By Donald Gilpin

Mark Eastburn

Mark Eastburn, Princeton High School (PHS) science teacher and a leader of the school’s award-winning research program, reflected on some of the key experiences and influences in his life: an interest in reptiles, a Quaker upbringing, a semester-abroad program followed by two years in the Peace Corps after college, and an affinity for pursuing his own interests regardless of popular opinion.

The PHS research team, with its remarkable cross-cultural Indigenous language project, was recently chosen for the second time as a National Grand Prize Winner in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Competition with a prize package worth $100,000 — the only school in the country to have won the national competition twice.

Eastburn first came to Princeton Public Schools as a Spanish teacher at Johnson Park Elementary School, where he taught for 10 years, then a science specialist at Riverside Elementary for seven years before coming to PHS in 2018, where he has taught chemistry, biology, and engineering, as well as overseeing the research program and serving as adviser to a wide variety of clubs. He has a bachelor’s degree in biology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and master’s degrees in biology from Villanova University and in neuroscience education from Columbia University Teacher’s College.

His own experience as a high school student was not a high point of his life. “I had some good teachers in high school who encouraged me,” he said. “Biology and chemistry were something I was interested in and I worked hard at that, but I did not have a good time as a teenager. I had so many bad memories. I threw out my yearbook. I didn’t enjoy middle school or high school at all.”

Science and animals, however, were two strong interests for him. “I’ve always been a science nerd,” he said. “And I’ve always loved animals.” Eastburn’s first job was in a pet store. “So I was bringing all kinds of weird things home to take care of,” he added. “That was where I really enjoyed what I was learning.”

He also recalled, “Every chance I got I was out in the woods — catching crayfish, looking at salamanders. The science thing was always close to me, especially the biology aspect of it.”

His mother, who was a nurse, loved animals too, “But she did not like my interest in reptiles,” Eastburn noted. Starting out as a “dinosaur nerd” as a small child, from about fifth grade on he was keeping lizards, and by the time he got to high school he owned a large tegu lizard. “Almost without fail, when it escaped from its cage it would end up in my mother’s closet — it tortured my poor mother.”

He continued, “I was always interested in nature and animals. I was always working on gardens in my parents’ backyard — not necessarily what they wanted me to do, but I would dig things up and plant things and raise animals and find turtles.”

He added, “I’ve always been one to pursue my own interests, which are oftentimes not what the majority would see as valuable. I love to pursue things that no one else would think of studying or doing things that no one else would think of doing.”

Travel

As a biology major in college, he became interested in traveling. A study abroad program in Guadalajara, Mexico, caught his attention. “I really wanted to learn Spanish, and I could get away from school for a semester and go somewhere warm, and it was cheaper to do a semester there,” he recalled.

“I was also starting to get interested in human rights and international development,” he noted. “I was raised a Quaker, so social justice and efforts to alleviate poverty have been important to me throughout my life.”

During the semester in Mexico he lived with a Mexican family, and he traveled around the country. The experience changed his life.

“I felt so welcomed there by Spanish-speaking people,” he said. “I felt like this was my place. These were my people. I’ve had a strong tie to Mexico ever since. Every chance I can go to Mexico, I go. It just had such an impact on me, and it also triggered my interest in going into the Peace Corps.”

Pursuing his love of Latin America and interest in International development, upon graduation from college, Eastburn joined the Peace Corps and headed to Panama, where he spent more than two years in a remote rural community in the mountains.

“Again it was a very welcoming community,” he said. “That’s another experience where I felt a very close connection to the Latino community. I’ve always been accepted by the Latino community. Traveling in Latin America I’ve rarely felt anything but love and warmth and welcome from the South American countries I’ve been to.”

In Panama Eastburn was “the volunteer at the end of the road,” as he described it, staying in a home with a dirt floor, no electricity, and a cold water tap outside the house for plumbing. But during the day he got a head start on his future career, as he helped to educate Panama farmers on improved agricultural techniques and vegetable gardening.

During the seven months of the rainy season the isolation increased, as the road would often wash out and the phone service would fail. But in the second week of his three months of training outside Panama City before he headed to the wilderness, Eastburn met his future wife.

