Shortly after 2 p.m. on Monday, as the moon started to do its thing, Sylvia Deschaine, who is the building coordinator in Carnegie Science Hall, knocked on the door of a crowded second-floor classroom, then entered, much to the surprise of prospective students and their families attending an Admission information session.

“Excuse me,” said Deschaine, in the brogue instilled by her birthplace, Maynooth, Ireland. “The eclipse is starting, and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. The president of the college is here, so come on and follow me.”

And they did. Admission counselor Jane Ngoc Tran had been leading the session, and she appreciated Deschaine’s spur-of-the-eclipse intervention. “We’re always looking for something new to share with families. We like to go the flow — �ֲ���ý is a spontaneous community.”

The crowd followed Deschaine (“She got everyone pumped up,” Tran said) outside to the Historic Quad, where an eclipse watch party had drawn a few dozen faculty and staff, including President Clayton Spencer.

Associate Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad set up a solar telescope, while his colleague Matt Côté, associate professor of chemistry, deployed a homemade viewing device that incorporated an old film camera.

Georgette Dumais, an academic administrative assistant, views the eclipse through an old Speed Graphic camera belonging to Associate Professor of Chemisty Matt Côté, who looks on. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

For students on the traditional summer tour of colleges, different schools can begin to blur. For �ֲ���ý visitors on Monday, the eclipse made its mark. “We will not forget the �ֲ���ý tour,” said Meg Alexander, visiting �ֲ���ý from Concord, Mass., with her daughter, Lucy Hirsch. “This is such a special moment.”

“This is so exciting,” said parent Jody Culcasi of Northbridge, Mass., visiting �ֲ���ý with her daughter, Maddie, and husband, Pete. “We weren’t expecting to be able to see it.”

Pete Culcasi is a welder for a fabrication shop in Boston, and he was amused that because of the eclipse hoop-la, the world suddenly knew all about the numbering system for eye-protective welding glass.

“Most people never know the numbers. I do only because I order the stuff,” he said. “To hear the number on the news, for people to call you up and ask, ‘Do you have 14?’ — wow. Everyone’s calling for 14, but we don’t use 14. We have up to 12. We use 10, and sometimes 9.”

He’d brought a glass with shade 12. “NASA says that’s safe,” Jody said.

Pete Culcasi of Northbridge, Mass., looks at the eclipse through protective eyeglasses with his daughter, Maddie (left), and wife, Jody. A welder by trade, Pete had also brought protective welder’s glass. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Côté had rigged the camera, a Graflex Speed Graphic (the familiar large-format style that news photographers used in the mid-1900s) so that the image was displayed, safe for viewing, on the camera’s ground glass viewer.

It had belonged to his late father, an avid amateur photographer who was a longtime professor of wood science and technology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

The night before the eclipse, Côté stumbled upon the camera in his “messy storage area” and “hauled it out to see if I could use it to view the eclipse.”

Fun with the sun: The partial eclipse is projected onto the Class of 1932 Sun Dial through a pair of binoculars. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

He could, and it was a popular attraction. Leading up to the 57.6 percent eclipse, a steady stream of viewers took turns looking at the image on the ground glass.

“It was odd to rediscover the camera, right now, after several years,” Côté said. “I thought, ‘This is serendipity.’ It’s neat to be putting to use something from my father.”

A national foundation that supports liberal arts education has awarded nearly $150,000 to �ֲ���ý and Bowdoin colleges for a collaborative effort to strengthen students’ quantitative reasoning skills.

The New York-based Teagle Foundation has granted the colleges $148,780 for a three-year project exploring effective ways to teach quantitative reasoning. The foundation’s Systematic Improvement in Student Learning initiative will support the schools’ efforts to develop techniques for assessing students’ progress in such reasoning. It’s hoped that these assessments will provide a basis for developing best practices in curriculum and teaching techniques.

“Quantitative reasoning” refers to the application of quantitative skills, such as computation, in the interpretation of ideas and the formation of arguments in any subject. Effective quantitative reasoning requires the development of such mental habits as thinking logically and basing decisions upon evidence.

“We live in a technologically driven society, and students must be able to reason quantitatively in order to participate fully in that society,” says Matt Côté, who is coordinating the project for �ֲ���ý College. Côté is an associate professor of chemistry and associate dean of the faculty.

“Much of a liberal arts education is about thinking well, reasoning well and presenting an argument. In many contexts quantitative reasoning is central to those processes.”

The two colleges plan to measure the reasoning skills of students at three points in their academic careers: upon arrival as first-year students, near the completion of their first quantitative reasoning course and just prior to graduation. At each stage, a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools will be used to gauge students’ skills and their effectiveness in applying those skills when reasoning from evidence.

These assessments will give �ֲ���ý and Bowdoin the data and the insights necessary to improve how such reasoning is taught, Côté explains. “We want to figure out which aspects of our efforts to enhance students’ quantitative reasoning are most effective and where there is room for improvement. Our assessment efforts will provide concrete information about what form those improvements ought to take.”

The grant comes at a crucial time for both schools, says Nancy Jennings, chair of Bowdoin’s education department. “We’ve already done preliminary work in making a transition in our general education requirements from a focus on quantitative skills to quantitative reasoning,” says Jennings.

“Faculty who teach quantitative reasoning courses have had some discussions about what the new focus includes and what our aims are, but we haven’t had the time or resources to thoughtfully and systematically put all the pieces together yet, especially the assessment piece. That we can now do this thoughtful, systematic work collaboratively with colleagues from �ֲ���ý just means the discussions and outcomes will be that much richer.”

The Teagle support will also advance the colleges’ participation in the regional New England Consortium on Assessment and Student Learning initiative and, more broadly, enable Bowdoin and �ֲ���ý to share their findings with wider national audiences.

The Teagle Foundation provides leadership for liberal education, marshalling intellectual and financial resources needed to ensure student access to challenging, wide-ranging and enriching college educations. The foundation emphasizes measurement-based approaches to educational improvements and the broad dissemination of project results. .

– Doug Hubley, Office of Communications and Media Relation