Teacher wins award by Marjorie Smith Alyson Mike It was relatively easy to catch up with Alyson Mike, '85 Biol, for a telephone interview, despite her demanding schedule teaching science to eighth-graders at East Valley Middle School in East Helena. This semester Mike is working with a student teacher which gives her more flexibility than usual. The student teacher had specifically requested Mike as a mentor after Mike received a 2001 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, the nation's highest award for science and math teachers. Last March, Mike and three other Montana teachers joined elementary and secondary math and science teachers from around the nation on an expense-paid week in Washington, D.C. "We testified about math and science funding before Congress," Mike says. "There were special showings for us at the Smithsonian, an award ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and we went to the White House and met Vice President Cheney." Mike took special pleasure in touring the executive offices in "the real West Wing." There was also a dinner at the State Department in the teachers' honor, a visit to Baltimore's science museum and a cruise on the Potomac. Best of all, the award came with a $7,500 grant which teachers can use as they choose to enhance their teaching. Mike has put hers toward a laptop computer and a digital camera and to help finance trips she plans to take to the Galapagos Islands and to Ruanda to see mountain gorillas. Teachers apply for the award by submitting evidence that they teach to the national science or math standards and by describing some creative and original project they have undertaken. Mike's project fits into a unit on chemical reactions. She has the students build a vehicle using an Alka-Seltzer tablet to propel it. Mike first worked for a veterinarian after graduation but soon decided to get a teaching certificate. After teaching a few months in Sheperd and two years at Circle High School, she found her way to East Helena where she has been "dealing with eighth-graders' hormones and enthusiasms" for 13 years. "I love these kids," Mike says, but acknowledges that it was gratifying to have the value of her teaching recognized. Her eighth-graders, she says, told her they couldn't see why she'd become suddenly famous, since I seemed like the same old dork they'd always known.