DECATUR - The enthusiasm outran the instructions in Cinda Farris' science class at Holy Family School.

"Don't dig with the spoons. Do not dig with the spoons," said James Farris, Cinda's husband, who holds a degree in anthropology and sociology and was visiting to teach her students about archaeology. With a grin, he added, "They're not listening."

Cinda Farris teaches science to students in fifth through eighth grades, and she wanted her students to understand that science is not just Galileo and Pasteur.

"I'm trying to impress upon them that there are real scientists right now," she said. "My idea is to bring a real scientist in once a month."

Cinda Farris has a geologist and a chemist already lined up. She'd like to find someone with expertise in wind energy.

She wants to make sure her students understand the scientific process: defining a problem, doing the research, creating a hypothesis and so on. Her husband, she confided with a grin, is her "guinea pig" to see if the idea works.

James Farris, retired from the Decatur Fire Department and currently working as a substitute teacher for Maroa-Forsyth schools, went back to school after his retirement to pursue his interest in archaeology. He worked on the New Philadelphia dig in Pike County, the site of the town founded by Frank McWorter, a former slave who bought his own freedom and that of 16 members of his family prior to the Civil War.

The Farrises took plastic tubs, filled them with potting soil and buried miniature artifacts in them, such as plastic skeletons that started out as Halloween decorations. They separated the tubs into quadrants and provided the students with tools similar to the ones used by archaeologists in the field.

James Farris prowled the classroom as students bent over their tubs, urging them to peel the soil away a tiny bit at a time, across the quadrant, and carefully record everything, just as real archaeologists would.

That wasn't easy to do, said Audrey Vandercar, one of the students. The tub she shared with several other students had been thoroughly excavated and not entirely neatly, she pointed out, laughing.

"But we wrote down where we found everything," she said.

The class helped Isabel Flemming see that excavating a real dig would be a painstaking process.

"It would be overwhelming," she said.

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