If you’ve seen one gaggle of high school students wearing eclipse glasses, staring at the sky, saying, “It’s so cool,” over and over again as the moon creeps in front of the sun, you’ve seen ‘em all.
“It’s fascinating, it’s fascinating,” said Katherine Zuleta, a freshman at TERRA Environmental Research Institute, a public magnet high school in Kendall.
As the school’s name might suggest, the teachers there were not about to miss a golden opportunity for a teaching moment on Monday. So they passed out the solar eclipse glasses and everyone craned their necks upward.
“I think this is amazing, you know, it’s great to see stuff that happens not so often in a lifetime, and being a part of it with all these people it’s just great,” said TERRA student Jordan Saumell, gazing at what looked like a bite taken out of the sun.
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SOLAR ECLIPSE 2024
Everyone who experiences even a partial solar eclipse walks away impressed by what they saw, and it’s obviously more impactful than reading about it in a textbook or watching a video on YouTube.
“Yeah, because you’re able to experience it, and you don’t always experience the things that you see, so it’s good,” said freshman Kyle Williams.
The kids had a blast looking through pinhole box cameras. A teacher made them and they worked, projecting the eclipse image inside the box. Students were also told to look for crescent-shaped lights on the ground, and they appeared.
Lisset Perez-Munoz taught the solar eclipse 101 lesson before the moon passed in front of the sun, and was not about to let her students miss this opportunity.
“I think it intrigues them and gets them involved in seeing nature," Perez-Munoz said. “Hopefully it does spark that interest that makes them go into the science field and learn more about nature and sciences and hopefully even make positive changes.”
One student, Isaac Litan, used the eclipse to test a new camera lens filter and wound up taking excellent photographs of the eclipse.
In South Florida, the moon only covered 46% of the sun. Not enough to make it dark outside, not enough to make animals freak out, but enough to create an experience the high school kids will not forget.
