Putting young Americans to work

October 5, 2012

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The garage door is up and the cacophonous whine of building equipment is in full throttle. Students, supplies and tools spill out of the classroom and onto the patio. Some are using circular saws to cut plywood, others are grinding away spurs with corded grinders, and a few are even welding, making aquarium racks out of wrought steel. It’s just another day in Chris Morissette’s Environmental Engineering class.

I’ve been teaching at High Tech High North County for only a few weeks now and I’m already gaining an appreciation for the project-based ethos. The students come in to class excited, and many use their free time for extra work or to get trained on new equipment. Each is shown the right way to use the tools and handed the accompanying outfit of safety equipment, then they go to work under close supervision.

The racks they’re fashioning will hold a single ten-gallon aquarium tank. Groups of four will have their own tank, a mini-ecosystem, which they will maintain throughout the year. All in all we will have fifteen aquaria, thanks to funding from SDG&E and the San Diego Foundation, and each will hold live coral from the Pacific and the Caribbean. Our overarching scientific goal is for the students to investigate how human activities—pollution runoff, warming of the oceans, and others—influence coral health. But there is much more to be gained from this project.

My classroom lesson topics thus far have ranged from the biology of corals to the tools of professional aquarists. Just last week we took our sixty students on a field trip to Birch Aquarium. While there I was able to give small tours behind-the-scenes, but it wasn’t to show off the animals. Instead, the students observed the complexity of engineering that goes into keeping the myriad marine systems functioning.

The students learned first-hand about protein skimmers, sumps, calcium reactors, filter socks, chillers, and algae refugia, all tools they will put to use in aquaria at the school. The field trip highlighted the line this project is straddling: science and engineering. The scientific questions are important, but they won’t be answered unless the engineering and maintenance of the systems is impeccable.

One of the only topics agreed upon during the first presidential debate was that America needs to bolster training in hands-on skills in order to put citizens back to work. When this came up I couldn’t help but think of the students in Chris’ class and our underlying motivation for the coral project: establish something for which a wide range of skills—academic and functional—are required, then allow students to pursue the skills with which they most align. And by providing the leeway for exploration, we hope to not just grow the students’ skill sets, but also help them find their passion.

Note: This will be the last Science Minded post on UT-San Diego. I would like to offer a sincere thanks to my editor, Mike Lee, for the great opportunity to blog on the Science and Environment page and wish him all the best in his next endeavor. Science Minded will continue, though, and can be found at http://www.scienceminded.net. Thanks for reading.

Reaching into the classroom

June 27, 2012

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During the coming school year I’ll be part of an NSF GK-12 program at UCSD, which teams Ph.D. students with K-12 teachers in classrooms throughout the county.

We’re in the throes of a four-week course that preps the grad students and teachers for our collaboration in the classroom. We began with simple communication: the grad students had to strip jargon from our research explanations while the teachers had to clarify the array of acronyms used in education. Then we, the grad students, began our training to be effective teachers.

The program’s aim isn’t solely to make us better at presenting Powerpoints to a general audience. We’re pushed to dig deeper and make our research both intellectually and physically accessible to our high school students.

With the help of my mentors, I’ll develop a series of lessons drawing on coral ecology and biology, using coral reefs to teach ecosystem interconnectedness, coral energy reserves to discuss macromolecules, and coral skeletons and tissue elements to talk about isotope chemistry.

On top of that, my teaching team plans to implement a full-scale scientific experiment in the classroom, guiding, but not instructing, our students through the process of defining questions, developing hypotheses, and planning experiments, then implementing and collecting data, and finally analyzing and interpreting findings.

I’ll have the privilege of working with a team at High Tech High North County— environmental engineering teacher Chris Morissette and biology teachers Matt Leader and Parag Chowdhury — along with fellow Ph.D. student Mike Lovci. Because High Tech High is a project-based school, we have the flexibility to tackle the ambitious undertaking of studying coral health in the classroom as we attempt to build a bridge between professional science and high school education.

Our project will challenge everyone, students and teachers alike. Through the process I’m certain that the students will learn critical truths about science, such as the importance of working together, the value of detailed planning and the necessity of problem solving on the fly.

One of the major themes I’ve tried to thread into Science Minded is that science can be best learned by doing. When students have to combine book smarts and hands-on ability they have the potential to advance rapidly, and in doing so realize both their strengths and weaknesses.

To conduct the project our students will have to read and engineer, write and design, and interpret and build; it’s unlikely that any are skilled in all of these areas, but through the diversity of roles necessary to complete the project we hope that each student will find their niche.

Throughout the year I’ll use Science Minded to communicate our progress—conveying what I’m learning from the students and my mentors—both scientifically and as a budding educator. On a broader scale, I hope that our hands-on approach will engage high school students and push them to be science-literate citizens.

I’m certain that there are multitudinous teachers out there using interactive lessons in and out of the classroom. My exposure to the array of such strategies is only in its infancy and my team could certainly use your help. So please offer feedback, thoughts and suggestions as we navigate this ambitious and exciting project.

Marine collector finds it all

April 30, 2012

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Phil Zerofski has two of the greatest jobs in the world.

Phil and his wife Amy own SEACAMP San Diego, a program that hosts students from all over the world at their facility on Mission Bay. Putting their hearts and souls into the program, they have built it into one of the country’s preeminent education centers for teaching hands-on marine science to elementary through high school students.

