Notes
from the Curator's Office:
The Time
Tunnel to Fourth Grade
James
Darren (left) and Robert Colbert (right) stand in the control
room of the Time Tunnel in this publicity still from
the 60's TV series.
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(7/07) I have to admit I am reaching that age where
I spend too much time thinking about the things of my long-gone
youth. One of the items I wind up thinking a lot about is TV from
the 60's. I was a huge Star Trek fan, and still am, but
that wasn't the only show on during the era. I really spend more
time thinking about the science fiction shows produced by Irwin
Allen during that period. For those of you not familiar with these
gems, they included Lost in Space (remade in 1998 as a
movie with William Hurt), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,
and Land of the Giants. Irwin Allen productions tended
to lean toward being camp instead of serious, which I think is
part of the reason they never had the staying power of Star
Trek. Still, they are remembered fondly by many people, including
me. Readers will recall I did an article not too long ago about
the B9 Builder Club, an organization
dedicated to building full-sized replicas of the robot from Lost
in Space.
The fourth sci-fi show that Allen produced in the
60's was actually my personal favorite. (While doing some research
I found out it was apparently Allen's favorite also) The program
was called The Time Tunnel and starred James Darren and
Robert Colbert as two scientists working on a super-secret U.S.
government operation (named Project Tic-Toc) to build a
time machine. The pilot episode sets the scene for the rest of
the series: When a bigwig from Washington, D.C. arrives to shut
down the billion-dollar project because of lack of progress, Darren's
character decides to prove the contraption works by sending himself
on an unauthorized trip back in time. Colbert's character is forced
to go back also to rescue him. They spend the rest of the series
jumping from time zone to time zone trying to survive until the
crew back at the time tunnel complex can bring them safely home.
The
show had everything a 10-year-old could want, including
a super-secret underground complex crowded with flashing
computers.
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The series had everything a 10-year-old kid could
want in a TV show: the mind-boggling idea of time travel, glimpses
of past events (such as the siege of Troy and the Battle of Little
Bighorn), and a humongous super-secret underground base in the
middle of the Arizona desert. Most of all, it had the time tunnel
itself: A psychedelic set of concentric rings that could only
have been dreamed up by someone in the 60's. The tunnel was the
focus of the action on the show and seemed to be the physical
embodiment of a passageway to impossible adventures.
About two years ago, the Time Tunnel series,
which lasted only a single season, came out on DVD and I purchased
a set and started watching it again. My only disappointment was
that I really didn't have anybody to watch it with. My wife -
who does not share my enthusiasm for 60's science fiction - would
sit through an episode with me only under duress. My sons, now
well into their teenage years, were too sophisticated to want
to watch the cheesy special effects from that era. So I was forced
to savor these classic shows on my own.
A Math
Problem
Or at least that was the case until last October,
when I was in the middle of my teaching internship.
As you can guess, I was a little bit older than
most student teachers. I had decided a few years ago to change
my career to something that might be more rewarding personally,
though less rewarding financially. As I was working full-time
during the transition it took several years, but by the autumn
of 2006 I had entered my internship in a fourth grade class at
a local elementary school. It was my job to teach the math and
my co-op teacher challenged me to do something special with an
upcoming unit on telling time. It consisted of five lessons which
included such activities as teaching the kids to tell elapsed
time on a calendar or an analog clock. For the most part the lessons
didn't have to be in any particular order, so my co-op suggested
it might be a good unit to use centers. Using centers, for those
of you not familiar with this educational arrangement, entails
building multiple areas in the classroom where students can work
independently from the teacher, either individually or in groups
to learn a new skill.
This made perfect sense to me. I could set up a
center where the kids could work on learning how to calculate
elapsed time on the calendar, another where they could do the
same thing on a clock, etc. Five centers for five lessons. I could
then divide the class into five groups and each group would go
to a different center each day and work together till that had
manged the skill. After five days they would have visited them
all. It was all very educationally sound. However, to my mind
it still seemed to be missing something: excitement. It was just
too dull.
I always try to enliven my units by doing something
to catch the kid's interest. A giant map taped to the classroom
floor for the unit on state geography. A simulated witch trial
when studying 17th century Salem. What could I tie into my unit
on time?
One
of the centers created for the unit.
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Joining
Project Tic-Toc
Then I remembered my Time Tunnel DVD.
