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MCAULIFFE, CHRISTA 1950-1986

TEACHER; ASTRONAUT

A Representative Teacher: A Woman, A Mother

Christa McAuliffe, a thirty-seven-year-old social-studies teacher at Con-cord (New Hampshire) High School was chosen from eleven thousand candidates to be a pioneer: the nation's first ordinary citizen in space. Her life ended when the space shuttle Challenger exploded ninety seconds after liftoff in February 1986. McAuliffe left her mark on the decade and on the nation as a model teacher, a woman who combined the idealism of the 1960s and the feminist ideas of the 1970s and 1980s.

Background

All of the important decisions of her life, her friends said, were as a result of her essentially solid values. She attended a Roman Catholic college-preparatory school in Framingham, Massachusetts, her hometown, with a solid academic reputation and a strict code of behavior. She decided before graduation that her life's work would be teaching, to her mind a noble profession because, as a high'-school classmate remembered, "You could be a wife and mother as well." At Framingham State College where she studied to be a teacher, she was particularly interested in the diaries of pioneer women, recalled Carolia Haglund, a former professor and dean of women. Years later she would stress to her students the importance of ordinary people in history. Her project for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was to keep a three-part diary on the Challenger mission: preparation, flight, and post-flight.

Teaching Career

Her career in teaching reflected that of thousands of other young women of the 1970s and 1980s. She married just out of college, to Steven McAuliffe, who immediately entered Georgetown Law School. She taught school, worked part-time as a waitress at a Howard Johnson's, and earned a master's degree in teaching administration from Bowie State College in Maryland. Her thesis was on the acceptance of handicapped children by other children in a regular classroom. The chair of her department remembered that McAuliffe was "eager to do things with her students, taking them on field trips and conducting mock trials." She gave birth to her son, Scott, in 1976, and to a second child, Caroline, a few years later after a move to New Hampshire. A month later, McAuliffe went to work as a social-studies teacher in Concord and soon became president of the local fifty-member teachers' union. Her role as a wife and mother came first. She often did not start on her schoolwork until ten in the evening, when the children were in bed, and she could grade her students' papers in relative quiet. She applied for a job as an assistant principal, but she was not hired. A friend later recalled that McAuliffe believed she had not been chosen because "the administration just wasn't ready for a woman."

Training as an Astronaut

When NASA invited teachers to apply for the shuttle mission, she wrote in her application, "As a woman, I have been envious of those men who could participate in the space program and who were encouraged to excel in the areas of math and science. I felt that women had indeed been left outside of one of the most exciting careers available. When Sally Ride and other women began to train as astronauts, I could look among my students and see ahead of them an ever-increasing list of opportunities." She endured the training with admirable stamina and good humor and was enthusiastic and excited about her adventure as the teacher in space. By the time of the launching, she had made her mark on NASA and had been accepted by the crew. At a portrait session in Houston, the regular crew wore mortarboards and held plastic lunch boxes and apples in her honor. McAuliffe's career as a wife, mother, and teacher was unusual only in its dramatic, tragic end. She was recognized by the nation as a true pioneer in space whose work in the classroom was representative of millions of other dedicated, enthusiastic teachers.