First Week at George Washington Community School
Posted: August 16th, 2009
Author: Deborah Morrison-Ibrahim
Had a good week getting to the know the school by attending meetings/community partners lunch the day before school started. Turns out I have already met several of the school partners thru my thesis work in the area. I met the students in Mr. Brocius’s classes the second day of of school and helped the students with the triple beam balance lab (while injecting the importance of replicates and comparing answers). I was also asked to pick 5 students out of the Biology Honors class to go with me the next day to do some soil sampling on the football field since I was asked to run some other samples in the lab. These students were FANTASTIC and I used this time while sampling to talk with them about future goals and interest in science and who might be interested in helping me start up an ecology/earth science club. These 5 students seemed very interested. We talked about how they could be the leaders of the club and guide the topics and general theme. On Friday after sampling I was asked to help out Mrs. Harrison’s Biology Class. It was interesting to see the difference between the High School and Middle School students. Mrs. harrison asked me to talk about my project and what I do at the University and I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised at the type of questions being asked and the great interest. It was kind of a free for all with questions, so was really fun to answer the students. Mrs. Harrison also invited this class to use a sign-up sheet for interest in the Ecology Club, with several students (at the 8th grade level) signing up before the end of the class.
I also met with the vice-principal about getting the Earth Science class back on the curriculum for the Spring Semester. All in all, I am very happy to start my work in classroom and learning frommy teacher partners and I look forward to learning more about how to get more of these students interested in science.