In 1993 Robbie McCarty was fed up, burned out and ready to resign. For six years she had been the lone science teacher at a 300-student school in Duke, a small agricultural town in far southwestern Oklahoma, about a three-hour drive from Oklahoma City. Her dream to teach science in an inspired and hands-on way—as opposed to the traditional lecture system with its overemphasis on vocabulary—began to fade as she faced the realities of teaching at a small, isolated school with meager resources. "There was so much I wanted to do—and so little to do it with," she recalls.   continued...

Scientists Recall Country Roots Three HHMI investigators share experiences       From Exhausted to Outstanding		Photo: Lisa Hoke Download this story in Acrobat PDF format. (requires Acrobat Reader) Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin, December 2001, pages 26-29. ©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Left: Frustrated by isolation and poor funding while teaching in rural Oklahoma, Robbie McCarty entered an HHMI program and found ways to make science teaching work.