Why don't penguins fly?
How fast can an ostrich run?
Why do elephants have big ears?
Hmmmmmm.
Let's ask Scientist Dave.
Dave is a volunteer at the Philadelphia Zoo, and one of his jobs is fielding questions about animals through the zoo Web site's "Ask-a-Docent" feature.
But David Schaffer, 68, is no ordinary answer man. He is the retired head of pediatric ophthalmology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a born teacher and animal lover. His flair for crafting online answers that are witty, expansive, and simple for children to grasp has won him fans from as far as New Berlin, Wis., where he has become a virtual guru to a classroom of second graders.
"The kids really get to me," Schaffer said. "I love their questions. The funniest one I had this year was, 'Why do bugs bite so hard?' "
Ask-a-Docent, which was started in the late '90s by a zoo volunteer named Robert Sloane, drew 1,300 queries last year. Schaffer, of Lafayette Hill, happened to be in charge of doling out the questions one January day last year when a curious request came in from a student teacher named Jill Carron, who was in the midst of a unit on the polar region.
She didn't have just one kid with a question; she had a whole classroom. Schaffer, a graduate of Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, took on that assignment himself.
"I didn't just want their questions answered; I wanted them to learn about the whole research process," Carron said. "I wasn't expecting to reach someone so generous."
Pretty soon there was a regular back-and-forth between Wisconsin and Philadelphia. Carron's pupils dubbed their new friend Scientist Dave and devoted a bulletin board to him. He popped up everywhere as they learned about how to write letters, how to find places on a map, how to measure.
When Schaffer told one child that a snow leopard could leap 50 feet, Carron turned it into a math lesson. The pupils measured their arm span, and figured out that the leopard's awesome reach was about equal to 17 of them stretching arm to arm. Then they demonstrated, forming a line from their classroom clear to the cafeteria.
