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The New York Times, 5/3/98 “There it is! There it is!” came the cry, as the chartered school bus pulled into the South Kearny rail yard on Thursday morning. Craning their necks, the 21 fourth graders of Maryalice Palisano’s class at the Wyoming School in Millburn Township pressed up to the bus windows to peer at the bright blue cargo container atop a truck in a loading bay. They had been waiting for this moment since November, eager not so much to see the contents of the 40-foot box, which carried toys destined for sale in the Northeast, but to glimpse the container itself, which they had been tracking for months on the World Wide Web as it voyaged by sea from Seattle to six Asian ports and back, and now east by rail (it travels from train to warehouses by truck). On various legs, it transported pillow cases, handbags and auto parts, among other goods. |
 Photograph by Dith Pran/The New York Times |
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“Everyone was screaming and pointing at the box,” said Emily Riddell,
10. “I just looked at it, and it was really exciting.” The container, called the Boomerang Box, to reflect the two-way nature of cargo shipping, was created by a California-based shipping company, American President Lines and the Port of Seattle to teach students about international trade, a field that provides jobs to one in four residents of Washington state, and about one in seven in New Jersey. Students in West Seattle designed the container’s shell, painted with 70 oversized postage stamps that depict everything from Pandas to Japanese temples. But at the heart of the project is a company Web site that provides maps and a diary of the container’s six-month voyage and even profiles of trade workers. (For the Millburn students, a crane operator named Lanny McGrew is the coolest, followed closely by Cabo the customs dog, a black Labrador.) The site also offers lesson plans for teachers that incorporate art, geography, mathematics, science and social studies. It has received more than 90,000 “hits” since October, and as many as 150 E-mail messages a week from as far away as Bangladesh, said Tina Montgomery, the project’s director. |
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“The whole goal was to really bring an industry to life for these
kids,” she said. “We thought it would be a great draw for teachers.” Mrs. Palisano, who has taught in the Millburn district for 11 years, said she stumbled onto the Web site while looking for Internet teaching tools this fall. She introduced it to her students on a computer presentation screen, and before long they were visiting the site at home. “They liked the element of surprise and change,” Mrs. Palisano said. “It really is a living curriculum. For them, it’s a real curriculum.” Kevin Galligan, 10, said he checks the site about three times a week. Coming from a family of boaters, he said, he is mainly interested in the ports, particularly Seattle’s, which is the biggest he has ever seen. “I have been trying to teach my mom about the Boomerang Box,” he said.
“We learned that it was named for General Philip Kearny. He fought in the Civil War and he lost an arm,” said Oliver Roe, 9. His favorite part of the project has been checking the container's progress on the Internet, “because I was always in suspense where it went and how long it took to get there,” he said. The box heads back to Seattle, where it will be featured during Maritime Week, starting May 19, and then tour local schools. “With a textbook you get bored because you know what’s going to happen,” he explained. “With this, you don’t know what the teacher's going to say next.” The Boomerang Box Web site is http://www.apl.com/boomerangbox. |
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