Published: Friday, May 16, 2008
Teacher, adventurer sails off into the sunset
By Sarah KoenigEnterprise reporter
Teacher Fran Hartman had just wrapped up a lesson on global warming for her fifth-graders at Cedar Wood Elementary, and as students filed out, one paused to run an idea by her."Could they make a giant vacuum to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?" a boy asked.Hartman paused for a second."Do you think 100 years ago someone sat in a classroom and said: 'Do you think someday people will be able to fly?'" she replied.The "anything is possible" answer seems to sum up Hartman's approach to life.
For a start, she lives on a boat. A decade ago, she took two years off teaching to sail around the world. Until recently, she drove a Harley motorcycle. Her lessons, which stem from slugs and bubble gum to a giant space shuttle replica that made headlines, are similarly "out of the box."And when she retires in June, she plans to sail to Alaska to "winter" there.Hartman now lives on a sailboat at Shilshole Bay in Seattle. But in 1997, the boat was also her home for two years. That's when she sailed around the world with her husband, an experienced sailor.
Hartman hasn't read "The Perfect Storm," the sailing disaster account by Sebastian Junger."I don't read any of those things about sailing," she said. Nevertheless, the first night on the water, she was terrified. She and her husband took turns driving the boat for four hours at a time."When morning came it was like, 'I'm still alive!'" she said. "Then I realized it was no big deal."She was also seasick on every leg of the trip.
But the voyage brought them to amazing places, including French Polynesia, Fiji, the Kokos Keeling atoll, where the water is an intense turquoise, and one island that was like walking into National Geographic, Hartman said."They're still naked!" she exclaimed, referring to the children there. "They fished, grew their own food."As if the trip weren't adventure enough, Hartman has been riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle for five years. On a sunny day, she'll commute to Mill Creek on it, and has motored to biker gatherings as far away as Sturgis, S.D.
But while riding in September of 2006, she hit a setback.Hartman was hit by a three-quarter ton truck and was bed ridden for four months in intense pain."I could not function," she said. "My husband was flipping me like a pancake."She's still recovering from the accident and has low-level pain. In February, she had surgery for a broken bone in her hand from the accident that doctors hadn't found.
She learned something from it, she said."In an instant life can be over, and you never, ever know when that's going to be," Hartman said. "I'd tell anyone with good health to do what you want to do now – don't wait for more money, don't wait for retirement. If it's important to you, do it."
She also recommends telling family and friends you love them every day.
Hartman's expansive approach to life is reflected in her 30 years of teaching.
Once a year from 1993 to 1997, Hartman and parent volunteers converted her classroom into a replica of the mid-deck of a space shuttle. The replica took up the whole room.For 24 hours, students wearing astronaut T-shirts did experiments about space and communicated with "mission control," located in the library. They programmed lessons about space for computers, which were less commonly used then. Parents wired the place so students could communicate with each other with white phones. Student "reporters" covered the event minute by minute, asking questions and writing articles. "It was huge," Hartman said. "Parents were here, senators, congressmen."Students had a live video conference with NASA (the real NASA), and the news channel CNN came out to cover it.As a result of the press coverage, Hartman got to have dinner with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
But that's only one of Hartman's teaching stories. Students also did a unit on Mars that included giving a "Mars Rover License" to Brian Cooper, the scientist who was controlling the Mars Rover robot at the time, in 1997. Cooper came to the school and did a test demonstration. The license the students made for him was signed by the governor and other politicians. It hung in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., for a year. Then Hartman got Al Gore to sign it.
On a closer-to-the-ground note, Hartman has also done lessons where students try to lure slugs to the school with slug habitat, and discover the properties of chewing gum by chewing it, weighing it and doing other experiments. Hartman's most recent science lesson is on global warming. For that project, a nursery donated a tree for every student to take home and plant.
Hartman said her philosophy of teaching can be summed up in a quote from John Gardner, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1965-1968."Much education today is monumentally ineffective," it reads. "All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."
Hartman plans to keep teaching even after retirement.Her and her husband will set sail this summer, headed north, and spend the winter in Alaska, where Hartman hopes to teach at a school. The length of the trip is "indefinite," she said. From Alaska, Hartman and her husband will head south."Maybe Chile, maybe Antarctica," she said.
© 2008 The Enterprise Newspapers, Lynnwood, WA
