
DATE: Thursday, March 6, 1997               TAG: 9703060301

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   84 lines

PUTTING SOME ENGLISH ON THE BALL SCIENCE CLASS LEARNS ABOUT NEWTON'S LAWS AT A BEACH POOL HALL.

It's 11 a.m. Wednesday at Bay Billiards, and the sound of clicking balls fills the cool, dark expanses of the pool hall.

The place is swarming with teen-agers, chalking up pool cues, leaning over tables, squinting their eyes for just the right angle.

No, these Northside Middle School 8th-graders are not playing hooky. In fact their science teacher, Judy Gulledge, is in the thick of them, instructing them just how hard to hit the ball and what angle to try.

The object of the lesson is not winning or losing. Nor is it the life and times of Minnesota Fats. This exercise, rather, has more to do with an English mathematician named Sir Isaac Newton.

For those of you who slept through physics class, that would be the guy who wrote the Laws of Motion.

The 68 Norfolk students - armed with tape measures, stop watches and algebraic formulas - soon discovered this field trip was not going to be all fun and games.

``I thought we were just going to shoot pool, I didn't know it was going to be all this work,'' said14-year-old Juan Galindo, who kept switching between a pool cue and a pencil to scribble down answers on a four-page work sheet. ``I didn't realize pool had this much stuff to it.''

While the textbook version of the laws of motion might be mind-numbing, the billiard hall rendition kept every student alert.

For two hours, they huddled over pool tables, measuring distances with tape measures, timing the speed of the ball with stop watches, charting diagrams of the distances and angles that the balls traveled, and then computing equations to come up with average velocities.

Here are some of the principles they learned:

When 13-year-old Romain Williams hit a ball lightly and it traveled a short distance, then whacked a ball with more force, causing it to go further, he observed this law: ``Acceleration increases as the force increases.''

When 14-year-old Susan Hensley aimed a cue ball at a single ball that went much further than when she tried to break a whole rack of balls with a cue ball, she learned: ``Acceleration decreases as the mass increases.''

When 14-year-old Rachel Norman hit a cue ball that forced a second ball down the table, she learned Newton's third and probably most famous law: ``For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.''

And when the students were stumped by the next activity on their work sheet, they learned yet another of Newton's laws: ``Every object at rest stays at rest.''

But Northside Middle science teacher Gulledge was always there to move along the students on their journey through Newton's laws.

Gulledge's eighth-grade science class has been studying laws of motion, speed and velocity in class, and many of the textbooks use examples about balls on a pool table.

Since she couldn't set up 20 pool tables in the classroom, Gulledge started calling around to find a billiards hall willing to be a laboratory for her students. Bay Billiards manager Nathan Boucree agreed to turn over the billiards center to the students for the morning.

``This makes it more authentic because they are actually experiencing the action, seeing what occurs and setting up specific situations to test the principles,'' Gulledge said.

Once the students finished their work sheets, they said the field trip was a good combination of fun and learning.

``Sometimes I don't pay attention in class,'' said Hensley. ``But this has really gotten my attention.''

The students had ample incentive to finish their work. They got to play pool without the ghost of Newton hanging over their heads. The students learned one other lesson at that point: Knowing Newton's laws does not necessarily make you a good pool player.

That was demonstrated by Gulledge, who was being trounced by student Ryan Bolton.

``You still have to practice to be good at this,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: [Color photo]

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot

David Morton, 13, scratches down calculations over a table of

billiard balls during his science class trip to a pool hall to learn

Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion.

[Photo]

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot

Jennifer Jablonski, 14, applies Newton's law that for every action

there is an equal and opposite reaction, as she enjoys a game of

pool during a class trip to learn about physics.