In early 2001 she returned with him to the United States, where they got married. He found out about teaching job openings in New Jersey and was hired in the summer of 2001 as a Spanish teacher at Johnson Park (JP).

Into the Classroom

For the next 10 years Eastburn enjoyed teaching Spanish at JP, but he’d always wanted to be a science teacher. His wife was working as a certified nursing assistant, Their young son and daughter were growing up, and the family lived in Levittown in Bucks County, Pa.

A job change came in 2011, and it was science and reptiles that brought him to Riverside Elementary School, which was known to have a large contingent of turtles living on the playground.

A science job opened up at Riverside,” he said. “I’d always known about the turtles at Riverside, and I was so excited to go to the school that had the turtles.” Eastburn cited Bill Cirullo, Riverside principal at the time before his death in 2016, as an important influence on his interests and career.

“He was so supportive of every ridiculous, crazy idea I ever had,” said Eastburn. “We were able to investigate so many different things with the turtles, and Bill let me put a frog pond in the courtyard, so we introduced frogs, and we had salamanders. All my childhood delights were able to come back in that time.”

He continued, “If Cirullo saw it was going to benefit students and benefit learning, he was 100 percent behind it, and so I had complete freedom to pursue all sorts of projects.”

One project Eastburn pursued started out with a study trip to North Carolina involving, again, turtles. “I came back to Riverside after being in North Carolina, and I said to my students, ‘The box turtle is the state reptile of North Carolina, isn’t that cool?’ And my students asked, ’What’s the state reptile of New Jersey?’ It turned out we didn’t have one.”

Eastburn and his students, along with students and teachers at Community Park, were able to coordinate a statewide effort over the next two years to have the bog turtle recognized as the state reptile. They worked to get a bill passed through the General Assembly, then the State Senate, and in June 2018 New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy came to Riverside to sign the bill into law.

“And I said, ‘I don’t think I can top this,’” said Eastburn. “That was an awesome opportunity where I was able to reach out to people in the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection. They all came to the signing. I met lots of people in the reptile community. It was one of those things that was so gratifying and fulfilling.”

In 2018 PHS was looking to expand its research program and needed a science teacher. Colleagues in the high school science department urged him to join them. “It was a perfect time to make that transition,” he said, but the transition was challenging.

“High school is very different,” he noted. “I could feel the tension and the anxiety. I could feel that there was such pressure for college and for whatever was going on in people’s personal lives. That came much more to the forefront as a high school teacher than as an elementary teacher. We become guides for the most difficult years of a child’s life. That’s something I’m still adjusting to.”

Building Bridges

Eastburn pointed out that he works with very diverse student communities. There are those who are “on a definite path towards college” and also those who are recent arrivals, perhaps unaccompanied minors, often unable to speak English and working five or six days a week outside of school.

Eastburn’s fluency in Spanish and his understanding of Latino culture has served him well. “That helps a lot and allows me to help bridge these different communities and to help them work together,” he said.

Eastburn explained, “The research program is one of those rare opportunities where all of these students can be pulled together. And that’s been the reason we’ve been able to win Samsung twice now and the New Jersey Student Climate Challenge, which we won last year.”

He continued, “The research program has that flexibility to allow any student who has the interest and the potential to discover their talents and abilities. I have several students I’ve recruited from the ESL program to do research and they’ve done phenomenal projects like what we’ve accomplished in the Samsung competition. We’ve had quite a few incredible success stories.”

PHS’ most recent Samsung award-winning project involved people training to speak the Indigenous Mam language, one of the most complicated languages in the world and the native language of a small contingent of PHS students who participated in the project.

As Eastburn looks to the future, he’s eager for more of the same. “My agenda for next year is to be doing the same thing I’m doing now,” he said. “In my current capacity there’s always something new to learn, something new to do. I really enjoy that.”

He went on, “I have so many things pulling me in different directions, but they’re all things that I want to do and ways in which I’m making a contribution to the community. I need to contribute in ways that my life experience has led me to be able to contribute. I can’t imagine doing anything else than what I’m doing.”