Brown plans to teach her students - along with dozens of others through the Urban Science Corps, a NASA-affiliated, nationwide after-school program she is helping to develop - with lessons live from Antarctica, via video conferencing and blogging.
At Promise Academy, the Antarctica studies have already begun. On a recent outing to the American Museum of Natural History, Brown's students got to touch penguin feathers. They were enthralled by Pekar's slides of his last trip to Antarctica.
"I want to get them to visualize it, to envision themselves there," Brown said in a recent interview. "You hear about Antarctica in the fourth grade when they're doing all the continents of the world, but it's not a place you consider tangible. You can picture Virginia: Your grandmother lives in Virginia. But who lives in Antarctica?"
Brown grew up in Irvington, New Jersey, just outside Newark, one of five children raised by a single mother who is a social worker. Sophomore biology at Irvington High School - and an inspiring teacher named Miss Jordan - hooked her on science. She went to Hofstra University intending to become a doctor.
But during a stint as a substitute teacher in a Newark middle school - she was working her way through college - she felt called to teaching, she said.
"I prayed over it, and that's where I was led," she said. "When you pay attention to where you're supposed to be, when you operate inside your gift, it just becomes easy. I found my gift; my gift found me."
"I'm a young African-American teacher who came from a public school education, from an urban environment," she went on. "My mom made less than US$30,000 a year, and she raised me and four brothers. Now I'm in a position to empower all these people to have the same path that I was on."
She tells her students they should not be afraid to go anywhere - to Japan (where she went on a fellowship during college), or Africa, or India, or Antarctica. "They ask me, 'If they send you to the moon, will you go?'" she said. "I say: 'Absolutely. You have to go everywhere. Life is bigger than Harlem.'"
RSS