When Long Beach Middle School teacher Natasha Nurse wanted to inspire her students’ thinking for a NASA program, she drew upon resources from ancient Greece and brought them to the digital age.
Nurse said she showed her sixth grade students a GIF of a camera encapsulated in a water bubble while floating in space and asked them to formulate open-ended questions about what they observed. By doing so she was using the Question Formulation Technique, based on the Socratic method, she said.
“The goal was for them to eventually answer their own questions through research and experimentation, just like real scientists do,” Nurse said, adding the experiment helped her students understand the effects of low gravity.
For the past three years, Long Beach Middle School STEM projects have been selected for the NASA Student Spaceflight Experiment Program. At a virtual launch party Nurse hosted on Zoom in 2023, the students and their parents counted down as a rocket carrying their experiment took off for the International Space Station.
“It was one of those experiences students and their families will never forget,” Nurse said. “They became actual scientists. They weren’t just learning about space, they were doing the work.”
Jennifer Gallagher, Long Beach school district superintendent, said Nurse “is the type of teacher that students often cite as having made a huge difference in their life.”
“She . . . will go to any lengths to make things happen for kids,” Gallagher said.
Nurse grew up in Long Beach, the daughter of one of the city’s first Black police officers, Alonzo Charles Merkerson, Sr. She wrote about the community-building values her father taught her in a chapter for a book by Lauren M. Kaufman, “The Leader Inside: Stories of Mentorship to Inspire the Leader Within” (Impress 2024).
Nurse attended the city’s public schools, running track and playing forward on the girl’s high school basketball team. She earned a master’s degree in education at Hofstra University in Hempstead.
After teaching public elementary school for three years in Far Rockaway, Queens, she returned to Long Beach in 2005 as an elementary school teacher and instructional coach in literacy and math for other faculty. When the district was looking to introduce STEM in the middle school, Nurse collaborated with three other district teachers to write a sixth grade STEM curriculum.
“My goal is to connect the real world and what’s happening in their [students’] lives with what’s going on in the classroom,” she said.
In May, the middle school STEM students spoke with two astronauts aboard the International Space Station via NASA Downlink.
Stella Bogdan, a seventh grader who took the STEM class last year, called Nurse “an awesome teacher.”
“I looked forward to going to her class every day,” Stella said. “She always makes her lessons exciting.”
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