But even with SEACAMP’s success, Phil couldn’t pass up on a new opportunity: Marine collector at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of UC San Diego.

“It was my dream job,” Phil told me when I asked about his reaction to learning that the position was available. “But I would have been just as happy to stay at camp because I love it there, too.”

This past summer I huddled around a window at Scripps with a group of undergrads. Out on the ocean we saw whale spouts and “oohed” and “aahed” with each one. Phil happened to pass by and we pointed them out to him.

“I was just out collecting kelp with (a masters student) and we passed them in the boat on our way back,” he said, taking a moment to talk with the students. “They’re blues. Mothers and calves.”

The students’ mouths dropped, and their reactions reminded Phil of a time he passed blue whales surface feeding off the San Diego coast with a boat full of SEACAMP campers.

As marine collector, Phil is asked to collect everything from tiny plankton to sharks for science and teaching at SIO. He also oversees the experimental aquarium facility, where he helps grad students and faculty design and implement experiments that teach us more about the critters that live in our watery backyard. Phil sees many parallels with SEACAMP San Diego, where students learn about the ocean by interacting with animals in labs and observing them in the wild via snorkel or boat.

Phil’s own love for the ocean dates back to when, at age four, his mom gave him a book about being an ichthyologist (a.k.a. a fish scientist); after that he proudly proclaimed it as his future job to anyone who would listen.

In middle school, Phil took on a marine science internship at the Woods Hole Aquarium and in high school Phil earned his SCUBA diving certification. When it came time to attend college Phil chose Roger Williams in Rhode Island because they offered a degree in marine biology. He put himself through school thanks in part to working construction, where he learned the wide array of techniques that he put to use years later at SEACAMP and Scripps.

Phil’s love of the ocean took him to the Florida Keys, where he landed a job as a handyman at a marine science camp for kids. He spent the first summer living in a tent, battling mosquitoes and working as hard as he could at his new job.

His perseverance and array of skills led to a promotion to harbormaster for the camp. In his new position he began learning from the more experienced boatmen at the local marina who taught him how to build boats from scratch.

While the camp’s facility managers loved Phil’s construction abilities, the camp’s teachers quickly learned that he was a vast source of information about marine life, turning to him when they were stumped by students’ questions. Before long Phil started teaching at the camp and leading students on dives.

After meeting in the Keys, Phil and Amy moved to San Diego where, fourteen years ago, they purchased SEACAMP San Diego. With total control to provide a hands-on marine science education, the blending of Phil’s expertise and passions—the ocean and building things—was complete. The camp now welcomes over four thousand students a year, coming from all fifty states as well as dozens of countries.

Today Phil has more on his plate than ever—especially with his three-year-old daughter Delilah—but he says it’s easy to get up in the morning.

When I arrive at Scripps for work around 9 a.m., I often see Phil, already hours into his day, suited up to dive, fixing a plumbing leak, or transporting animals. He’s usually smiling, and I can only imagine that each day is a new adventure, each new task an exciting problem to solve

Teacher spurs curiosity

April 30, 2012

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My dad is a teacher, so naturally the idea for this week’s post came from him: Write about the teacher that inspired you to get into science.

The concept of having one inspiration may sound cliché, but I have such a person and I think that many of my peers do as well.

For me it was my AP biology teacher Karen Smereka at Montpelier High School in Vermont.

High schoolers are good at spotting a fake—a teacher can’t act overly enthusiastic about their subject because kids just won’t buy it. But when I was in high school my trained eyes told me that Karen was no fake: she was chronically enthusiastic and entirely genuine.

Karen’s lectures were speckled with insights into natural phenomena that she found fascinating, which helped enliven the compulsory curriculum. She treated us like adults, allowing us to work through complex concepts with her in an open dialogue, rather than learning through silent listening.

Karen was also good at admitting when there were questions she couldn’t answer (which wasn’t very often). Instead of getting flustered or defensive, she would get even more excited. Mid-lecture Karen would pull books off the shelf to search for the answer, or follow up by looking into a question after class.

Sometimes she’d find the answer and sometimes it just wasn’t known. When this happened we students saw that there was much left for us to sort out in the world, and this gave us a glimpse into the source of her enthusiasm.

Karen was up for researching anything, no matter how crazy it sounded. Thus, it was no surprise when she immediately agreed to help with my unique independent study proposal: I wanted to figure out what made people hungry.

At seventeen I was extremely thin. No matter what I did I couldn’t gain weight. But I thought that if I could figure out how the brain controlled hunger I could learn how to trick myself into eating more.

Karen could have scoffed at such an idea and pointed me towards a more traditional topic. Instead, she saw how interested I was, and was all in. We looked in books, sent emails and read articles, amassing as much information as we could about the brain and appetite.

I tried a few strategies, like drinking less milk with meals, but nothing seemed to work. In the end we found that the communication signals between the brain and stomach are complex, and certain aspects are poorly understood. Seizing a teaching moment, Karen pushed me to learn how multiple structures of the brain interact with the rest of the body.

The following year she helped me secure community based learning credits for shadowing neurosurgeons at our local hospital. And from there I was on my way.

Even though I eventually switched from an interest in medicine to marine biology, it was Karen’s infectious curiosity for science that pushed me towards this profession. She showed me that science can explain much of the natural world, but at the edges — when we hit the limit of what we know — is where things get most interesting.

And that’s where there’s work to do.

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