An Orbit of Confusion

When a student in a Panama City, Florida, elementary school heard the bad news about Pluto, she rushed to distribute a petition among her classmates to get the tiny former planet reinstated as the ninth from the sun.

It didn’t work. But her reaction is typical of many students who were downright dismayed when the International Astronomical Union recently decided to strip Pluto of its full planetary privileges and call it a mere “dwarf planet” instead. Snip went the scissors, as teachers all over the country trimmed their planetary models.

 Nonetheless, even as textbooks immediately became outdated and students quickly became confused, teachers took the change in the planetary pecking order in stride.

“It’s easy with the [youngest students] because I just don’t tell them about Pluto. With the older kids, I tell them how it changed,” says Becky Peltonen, who teaches at Oscar Patterson Elementary, home of the young pro-Pluto petitioner.

Such is the nature of science, adds Bill Safranek, a high school teacher in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who explains, “Science is ever-changing—especially in astronomy, where new discoveries are made every day.”

And his students are equally adaptable. “Call it what you want,” one says. “It’s still Pluto. It’s still there.”

 —Mishri Someshwar