Friday Fun: Elementary School Edition

"What do owls eat?"

This past Thursday was my last SEP science lesson for this school year. Building from our digestion theme from the last visit, this lesson was all about owl pellets. Owls frequently swallow their prey whole. However, they cannot digest the prey's fur or bones, so they regurgitate the material. 

Scientists often collect the owl pellets and study their contents to determine seasonal eating habits and estimate populations of various rodent species. Owl pellets are also a common first dissection for elementary school children, as the bones are well-preserved, it feels like a treasure hunt for the kids, and they can learn fantastic scientific method skills like asking questions (What do owls eat?), testing their hypotheses (performing the dissection), analyzing the results (What did we find in the owl pellets? How many of each rodent are there?) and drawing conclusions. 

The children were incredibly excited to do the owl pellet dissection--constantly calling one of us over to show what they had found or to ponder what a particular bone was used for. It was a whirlwind end to the semester, but everyone (including the teachers) seemed to really enjoy it.

After both classes were finished, the teachers presented us each with a bouquet of flowers

Flowers! 

and a packet of really cute thank-you letters. 

This student drew a picture of the preserved small intestine we brought. 

Fun and cute excerpts from our thank-you letters:

1) Dear Mr. Louise (sic) and Ms. Christina...

2) I liked to touch the guts but the guts stinked (sic).

3) It was cool when you put germs on our hands. 

4) I remember when you had five senses.

5) Thank you for visiting our class room and teaching us cool science stuff? (sic)

This was my third year in a row volunteering with SEP. I also think this was my favorite year. The teachers we partnered with were absolutely amazing! The students were always so well-prepared before we came in and always asked insightful questions. Their preparation and the students genuine enthusiasm made it really easy to get them thinking aloud and participating in the experiments. 

As Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician wrote:

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because

he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful." 

I hope Louise and I had a positive influence on the students and that some of them choose to stick with science. It's a field with many ups and downs, but it's also so full of wonder and awe. 

Science Questions from Second Graders

The following is a partial list of the questions asked to me and my classmate today while teaching 2nd graders about the 5 senses:

1. Do we get to try all the [5 senses] stations?
2. Do you like candy? Do you like sour patch kids?
3. Do you like lemonade?
4. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?
5. Why are we eating paper? [When passing out the taste test strips]
6. Are you poisoning us?!! [After eating the bitter-tasting PTC test strip]
7. What's on your face? [Pointing to a handful of pimples on my forehead]
8. Can you still taste if you are death [sic]? [I think this student meant 'deaf']
9. How does hair grow?
10. Why do stars glow?
11. What is a shooting star?
12. Does Pluto still exist?
13. Do you have fun?
14. Do you still live with your parents?
15. Do you have a boyfriend?
16. How old are you?
17. Are you two [myself and my classmate] sisters?
18. How do tornados get strong enough to throw houses and basketballs and stuff?
19. Why do we get storms?
20. When are you coming back?

Can't wait to see what they come up with for the next time I visit!

Volunteering with SEP

One of the things that I'm really excited about is teaching. Teaching is something I did throughout high school and college, both as a tutor and a more formal Teaching Assistant. I really enjoy that "Aha!" moment, when a student has been struggling with a particular concept for a long time, and it finally clicks with them. The other thing that I am really passionate about is science outreach. There have been a number of studies exploring the reasons why people shy away from science, or why the reasons why certain groups are underrepresented in various fields. I'm not going to get into this topic too much in this post, sufficient to say that I think early exposure to science is critical. And what better way to combine early exposure to science and teaching that through volunteering in public schools!

UCSF has a program called "Science and Health Education Partnership" (SEP). The basic idea behind the program is to pair students/postdocs with a teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District. The scientist-teacher team then plans and executes a series of lessons throughout the semester. Sometime programs last a few months and the scientists teach just 4-6 lessons, whereas other programs last the entire school year. 

So far I've been involved in two semester-long programs during my time at UCSF. As a first-year grad student, I was involved in the Bio&ChemTeach program. I was paired with a 7th grade Life Science classroom, along with two other students from my graduate program. The school where we taught was ranked in the bottom 5% of schools in California, and served mostly students of Latino decent. Our lessons were designed to fit into their existing curriculum--and thus didn't really follow a theme or share continuity with each other.

One of my favorite lessons from last spring was entitled "A Day in the Life." We asked the students to describe various characteristics shared by scientists. We kept a list of their ideas on the chalkboard. As would be expected, the students came up with many popular stereotypes: geeky, no friends, pale from working all day in the lab, evil geniuses, (and my personal favorite) "tall socks and crazy hair!" We quickly broke down some of these stereotypes with help from this Tumblr: This is What A Scientist Looks Like. The students were still a bit incredulous, as many of them had never considered that scientists were anything other than white males. 

We had also put together a slide show of "A Day in the Life." I literally took a camera to work and documented my day down to the minute. Some of the slides were serious--photographs of me preparing a reaction in a round-bottom flask, or pipetting compounds into a 96 well plate. Some of the photos were silly--giving bunny ears to an unsuspecting lab tech or pretending to sword fight with paper towel tubes after lunch. Mostly we tried to show activities like attending seminar with classmates, performing an experiment, or eating lunch with my friends--all of the types of things they do in school. At the end of the slide show, we also had some photos from activities I enjoy outside of the lab: hiking in the Grand Tetons; playing rugby; swing dancing. My partner and I also took the time to emphasize that neither one of us got "the best" grades in science classes--but that we stuck with it because it was something we enjoyed.  

For many of the students, this slide show and our admission of average grades was a revelation. The discussion we had at the end of our lesson was rowdy! They talked excitedly about different types of science fields, frequently interrupting each other to ask my partner or I questions about our hobbies or the classes we took in high school to prepare to study science. More importantly in my book, they no longer saw science as an unattainable career path pursued only by socially-awkward white men. 

This spring, I am involved in SEP's STAT program, which stands for "Scientist-Teacher Action Teams." I was paired with a 4th-grade classroom along with another student who is in UCSF's Neuroscience grad program. I will save the details of our lessons for another time because this post is already too long. But needless to say, I am excited to be back in the classroom and excited to expose elementary schoolers to the joys of science.


Getting Involved in the Bay Area:
1) UCSF Science and Health Education Partnership
2) Bay Area Science Festival
3) UCB Lawrence Hall of Science
4) Community Resources for Science