{"id":9552,"date":"2015-12-18T13:19:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T20:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=9552"},"modified":"2015-12-20T07:37:57","modified_gmt":"2015-12-20T14:37:57","slug":"senior-high-teacher-hosts-explosive-history-channel-pilot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/12\/senior-high-teacher-hosts-explosive-history-channel-pilot\/","title":{"rendered":"Senior High teacher hosts raucous History Channel pilot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Beals\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Craig Beals talks to his honors chemistry class Friday morning at Billings Senior High School.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the classroom, Billings Senior High science teacher Craig Beals knows how to get his students\u2019 attention. Things that go boom are always popular, and you really can\u2019t go wrong with fire.<\/p>\n

This Monday, Beals will see if he can capture the interest of nationwide television viewers with a show featuring some of those same attractants, only on a much bigger scale.<\/p>\n

The History Channel<\/a> show, \u201cSecret Earth: Yellowstone Supervolcano,\u201d will air at 8 p.m. in Montana. It will feature Beals doing what he does best, explaining complex science through vivid, hands-on demonstrations, with lots of fire and explosions.<\/p>\n

If the pilot is successful, Beals could end up hosting a whole series of \u201cSecret Earth\u201d shows for the History Channel. The 36-year-old teacher already has a long list of accomplishments, including being chosen as the Montana teacher of the year in 2015, but a national TV show is pretty heady stuff, so heady that he can\u2019t describe how it feels.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I was an English teacher, because I don\u2019t know the words,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it will sink in until the show airs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beals is a native of Billings, a 1997 graduate of Skyview High School. His mother, Vivian, is a retired elementary school teacher. He earned a degree in biology and broadfield science (teaching) from Montana State University and later earned a master\u2019s in zoology from Miami (Ohio) University.<\/p>\n

He has been at Senior High for 11 years, teaching earth sciences and biology, and this year he is teaching chemistry and honors chemistry. His summers are busy, too.<\/p>\n

He works as a biology facilitator for Miami University\u2019s Earth Expeditions<\/a> program, which involves leading graduate students who are doing conservation research all over the world. The project has taken him to Mongolia, Belize, Namibia and Borneo.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>In 2008, he was part of a 20-person team on a PolarTREC research expedition<\/a> that spent six weeks at the summit of Greenland\u2019s ice sheet, where they studied atmospheric changes, collecting what Beals described as \u201csome of the most important Arctic data ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the past two summers, working on a grant from the Murdock Trust<\/a>, he did research in the Beartooth and Spanish Peaks mountains, studying the effects of climate change by replicating historical photographs and then quantifying the change in the treeline over time.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he continued to teach at Senior High, and five or six years ago he was looking for a new way to reach students who were struggling with their coursework. He took a cue from a friend of his, Paul Andersen<\/a>, a science teacher at Bozeman High School\u2014and the 2011 Montana teacher of the year\u2014who had had some success with tutorial videos he posted on YouTube. Beals started making his own videos aimed at students who needed extra help, and later for students missing classes because of sports.<\/p>\n

The videos proved popular and useful, and Beals found that his students were sharing them with friends and relatives all over the country. He figures he\u2019s done 100 of them by now, unintentionally honing his on-air skills for the day the History Channel came knocking.<\/p>\n

The \u201cSecret Earth\u201d idea was hatched by History Channel producers working with Grizzly Creek Films<\/a>, a Bozeman production company founded by some of the first graduates of a master\u2019s program in science and natural history filmmaking at MSU.<\/p>\n

\"Fire\"<\/a>

Just another day in the classroom for Craig Beals. This photo was taken from his Facebook page.<\/p><\/div>\n

At first, Beals said, the History Channel just had a concept, the idea of doing a \u201cbig science\u201d show. After working on several different concepts, they decided to go with a host-led show. The folks at Grizzly Creek suggested Andersen, but he was so busy by then\u2014he is on a two-year leave of absence from Bozeman High and is an official YouTube Edu Guru<\/a>\u2014that he had to decline.<\/p>\n

However, Beals said, Andersen told them, \u201cI\u2019m not the kind of guy who would throw himself out of an airplane to prove that gravity exists, but I know this guy\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

So, in the fall of 2014, Grizzly Creek more or less auditioned Beals via Skype. They liked what they saw, and so did the History Channel. The upshot was that Beals spent five weeks last summer filming the hour-long pilot show.<\/p>\n

As you can see if you watch this History Channel promotional video<\/a>, Beals has a lot of fun exploring the science behind the Yellowstone supervolcano, which has already erupted in three massive explosions over hundreds of thousands of years and which could erupt\u00a0again at any time.<\/p>\n

For the show, Beals and his team shot off a cannon to demonstrate how the buildup of pressure causes explosive releases of energy. He climbed into a portable pool and fired a handgun underwater to show the movement of shock waves.<\/p>\n

Most spectacularly of all, he jammed a few bags of chemicals into a hole in the ground on a ranch near Joliet to simulate a supervolcano, then used a drone to film the movement of the dust cloud over a map of the United States superimposed on the land.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo really, it\u2019s just my teaching but out in a different environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There was a script, Beals said, \u201cbut they found out pretty quickly that I can\u2019t follow a script.\u201d So he read it through, to get the drift of where they wanted the show to go, then winged it, ad-libbing the whole thing.<\/p>\n

He said it was surprisingly fun. The only stressful aspect of the project was his facial hair. There were basically three Craigs in the show, he said, Teacher Craig, with a one-day beard growth, Expedition Craig with a two-day beard and Adventure Craig with a three-day beard.<\/p>\n

So, depending on what segment they were filming, they always had to worry about his beard matching the scene. He chose his own wardrobe. His world travels taught him that a polyester Wrangler button-down short-sleeve shirt was incredibly versatile and easy to wash\u2014just dip it in a stream and wring it out.<\/p>\n

They also did some filming at Senior High. Four of his students who graduated last year are in the show, as is Dan Bartsch, a fellow science teacher at Senior.<\/p>\n

All Beals can do now is wait. He and the cast and crew are having a private premiere party Monday night at the Art House Cinema & Pub<\/a> in downtown Billings. He\u2019ll be there will his wife Christi and their two children, 5 and 6 years old.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not sure what he\u2019ll do if the show does well and he\u2019s asked to film a whole series. Asked if he\u2019d have to a take a leave of absence, he answered, \u201cNobody will even start that conversation.\u201d Everything is riding on how well the show does.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it stops there\u201d\u2014if there\u2019s no series\u2014\u201cI\u2019ve got class to teach the next day, so I\u2019m totally fine with it,\u201d Beals said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only thing that makes me nervous about the show is, what does it mean for the future of me and my family? Because I absolutely love what I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the classroom, Billings Senior High science teacher Craig Beals knows how to get his students\u2019 attention. Things that go boom are always popular, and you really can\u2019t go wrong with fire. This Monday, Beals will see if he can capture the interest of nationwide television viewers with a show featuring some of those same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,18],"tags":[741,3537,3540,3539,3536,1065,3538],"class_list":["post-9552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","category-diversions","tag-billings-senior-high","tag-craig-beals","tag-dan-bartsch","tag-grizzly-creek-films","tag-history-channel","tag-montana-state-university","tag-yellowstone-supervolcano","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}