Teacher of the Year makes science real

Across the bench, Sean Kelley (no relation) says his teacher "keeps everything exciting and new. She'll put up slide shows of current events, so she relates everything that's going on in the world right now to what we're doing in the lab." When the nation's attention was fixed on E. coli in spinach, "we had it in Petri dishes in front of us," he says. "She trusts us."

The organisms are attenuated and safe for student use, Kelley explains, but to the kids, it's still a motivator. "It makes you grow up just a little bit quicker," says Samantha Pettipost.

The responsibility is paired with a relaxed attitude. "She is really friendly and bubbly and probably the most fun teacher I've ever had," Kaila says. She makes jokes, "sometimes corny ones," adds Kaila's lab partner, Jessor Baugh.

"I wouldn't give anything to the students to work on that I wouldn't enjoy doing," Kelley says. "If you love science, which I do, it's just so easy to make it interesting and pass on that enthusiasm."

Kelley drives home the relevance by involving students in the community. For one project, they met with families affected by Alzheimer's and put together an educational handbook. Another time, they created a biotech exhibit for children at Boston's Museum of Science.

The teens also choose individual research projects. Kaila is surveying local vets about feline leukemia, which has affected her cat. Samantha loves fish, so she's testing their memory with a routine of turning tank lights on before they're fed.

Students at SST also do summer internships to check out potential career paths. People who host Kelley's students frequently tell her that their skills outshine those of many college students. She's recently put up a "Wall of Fame" outside her classroom, showing what former students did for internships – everything from studying genetics to tracing suicide trends with the medical examiner's office – and what they're now studying in college.

Two SST biotech interns have worked with Vaughn Cooper, an assistant professor of microbiology and genetics at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. One, a freshman at UNH, still works in Mr. Cooper's lab. "He's one of our best students," Cooper says by phone. In high school, "he was a good student but not one of those blinding all-star students ... but it's clear that the experience he got in [Kelley's] classes ... really lit a fire under him. When he showed up in my lab he started to swim right away."

Marilyn Kellogg, the career adviser at SST, says such internships are integral. "It makes students much more motivated – they have a better sense of what they need to know," she says.

Kelley was called into a surprise assembly at SST last fall to be named the state's teacher of the year, based on a committee's review of nominations from students, teachers, and administrators. Everyone from the superintendent to her husband was in the audience as she was awarded a $3,000 grant. She's already used part of it to buy new equipment for the lab. She'll use her bully pulpit to boost science education in lower grades.

Matthew Kramer was in Kelley's first class at SST. Now he's a junior at UNH, double majoring in microbiology and business. "The unique thing about what she's doing ... is that she starts teaching a lot of high-level procedures that you probably wouldn't learn till you're a junior in college," Mr. Kramer says by phone.

He's ahead of his classmates in the lab because of that, he says, and he found that classes like organic chemistry made a lot more sense because he could see how the information would be applied. "You absorb the knowledge a lot better."

Kramer hopes someday to start his own biotech company. If he does, you can be sure that fact will be up on Kelley's Wall of Fame faster than you can say "DNA."

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