Instructor: Do as I say – and as I do

Whether it’s building her own home, teaching about science or diving out of a plane, Kathy Blomker has a passion for the power of doing.

Blomker is an academic staff member in the School of Education who believes life is too precious to passively waste as an onlooker. And education for life, she says, must challenge students to rise from their seats and plunge in.

As a lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Blomker teaches the elementary and middle school science methods course, which seniors take before student teaching.

Not all of her students are brimming over with confidence.

“Some of the my students have a modest science background and are afraid their students will ask them questions they can’t answer,” she says. “But science isn’t just reading chapters and answering the questions at the end. Science is doing science and thinking like a scientist. It’s an exciting way of looking at the world, driven by curiosity.”

That’s where Blomker’s famous yellow box fits in. On the first day of class, she shows her students a sealed cardboard box that has ropes hanging out of both sides. Both ropes can be pulled farther out of the box, but not equally, which prompts Blomker to ask: “What might be inside the box that would explain your observations?”

The students make observations and inferences, diagrams the inside, get boxes and rope to build a physical model and report to the class. Reports done, almost everyone wants Blomker to tear open the box and show them who was “right.”

“I never open the box, which is very frustrating to students,” she says. “I tell them science isn’t some cosmic box you can look into and find the right answers. Science is making models of what you think the world looks like, but you won’t always get the answers. Those layers of mystery are very freeing for teachers who think they must always have answers for students.”

Blomker’s insistence that students should do, not regurgitate, can be seen in her consulting work for the Shorewood school district. She’s created assessment models that ask students to be scientists and to wrestle with questions that scientists are actually posing. Second-graders, for example, are asked what they think would happen if the sun went out or why the dinosaurs disappeared, based on what they’ve learned.

Blomker first taught in Chicago suburbs after graduating from the University of Illinois. She moved to Madison in 1976 when her husband, Dick, received a pastoral call from Lake Edge Lutheran Church, where he still serves.

That move gave Blomker what she calls a “whole other college education.” She was the general contractor for building their new home in Cottage Grove by Koshkonong Creek. With the help of her father, an electrical engineer, and her brothers, electrical contractors, she and her husband built the house, but not without some near-misses.

The planets must have been askew when their architect drew up the house plan, because when Blomker’s father looked at it, he said, “Good night, the roof will fall in!” And it would have. So they came up with their own design, and a quarter-century and three sons later, they still have a sound roof over their heads.

That home has been more than mere shelter. It’s been a schoolhouse, because Blomker home-schooled two of her sons. One time was to save Will a bus ride of an hour and a half in the early grades and another to save Peder from a classroom where Blomker says shame-based discipline ran amuck.

“Some people might ask how I can advocate home schooling when I teach students how to become public school teachers,” she says. “I advocate whatever schooling is best for each child.”

The Blomker School alumni have done quite well. Will, now a senior theater major at UW–Madison, was the youngest certified election observer in El Salvador at age 15. He and his mother went there in 1994 to help with that nation’s first democratic elections following years of civil war.

Will and another brother, Jonathan, went to Cuba two years ago. They were part of a delegation of high school students who had collected computer equipment for a Cuban school. Jonathan is now a sophomore at La Follette.

Peder went to the Amazon at age 12 with his mother, and upon his return, he raised $6,000 to preserve what he had seen. He now is working a year before starting college.

“I think my sons are comfortable traveling because they’ve developed such deep roots in our home,” says Blomker. “They’ve told us we simply can’t sell our house, ever.”

When her sons were little, noisy and needy, Blomker tried something that got her above it all for an hour or so: falling out of a plane. She did a half-dozen sky-diving jumps, but then decided she didn’t like the idea of total equipment failure making her sons motherless.

One antithesis of sky-diving is mucking about in a boot-sucking marsh, and that’s what Blomker plans to do this summer. She’s leading a teacher seminar on wetlands that will include a week on the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Reservation.

Blomker says: “Environmental education is my dessert. It’s one of my passions because humans often define themselves as apart from, not a part of, nature.”

And how will the teachers in her field course best learn? Not by reading about wetlands, but by bending down in them to watch things crawl, slither, swim and buzz. It’s also called learning by what Blomker loves best — doing.