Once I made the connection, it didn't take long
for me to figure out how to put it together. As I mentioned earlier,
the pilot episode has Darren's character testing the machine and
getting lost in time. My plan was to tell the kids our class had
temporarily been made a part of Project Tic-Toc. I would
then show them the episode up to the point where Darren's character
disappears into the tunnel and then explain to them that we had
been assigned the job of locating where in time he had gone, so
that the time tunnel staff could then send him help. To find out
where he had gone in time they would be working at the centers
like scientists. At each center they would learn a skill (such
as reading how many minutes after an hour the hand showed on an
analog clock). They then would use that skill to decode a clue
that gave one of five pieces of information necessary to figure
out where the scientist was lost in time. By the end of five days
they would have all the clues. They could then go to the computers
at the back of the room, enter the date in Google and see what
event had happened that day. When all the groups had done this
we would then watch the remainder of the episode.
My co-op appoved the idea and over the next couple
weeks I put together my centers. In addition to materials to help
them learn the new skill, each center had the clue to decode and
some sort of game I invented based on the skill that would encourage
them to practice it. To get them further involved in the storyline
I created picture ID badges for each student on my home printer
similar to those you might expect people to be wearing on a super-secret
government project. The ID's bore imaginative titles such as Time
Quanta Specialist and Nonspatial Linear Continuum Expert
with a section saying that they each had a "Secret Clearance
level of 17."
The first day of the unit I borrowed the big screen
projector from the library, hooked up my laptop and set the whole
thing up in the middle of our classroom. It was my plan to give
them a short power point presentation to set up the video, run
the video, and then get them out to the centers before our math
period ran out.
One
of my fourth grade time scientists, Hannah, shows off her
secret government identification.
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But I made the mistake of handing out the ID cards
before doing anything else. These simple items made such an impact
with the kids they were unable to think about anything else or
follow any instructions I gave them for about ten minutes. They
ran around showing the ID's to each other and peppering my co-op
and me with questions like: "What are these for?" "What is Project
Tic-Toc?" "Why am I a Horologist?" My co-op pointed out that perhaps
next time I might want to issue the ID's after the power
point, which would have answered many of their questions. Still,
it was exciting to see the kids electrified by my whacky idea.
I was particularly gratified to see that the ID's inspired one
of our less academically inclined members of the class to run
to the dictionary - a book he usually avoided - to find out the
meaning of Chronometer Technician, the title on his identification.
The kids eventually did calm down and I did get
to do my power point and launch the video. The kids were enraptured
with the episode and quite disappointed when I stopped it just
after the scientist disappeared into the time machine. When I
explained the assignment, however, they were excited with the
idea of using clues to find where the scientist had gone and plunged
eagerly into working at the centers. One little girl told me,
"I like it because I felt like a real scientist."
It was obvious some of the kids loved the idea of
working on Project Tic-Toc, but I wasn't sure that interest
in this idea extended to everybody. That was until one of the
quieter kids in the class - one of the ones who I was afraid might
be bored with the whole thing - showed up with a time machine
she'd built over the weekend out of a cardboard box. The arrangement
was quite clever. The box, which was decorated with crayoned dials
and switches, was large enough for the kids to crawl through.
The inventor then took them back in time by operating a dinosaur
puppet from the outside. This kind of creative thinking was exactly
what I hoped the unit would invoke in my students.
A Titanic
Ending
The place the scientist lands is the Titanic
on its maiden voyage in 1912. This was a lucky break as far as
my unit went. The story of the Titanic had been featured
in the language arts curriculum the year before and the students
were very familiar with it. So much so that my original idea of
having them enter the date in Google wasn't really necessary.
Many of the kids realized where he must have gone just after seeing
the date.
After everybody finished their last center and understood
the significance of the date, we watched the rest of the episode
in which the scientists help save lives on the doomed ship. At
the very end before the ship sinks, the staff at Project Tic-Toc
manages to transfer the scientists to another time zone and
another adventure. This, of course, was a bit of a problem for
my unit. After watching one episode, the kids naturally wanted
to know what happened next. Since I could hardly show them the
whole series they had to be satisfied that while the scientists
were not back home, we had done our part by getting them safely
off the Titanic. Well, if nothing, else this proves that
I finally found some people that wanted to watch this show
with me…
Was the unit really worth all that work I put into
it? In the end I guess you could question if this elaborate arrangement
was really necessary to teach the kids about using clocks and
calendars. Certainly doing it straight from the book would have
been easier and more efficient. Someone might argue the time tunnel
was a useless distraction, a frivolous bit of entertainment, a
silly science fiction show from the 60's about an impossible invention
that could never work.
I would argue, however, that the time tunnel actually
did work. It was a true time machine: It bridged the decades and
allowed a child of the 1960's to reach out and connect with some
kids from the 21st century.
Copyright Lee Krystek
2007. All Rights Reserved.