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But to Jim Beddell, a marine environmental studies teacher, the accident provided another kind of lesson: one that turned Rhode Island's cherished coast into the perfect classroom, giving his students a chance to put what they've learned into action.

On Tuesday, Beddell piled five Toll Gate High School seniors into the marine program's rickety blue van for a trip to Moonstone Beach -- ground zero of the accident that spilled 828,000 gallons of oil into the water, littering the sand with dead and dying sea creatures.

While their classmates sat in toasty classrooms with textbooks and blackboards, Beddell's students bundled up in hats and gloves to ward off the Arctic chill and trudged out onto the frozen sand. There, in the numbing cold, they began their study of the toll on marine life, 18 days after the spill.

"You get more experience going out and taking part in things rather than sitting in a classroom," said student Tracy Dressel.

The previous week, another group of Beddell's students identified and counted sea organisms in square-meter plots in the sand, just like biologists and volunteers have been doing to determine the loss of life wrought by the spill. Then the students turned over their data to members of Save the Bay, who are helping state and federal agencies.

"I was hoping we could work with them and very glad we could," said Beddell.

But on Tuesday, the only visible sign of the oil catastrophe was the beached tugboat Scandia, which caught fire Jan. 19. The tug and its barge ran aground after the crew abandoned ship.

As salvagers attempted to remove the charred tugboat Tuesday, Beddell's students searched in vain for signs of dead sea creatures along Moonstone Beach.

"Last week, this was just lobster, lobster, lobster," Beddell told his students while pointing at the sand. Today, he said, "It's looking pretty good."

Beddell, looking more like a field biologist than a classroom teacher with his loose work pants, snow boots, fleece hat and sunglasses, said he couldn't pass up the opportunity provided by the North Cape tragedy.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of event and I wanted students studying marine science to be part of it," he said.

The marine studies program began in the 1970s when Warwick and Cranston won a grant that paid for each community to buy a van, a boat and marine sampling equipment. While Cranston's program ended when the district stopped paying for a teacher, Warwick's is still going strong, attracting 72 students this year.

The program is open to seniors at Warwick's three high schools who have a fondness for science and like to be outdoors. In all but the coldest, nastiest weather, Beddell takes them out in a Boston Whaler to catch fish in trawl nets, conduct water-quality tests and observe marine wildlife.

The students have provided Save the Bay with seal counts off Wickford's Rome Point, studied where biologists might have success planting eel grass and sent information on the health of Greenwich Bay's coves to groups striving to improve water quality.

One of Beddell's students, Joseph Verri, is so gung-ho about the marine environment that he made his way down to South County to help gather and count dead sea birds and locate live ones in the days following the oil spill.

"We're giving the kids a course that is a field-science course, a class outside in the real world," said Beddell.