![]() ![]() Luke's Hospital," the AugRockford Register-Republic reported. "The real source of her trouble wasn't found until she was examined at Presbyterian-St. Workman first experienced pain in 1936, but doctors told her it was arthritis. The 54-year-old Park Ridge, Illinois resident had worked in the 1920s at the Ottawa, Illinois Radium Dial Company, which hired women to paint watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. On August 25, 1959, Beatrice Workman died of radium poisoning. “Just learning how to organize the periodic table with the valence electrons and number of rings around the atoms is the biggest thing we learned,” said Logan.She was among the last of her kind, but longevity in this club was a mixed blessing. Logan surmised correctly that entering the body via the mouth sent radium to the nearest bones, the tiny jaw hinges, explaining why entire jaws would break off. “Today it just kind of all came together.”īone bonding with radium, an atom that is similar in structure and charge to calcium but much greater in size, put pressure on the bones and weakened them. “It ‘clicked’ why radium replaced calcium,” said Sophomore Samara Mosley. “It’s going to break it,” answered a student. If you have a huge molecule trying to fit into a small place, what’s going to happen?” “Radium has a bigger structure than calcium. “Look at how the marble and the ping pong ball actually fit into the hole,” Boersma told a group. Using a spot plate to represent bone lattice, students began experimenting: rolling the spheres into the plate, dropping them, and trying to understand which sphere represented which element, and why. “Here’s my hint to you: don’t focus on the mass focus on the size,” said Boersma. “Calcium is the marble because it’s stronger and we want it in our bones.” “Radium is the marble because it’s heavier.” The classroom erupted in discussion as students hypothesized which sphere represented which element. Which is calcium and which is radium?” Boersma asked her student, as they studied how radium ended up in the women’s bones. Using the scant resources they found, Boersma and Stoneman created the unit basically from scratch. “We thought, ‘we should do this too’, because the storyline is so engaging,” said Boersma. Inspired by occasional “tweets” from a science teacher who created a unit on the Radium Girls, Boersma and colleague Derek Stoneman designed a series of labs for their own students. Over five weeks, students delved into the periodic table, the structure of human bones, half lives of elements, and alpha, beta, and gamma particles, among other things. But it’s all part of a storyline for Boersma’s science class. If you only caught bits and pieces of the class, you might think this was a history or an ethics class. 10th grade science teacher Grace Boersma prompts student Logan Hagen to think about ways to experiment with a marble and ping pong ball that represent calcium and radium The “ Radium Girls” who painted the watch faces were taught to wet the brushes in their mouths to create a fine tip between dips in the paint, thereby ingesting the radium. “They put it in all these things saying it was a cure-all, without actually knowing the bad side effects.” They put it in water they used it for paint,” sophomore Logan Hagen said. “They were selling radium as miracle drugs. Sophomores in teacher Grace Boersma’s classroom at Godwin Heights High School recently discovered for themselves how the radium in paint that made watch dials glow left a legacy of illness and death in its wake. What was happening to these employees, who spent their days painting faces on timepieces? A century ago, health problems began plaguing the women and girls who worked at the Radium Dial Company. ![]()
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