Melanie Ferguson was encouraged by her grandfather to be inquisitive about science.

Now she’s encouraging her students to do the same.

Ferguson was honored as an inspirational educator at Thursday’s Bowling Green Kiwanis Club meeting.

Ferguson grew up in Findlay, came to Bowling Green for her college education and never left. She has taught eight grade for 28 years – never the same lesson the same way twice — and considers herself almost a townie.

She told her audience they needed to break pencils, talk or fall asleep to make her feel like she was in a classroom.

She was quick to put Kiwanis member Eric Willman in his place when he asked, “can I go to the restroom?”

“I don’t know, can you?” Ferguson responded, eliciting hoots and applause.

Ferguson interspersed her talk with lessons she learned from her grandfather.

Her grandfather was the most patient person she knew, and he made sure if she didn’t know how to do something he asked her to do, he would also stop and teach her.

She showed a wooden plaque made by a student that said, “The world is bigger than you.”

This is her mantra, she said.

She said she tries to teach her students patience.

“They’re very ‘me’ now,” she said.

Ferguson said she tells them to stop, wait and chill until it’s their turn and to have patience with everyone else.

Teenagers are awesome, infuriating and exciting, rotten and innocent, narrow minded and wide eyed.

“Every possible scenario you can think of to describe an eighth-grade student, they always will show you the other side of that coin eventually,” she said.

She said she knows she could teach high school or little kids, but “I am where I’m supposed to be.”

She explained her approach to teaching also included compassion, curiosity, a desire to explore, and perspective.

Eighth graders are worried about themselves, because they think the focus is on each of them, but Ferguson teaches them the world is bigger than any singular person.

There are kids that roll their eyes at a change in seating arrangements, but she tells them she’s not asking them to go to prom together.

“We’re just going to be scientists together,” she said.

Ferguson challenges her students to dig into scientific inquiry, which brings the book smart kids and the quiet ones together to create “glitter bombs of conversations.”

She will be more successful in what she needs to do if the kids look forward to walking through the door, she said.

“Curiosity is a trait that if you haven’t tapped into it, you need to find what does open up that faucet,” she said.

Sometimes there is the expectation that as a teacher, she knows everything.

“I have no problem admitting I don’t have a clue when a child asks a question,” Ferguson said. “How I teach in that moment is, ‘I don’t know, let’s find out.’”

Ferguson, who is teaching the second generation of Bowling Green families, said many of her students have never been outside the city.

When the eighth graders travel to a Mud Hens game at the end of the school year, they are amazed at the height of the Fifth Third building, she said

She wants her students to have a desire to explore.

She said she traveled to a lot of places with her grandpa, from coast to coast, and often went to the airport to watch the planes. Once, they entered a building in downtown Columbus and walked uninvited into an office. They to the window to watch windshear cause rain to travel up. She was 9 years old.

On block schedule days, Ferguson allows her students to pick coordinates to find on Google Earth.

On Thursday, they visited the Yoda fountain, which is in front of Lucas Film Studios in San Francisco. They talked about the 1906 fire, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Redwood National Park.

Throughout the school year, the class keeps a map of all the places they travel to. At the end of the year, they have to plot a virtual road trip with $1,000 to spend.

“In my heart, some day one of the kids is going to take that trip,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson also teaches her students perspective.

“What you think you know is not what we all know,” she said.

During popcorn day, they talk about three types of heat transfer: Conduction (Jiffy Pop), convection (air popper) and radiation (microwave).

“I run into kids in the grocery store, and they ask, ‘are you still doing popcorn day,’” she said.

She tells her students everything they do in science relates to something.

How do you think the satellite got into orbit, so you get TikTok, she asks them, and explains how negative and positive charges relate to jumping a car battery.

“It’s a big world out there and you don’t know everything you need to know,” she said. “The world is bigger than you, so you need to keep learning.”

You never know where inspiration will come from.

She shared another grandfather story, where he assigned her to find a way to lock the fence to keep the cows from getting out.

“There’s always something to learn, there’s always some new experience. Sometimes you’ll be forced to learn it and sometimes the experience will come to you.”

Incidentally, she took the latch and put in on the other side of the fence and added a second, lower latch to where the cows couldn’t reach it.