Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette
	From left, Ian Frost, 18; Sandy Weiser, 15; Paige Morton, 15, and Ryan Hanna, 17, listen to Tim Spuck talk about the Witch Head Nebula IC 2118 at the library in Oil City.

Tim Spuck made two discoveries recently. The first involved his high school science classroom in Oil City. The second involved a patch of stars some 800 light years away. Mr. Spuck made the first discovery because he's something of an iconoclast, at least when it comes to education. Want to really get him talking? Ask him if he sees any problems with how science is taught to teenagers. "Something is missing," he said. "The inspiration."

So Mr. Spuck decided that he and as many inspired Venango County students as he could gather would begin to ask questions, the kinds that require years of commitment, not quick references to textbooks.

Mr. Spuck made the second discovery because he's an astronomer, at least by hobby. So to find big questions, he looked to the stars. He and several students devoted months to studying infrared telescopes -- OK, the infrared telescope, the Spitzer telescope, a $1.19 billion freak of technology orbiting the sun -- and eventually used one hour of hard-to-get playtime with Spitzer to claim the kind of observations high school teachers and students generally have no business claiming.

At the beginning of the Oil City High School year, Mr. Spuck and seniors Brittany Ehrhart and Dave Bowser flew to Pasadena, Calif., gained access to Spitzer's powerful images and discovered nine new stars tucked close to the Orion constellation.

This revelation allowed for a few things. It bolstered, at least by a fraction, astronomers' understanding of baby stars, adding some idea to how our own sun might have behaved some 4.5 billion years ago. It also allowed Mr. Spuck to use the past Oil City school year, which ended Friday, to test his vision of teaching: What would happen, he wanted to know, if students could not just study the history of science, but add to it?

"We can't keep telling students that 'This is the way it is,' " Mr. Spuck said. "We teach science as an absolute: Here's the lab, follow this recipe, see these results. And it's not really like that. You have to embed yourself, and that's something too many science students miss out on."

Mr. Spuck had learned from his parents that basic learning should involve curiosity. His father, after all, pursued a locksmith degree in his late 70s, reading books to refine his knowledge. And when Mr. Spuck inspected science education -- he snagged the job at Oil City upon graduation from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 1988 -- he saw something incongruent: static teaching methods for an ever-evolving field.

American science students, meanwhile, have largely sputtered, substantiating Mr. Spuck's gut feeling. The latest findings compiled by the Program for International Student Assessment revealed that U.S. 15-year-olds, in the category of science literacy, ranked below 21 involved countries, including Iceland, Poland and Hungary. So, starting several years ago, Mr. Spuck took the first steps, small ones, to counteract a trend.

"Tim is a leader of what most of us in science teaching now believe, that it needs to be highly participatory and very inquiry-related," said Stephen Pompea, manager of science education at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. "That it needs to be hands-on and minds-on."

In the summer of 2004, Mr. Spuck spent time at the Kitt Peak National Optical Astronomical Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. NOAO put on a program for 20 science teachers, hoping to lend them knowledge and passion that could they could transfer to students. Soon after, Mr. Spuck received an e-mail: The Spitzer Science Center wanted to grant a few teachers a chance to use its infrared telescope.

It didn't compute, Mr. Spuck knew, because even professional astronomers elbowed one another for a chance with Spitzer. Two-thirds of the scientists who apply to use Spitzer are refused. The telescope has a life span of five years. By 2008, it will become waste. The cryogen used to cool it will run out and, all of a sudden, Spitzer scientist Luisa Rebull said, "this wonderful machine will have a very unromantic ending." Until then, those who operate it guard it like watchdogs. Generally, high school science teachers don't come close.

Mr. Spuck had one opportunity. He applied and heard back soon after. He, along with several other high school teachers, received just more than one hour of time for research. Mr. Spuck became the leader of the group, helping them to decide on their area of interest: baby stars. He brought two of his most passionate students on board, used class time to carry other students through the process and, by the time they studied the infrared images of a gaseous region called IC 2118, Mr. Spuck had his astronomical breakthrough.

"He was able to lead the whole group," said Ms. Rebull, the scientist who worked with the teachers and students on the baby star project. "He put in so much work, I sometimes had to remind myself, he has a teaching job, too. He was not only taking this on as science, but trying to integrate it into his classroom."

He began the year determined to take his passion and make it everybody's. He told them about the nine T-Tauri stars, how they formed, perhaps, because of their neighbor, superpower star Rigel. He asked his students to undertake side projects. Junior Ian Frost, for instance, devoted 100 hours to research examining the rotation of three T-Tauri stars. Mr. Spuck's most interested students began using study halls to hang out in his room. They met after school, often persuaded by the awaiting pizza. By the end, Mr. Spuck had taken something esoteric and rebranded it as something with greater appeal, the progress of mankind's knowledge base.

"It hits you that you're a part of something important," sophomore Paige Morton said.

Mr. Spuck's discoveries hang below one basic premise, that is, there are no absolutes. They are discoveries, not certainties, and so he continually asks himself about his research, about his thoughts on education, always in search of the next Better Way.

"If you're curious, are you ever going to be done with it?" he said. "No, it just keeps going on and on."

Although Oil City's school year has ended, Mr. Spuck plans to arrange five or six meetings during the summer with at least eight students. Two of them, Paige and Matt Heath, are heading with Mr. Spuck in early July to Pasadena. Because of the success of their first hour with Spitzer, the group applied for and received 11 1/2 more hours of research time. Ideally, Mr. Spuck said, the project will grow bigger than his class. Two years from now, long removed from the Oil City space science class, Mr. Spuck's students still will be involved in the research.

"I think they are getting a sense this is not your everyday, standard experience," Mr. Spuck said. "It's fascinating to be engaged in this sort of process. The work you're doing is actually writing astronomical history. You're not just doing something to go through the motions. You're doing it because it adds to what we know. You're doing it because it has a purpose ...

"I'm asking them to join me, not stand behind me, in this process. Everybody in the classroom is a learner. Even the teacher is a learner."