocean View.

As a teacher, she hopes exposing her students to the local maritime environment will open their minds and imagination.

"You'll teach them conservation and pride in the community in which they live," she said.

Jen Boyer, a 15-year Ocean View teacher, said the adventurous, hands-on learning even fits into the state's high-stakes Standards of Learning requirements. Math and science, for example, naturally come into play as students count baby oysters on the floats or wield thermometers to measure marine temperatures.

And it's all a bit less boring for children than lecture-style teaching.

"You can stand in front of a room and talk all day and they're not going to understand it," Boyer said, "but the day I bring them down here for a lesson on erosion or tides or clouds, and they observe it or touch it, they're going to remember that."

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com