🚀🎶🖖🌌 In Preston Prince’s music class at Sand Hill-Venable Elementary, kid cadets have a five-year mission: to explore strange new rhythms, to seek out creative inspiration, and to boldly make music where no class has gone before.
On Sept. 8- Star Trek Day, marking the 1966 premiere of the original show- fourth graders walked into a classroom filled with Starfleet schematics, glowing red DJ lights, and their teacher in full command uniform. Prince explained the significance of Star Trek Day, handed out Delta Shield stickers, and led the kids on a bucket drumming exploration of “Star Trek” music. Then it was time for drills. While the students drummed away, Prince called “red alert.” One student turned off the overhead lights and another turned on the DJ lights, which cast an eerie red glow across the room. The students got ready to “engage.”
“It’s just like the fire drills we do at school,” Prince explained. “Well the crew has drills too, to make sure that they’re ready in case something happens.”
In addition to the hands-on drumming activity, Prince highlighted the contributions of “Star Trek” composers Alexander Courage, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner, showing how their work evolved from the 1960s through the 1990s.
“Using different forms of culture like ‘Star Trek,’ space exploration and artistic creation can supplement what students learn about music and inspire that creativity to want to explore and create something fantastic,” Prince said.
Beyond rhythm, Prince also pointed to the show’s historical and cultural impact - like when Martin Luther King, Jr. convinced actor Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) to remain on the original 1960s show in order to promote the Civil Rights movement through media representation.
“He convinced her to stay on the show and not leave, and that's why she remained on there for the other two seasons,” Prince said. “And she went on to be in the movies as well.”
Prince’s fandom began in his own elementary school days. In second grade, he asked his dad if he could watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“He said ‘it comes on too late, but I’ll tape it for you,’” Prince said. “So my dad would tape it for me and pause during the commercials. So every Sunday morning, I had a commercial-free episode of ‘The Next Generation’ queued up on the VCR. That was my childhood. And I’ve been hooked ever since.”
Prince’s Star Trek Day lesson showed how music education, history, and pop culture can accelerate learning to warp speed- proving that, in this classroom, the final frontier is creativity.