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House of 35,000,000 pictures
Naturalist believes each artifact worth 1,000 pictures: The age of the fossils and rocks in the Smithsonian's Naturalist Center is important; the history that built the earth's strata in Loudoun is important; the starting point for the arrowheads and pot shards is important.
However, the ages, the history and the starting point for the visitors to the Smithsonian's Naturalist Center in Leesburg, is not important at all.
Program Director Richard Efthim makes it clear that the center, on Miller Drive near Leesburg Executive Airport, is designed for students of all ages and all backgrounds.
"We offer a lot of programs for schools groups, grades five right up through university," Efthim said.
DDE_LINK1The programs, he said, are not just for numerous science fields but also for art, social studies and language arts. The center, he said, has activities appropriate for special-needs students as well as those in the gifted and talented programs. DDE_LINK1
"We've done some things focusing on the natural history of Virginia, from the perspective of the Jamestown 400th anniversary," Efthim said. "We have them imagining themselves as being the first explorers and settlers in Virginia and getting to know their environment because they are all new to America."
To do this, the center staff introduces the children to the native animals and plants, the rocks and minerals that would be found in the mid-Atlantic area.
"For a lot of the kids, it's the first time they've really paid attention to these things," he said. "... While we are helping the school meet state standards, really the goal is to let them see what the learning potential is."
Efthim shared an anecdote that illustrates what he and the staff are trying to do.
He said he asked one of the paleontologists at the center if he thought he was a good teacher.
The scientist answered in the affirmative. Efthim pointed out that there were two reasons this was true.
"First, the students were interested in the fossils, yes, but they were also interested in him as a person -- that he was really excited about learning," he said. "Scientists are passionate learners. This gives [the students] all kinds of resources to be passionate learners, and they have become passionate learners, so it works. "
The goal, he emphasizes, is to teach them so they will return to the center on their own.
They come back, Efthim said, to draw, to photograph, to prepare for a science fair. They come back with those artifacts they found in their backyards or the woods or on the beach. One pair, a grandfather and his son, came back with fossils from a stream in Illinois and discovered that they had found the fossils of sea creatures, proof that Illinois was once underwater.
"We turn junk into family treasures and sometimes family treasures into not-so-family treasures," he said. "They will bring us what they think is a unique artifact that turns out to be a naturally weathered stone."
Efthim said the center serves more than 300 groups a year, averaging more than 10,000 students, teachers and chaperons. There are about 5,000 walk-in visitors.
"Half of those walk-ins are repeat visitors," Efthim said.
Some are tourists, like the family from Connecticut visiting a son attending Patrick Henry College.
"They wanted something interesting to do without having to go all the way into Washington, D.C.," he said. "They came and were very excited to find this."
Perhaps the key to a good museum is energy: To paraphrase DDE_LINKEfthim DDE_LINK, the energy of passionate teaching and the energy of passionate learning.
"Too many people come to a museum and see static displays. What we try to do is get them to look at this as more of a library of natural history -- to think of the objects as books that they can learn how to read. ... If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a real object has to be worth at least a thousand pictures. The 35,000 objects we have ?that's a lot of pictures."
Contact the writer at ecarlton@timespapers.com
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