Barbara Hacker of Springfield isn't just willing to go the extra mile for her students, she's prepared to fly halfway around the world.
Hacker, a fifth-grade gifted and talented teacher at Belvedere Elementary School in the Falls Church area, recently spent 10 days in Lithuania, learning about how teachers there instruct their students about economics and "financial fitness."
As a history teacher, Hacker said she likes to teach her students lessons by "becoming" various people, including an award-winning lesson she wrote about Lewis and Clark's expedition westward.
"When I teach these kids things, I try to become each role," she said. "I want to get the kids to imagine what it would be like to be a naturalist, trying to record all the different birds and plants they find along their way from Virginia to California and how they'd have to draw and write everything down in detail."
AN ECONOMICS student at George Mason University since 1996, Hacker was told of a trip coordinated by the National Council of Economics Educators that would send her to Lithuania for a week, to tour the country and visit various grade-level classrooms to observe how European teachers bring the subject alive for their students.
"My objective was to help elementary kids understand that we live in a world market," she said. "I can take the tools these teachers and bring them back for my students."
Joined by 11 other teachers from across the country, Hacker and her colleagues left Washington, D.C. for their 10 day trip, arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania.
"We spent eight days there in a sort of economic summit," she said. "We talked with several banks there and visited one elementary school and two high schools, talking with kids who were learning their lessons based on the 'Financial Fitness for Life' textbooks," she said.
Their translator, Svetlana Smerdinskay, had left the former Soviet Union in 1991 with $30 in her pocket. A teacher in Lithuania, she would translate from Russian to English for the educators as they went from place to place.
"The way we teach economics, we focus on production, capital and resources, but we have to teach to the state standards so we don't have the opportunity to discuss how other countries are different," Hacker said.
In Lithuania, their economy is still forming independently from that of the former Soviet Union, more than a decade after it declared independence.
The classrooms the teachers visited seemed disorderly to an American observer, Hacker said, but were filled with happy children who were eager to learn.
"Once the bell rang, the kids went right to their rooms, but it was chaos in the halls before that," she said.
The financial world of Lithuania is still defining itself, she said, in part because it is a nation that has been under the power of an outside entity for most of its history.
"People there are afraid to save money because they're constantly wondering if they'll be conquered again," Hacker explained.
The setup of the National Bank was different from anything she'd seen in the U.S., Hacker said, with the staff there keeping a distance from their visitors and answering any questions begrudgingly.
Even the course of study for students is set up differently from the U.S., Hacker said.
"Here, we take higher education, technology and science for granted," she said. "Over there, everything is done on a basic level. The basics are economics. If their everyday lives are destroyed, economics are necessary to make sure resources are used wisely."
UPON RETURNING to Virginia, Hacker said she's working on a series of lesson plans modeled after the Lewis and Clark unit she wrote, where students would take on various roles to understand the economic system of another country.
"It's very frustrating because I can't do a lot of what I want to do because [economics] isn't part of the Standards of Learning test," Hacker said. "In a GT classroom, I can talk about some global objectives, I can teach my students about a market economy versus a command economy. Our kids don't understand that in a market economy, everyone's rent would be the same, everyone would earn the same money," she said.
Lithuanian students also have to learn the various currencies across Europe along with conversion rates, whereas most American students don't know how many pesos are in each dollar.
Despite the roadblocks, Hacker is intent on providing other teachers with the tools and tricks she learned in Lithuania.
"I've taught before at a conference for social studies teachers with elementary school teachers from across the county," Hacker said. In-services like that one are only one to share what she learned until her lesson plans are finalized and distributed.
Susie Orr, the social studies specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools, said trips like this are worthwhile to teachers who can benefit from the background information gained on the trip without leaving their own classrooms.
"What we're trying to do is get information out to staff through in-services and what we call after school specials, which are workshops at various schools after students leave for the day," said Orr, who works in the office of Elementary Instruction and Library Information Services at the Lacy Center in Falls Church.
Economics is a part of the curriculum that isn't discussed much in a broad context, but Hacker's information may be used in other ways, like cultural discussions, Orr said.
"When she's written them, Barbara can share her lessons plans so all teachers in the county can access them," Orr said. "We do try to stick with the program of studies and the state standards, but we can show our children that there are different cultures around the world but they all interconnect."
Trips like this are part of a larger initiative in social studies classrooms to return to telling history as a story involving people and their daily lives, said Alice Reilly, the K-12 Social Studies Coordinator for FCPS.
"We're trying to move from just textbook learning into real-life applications," Reilly said. "Economics play a huge role in our history and cultural change. The more background knowledge you have, the more interesting you can make it for your students."