Hanging it up

MOSES LAKE — After 34 years, Steve Gjefle has hung up his last classroom ceiling tile.

“It’s a good time (to retire),” Gjefle said. “At 66, it’s time to go, let somebody else take the reins and start driving the wagon down the road.”

Gjefle spent yesterday, his last day of teaching, right where he spent his first: in the eighth-grade science classroom at Frontier Middle School. He had originally thought he’d teach high school, he said, but when he finished his education and started looking around for work, he stumbled on Frontier, and he’s loved it ever since.

“Kids are still really excited about learning when they get here,” he said. “And their curiosity level is up there quite high.”

Gjefle’s students have learned a spectrum of science: earth and space, genetics, physics. Along the way, they’ve received a lot of hands-on learning. One class spent seven weeks working with air-propelled rockets made from plastic bottles. The students would design the rockets with different goals in mind, Gjefle said: height, distance, transporting an egg unbroken. 

“You let them figure out (a design) and then try it, see how good or bad it was, and then rebuild. That’s real life. You come up with a problem, see if you have a solution for it, try it out, look at the data and do it again,” he said. 

In another class, Gjefle worked out an arrangement with the Department of Fish and Wildlife where his students would raise trout and salmon in the classroom,  and then release them into the Columbia River.

Gjefle’s also taken teams from Frontier every year to the Science Olympiad, an extracurricular science competition. His students have placed first in regional competition 17 times, were state champions in 2104 and placed fourth in the nationals in 1997, according to the Science Olympiad website.

Some of those victories are memorialized on the ceiling.

To a casual visitor, Gjefle’s looks like any other science room: desks, chairs, lab tables, glass cabinets filled with this and that. But an upward look reveals years of brilliant creative art. Every tile in Gjefle’s ceiling is painted in a different theme. Some commemorate Science Olympiad victories; others riff on iconic album covers or celebrate athletics or just show off the students’ imaginations.

 “I try to find the artistic kids,” he said. “We’re doing science (classes), and some kids can’t stand science, but you see them doodling. So you’re like, ‘All right, who’s an artist? Who wants to do a ceiling tile for the class?’ I’ve had (tiles) where individuals have done it or two or three are working on it together. They’ll come in on their lunch hour. I let them run with it.”

As each tile was finished, the whole class would sign it and it would be returned to the ceiling.

“What you see up on the ceiling is what’s inside of them,” Gjefle said.

Adolescence is an awkward time for both kids and the adults around them. Teaching them requires relating to them where they are, Gjefle said.

“They're not adults, you know?” he said. “Sometimes we expect adult behavior out of them because they're going to be young adults, but they’re (not) … They're figuring out their independence.”

Sometimes that quest for independence can manifest itself in unexpected ways, like when the class was designing CO2-propelled cars.

“They had to paint the cars,” he said. “One girl … crawled underneath the table and decided to spray-paint her hair. She came out with blue hair. Every day you have upwards of 150 kids, and you have 150 different personalities. And it can change day to day, with the weather and what’s going on in their lives and what kind of mood they’re in. Just like adults.”

    The ceiling of Gjefle’s classroom is a testament to the creativity of one class after another of Steve Gjefle’s students.
  

    Some of the artwork on Steve Gjefle’s classroom ceiling commemorates victories by his Science Olympiad teams.