Abstract

G. Vass, Astronomical Institute, Cutitul de Argint 5, 75212, Bucuresti 28, Romania

Till now, the educational system in Romania was not able to have a minimal number of teachers with a minimal astronomical qualification, in order to ensure a continuity of interest for this science and to have a cultural environment which includes astronomical communities for debates concerning the statute of the astronomy. The lack of astronomy departments in our universities makes impossible any changing from the interior of the system; unfortunately, we have many proves in this sens. That's why such an institution like the Children's Astronomical Observatory; inspite of its good endowment and activity (a Coude refractor telescope of 15 cm diameter, a 10 cm diameter refractor, an orizontal coelostat for solar observations etc.), had only a small cultural influence; it is almost unknown for the schoolar population in Bucharest. Obviously, without a satisfactory endowment, we cannot have an astronomical cultural community; without such a community, we cannot exploit satisfactory an eventual endowment.Apparently, there is a simple solution: we must obtain the endowment, put it in evidence and create the astronomical schoolar environment by qualifying more and more teachers. OK, but how can we MOTIVATE these teachers? They are not stimulated by our universities, which has no astronomy departments; they are not stimulated by the ministery, who's burocracy has no place for astronomy. The effort of introducing himself in a new scientific discipline rests a personal problem of each teacher. But Romania of the last two decades was not a place for assuming such idealistic tasks.THE ECLIPSE offered an opportunity to change something, because:
- it offered the opprtunity to obtain funds for some endowment;
- it offered a strong SOCIAL MOTIVATION for the teacher's efforts;
- a minimal qualification of many teachers will be a serious startpoint for a future schoolar astronomical environment.Based on this idea, some professional astronomers created the Romanian Committee for Education through Astronomy (CREA, president: G.Vass, eMail: [email protected]) and worked long time enough to formulate a good, realistic, educational project, based on the efficient use of the small numbers of romanian astronomers, in conjunction with the existing infrastructure of the educational system. Two years before the eclipse, the project was proposed to the Ministry of National Education, in the name of Bucharest University and Astronomical Institute. The Ministry did not adopted the project, inspite of his formal accord.But the emotional resonance of the event and the social motivation created by it worked stronger than we expected: someone from inside the educational system, acting independently, adopted the project, asked CREA's help for assistence and obtained an important finnancial support (120 000 USD) from the "Soros Foundation for an Open Society". The manager of the project (the person who adopted it and obtained the finnancial support) is the director of the Eforie South HighSchool, Florin Serbu - eMail: [email protected] to the eclipse, the project - named THE ASTRAL HOUR OF ROMANIA (AHR) - achieved practicaly all the proposed tasks:
- the creation of six strong centers for astronomy education on the band of totality;
- the continuous qualification of teachers in a cascade system, firstly for the preparation of the schoolar population for the total eclipse;
- the integration of various disciplines (physics, mathematics, geography, computer science and schoolmasters) teachers in these activities;
- the distribution, in the AHR centers, of the various written, modular materials made by CREA;
- the set up of an informational infrastructure inside the AHR network (using the Internet);
- last, but not least, the endowment of each AHR center with five different (LX50, SC203, ETX, 3"1/2 refractor and a 8" Dobsonian) MEADE telescopes (totally 30) and accesories, including photo, CCD cameras and computers.Inspite of all finnancial, burocratic, commercial (the nearer dealer of MEADE is in Germany) and organizing problems, now all the 30 instruments are installed by just qualified teachers and thousands of studens saw the sky through astronomical instruments. More than that, all AHR centers observed the eclipse and obtained a lot of photos, many of them absolutely remarcable; all these will be included in a final volume which will appear before the end of this year.The outsiders - professional astronomers of CREA - made an important effort to ensure many written materials for the starting activities of the AHR centers; we was inspired by the excelents FICHES PEDAGOGIQUES DE CLEA, editet by les Cahier Clairaut from France. We hope that these efforts will be continued by the teachers, in order to have a normal presence of the astronomy in the school.