As Billy M. Miles described Monday’s solar eclipse from the perch where he experienced it in Sedalia, Missouri, he sketched a world that — for a couple of minutes or so — had deeply changed.

“It got really dark, and the cicadas started singing,” said Miles, a retired physics and astronomy instructor at East Central Community College. “The temperature dropped by about 10 degrees. It was just sort of eerie.”

Miles lives just outside of Morton, but he and three friends traveled to Sedalia so they could see the eclipse in its totality. Here in Meridian the lights stayed on — if a notch dimmer than usual. But throughout downtown Meridian, trickles of people stepped out of buildings with special eclipse glasses to glance at the convergence of moon and sun.

“It’s history,” Korei Gray said.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event,” added her husband, Del Gray.

A member of the U.S. Navy, Del Gray is stationed in Meridian with his wife, Korei.

What Miles saw in Sedalia was far different from what people in Meridian experienced. Miles described a “diamond ring effect” just before totality, when “the last few bursts of rays from the sun produced a bright spot along the edge.” He also said that as the moon moved away from the sun, “the edge look(ed) like a string of pearls.”

That sort of dazzlement may have been reserved to people in the path of totality. Nicholas Fenner, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Jackson, explained that even a sliver of sunlight supplies a fair dose of brightness. He said more than 85 percent of the sun was covered by the moon in Meridian during the eclipse’s climax in the area, just before 1:30 p.m.

“The sun is just so bright as it is,” Fenner said. “Even if you’re close to sunset, the sun is still bright enough for you to read outdoors.”

But the whole phenomenon still engaged a number of people — and it also supplied a kind of cosmic lesson plan for teachers and students.

Kameran Washington, peering through NASA-approved glasses during Monday’s solar eclipse, saw what he called a “small, little crescent-sun.” A sixth-grader at Carver Middle School, Kameran had done his homework before the eclipse and could describe the path of totality through the continental United States — from Oregon to South Carolina. He could also offer nearby suggestions about where a person might have seen the eclipse in its entirety.

Kameran, like others in the area, was surprised it didn’t get any darker than it did, but he did say the eclipse fueled his desire to keep on learning.

“I’ve never seen something science-y up close,” he said.

That, said Amanda Shadwick, an eighth-grade teacher at Carver Middle School, is a key goal of bringing the eclipse into students’ lessons.

“Any exposure where they can take something from textbook to life” is valuable, Shadwick said. “And how much more real can you get than this?”

Other schools throughout the area tapped the eclipse for lessons, as well.

When Candice Maloney queried her Algebra 1 class at Northeast Lauderdale High School, for instance, she was asking about more than solving for the value of x.

Where, she asked, could you see the entirety of Monday’s solar eclipse and then, on April 8, 2024, see the entirety of another eclipse? Adapting a lesson from NASA’s website, Maloney and her students plotted two lines following the totality of both eclipses.

“This is where you could be standing today, and in seven years, and watch two solar eclipses from the exact same spot,” she told the class. “Let’s figure out where it is so we could go there.”

Calculators clicked in an otherwise-silent room as students began to determine the intersection, which, as Maloney explained, converged right around Carbondale, Illinois.

Maloney said she brings real-life applications into Algebra 1 frequently, creating graphs that illuminate the number of vans needed to transport a given number of students, the ratio of children’s tickets sold to adult tickets, and other everyday applications. Monday, though, pushed the practical aspect of math into new territory.

“Anytime we can engage students in something they’re already interested in, and then put a spin on it so that it turns into a math lesson, then I think the lesson is that much more effective,” Maloney said. “Because they’re already engaged in the topic. They came to school interested in the solar eclipse today, so the fact that I could make my math lesson about the solar eclipse meant that they were already engaged and excited about making these calculations. It felt real to them.”

For sophomore Dennis Heidelberg, Maloney’s lesson let him begin to hatch plans years down the road.

“Maybe when we get older, we can go see that place with our families and see a total eclipse, since we’re not getting one here today,” he said.

Kyleigh Turner, also a sophomore, explained how she liked the way the lesson seeped outside of the classroom boundaries.

“Whenever I study things that are going to happen in real life, I have something to look forward to, more than in a regular math lesson,” she said.

Maloney was teaching her class in the morning before her students went out to view the eclipse in the afternoon.

For Alden Slutz, a fourth-grader at St. Patrick Catholic School, the vivid colors of the eclipse seemed to make a particularly deep impression.

“We saw the sun, and it looked like a crescent moon,” he said. “It was all yellow, and then there was a little orange. And the moon was completely black, and it almost completely covered the sun.”

Jill Scott, a fourth-grade teacher at St. Patrick, also stressed the importance of learning that bleeds outside of the classroom — and even becomes a story for students to tell at home.

“It excites them about science and the solar system,” she said. “It helps them, when they can actually take part, to understand our world in real time. We made sure that they had the proper glasses … and now they can go home and tell their parents why it happened and what they were seeing.”