Wow, my summer experience came to an exciting conclusion on Monday with our necropsies of 18 chickens in the homeostatic group of our ovarian cancer study.  I can’t say it was particularly pleasant putting the chickens down (I respectfully declined to actually do said act), but the professors leading the necropsies were extremely instructional and made sure that I understood every part of what we were looking at and also informed me of a lot of background information.  This last day was a look at the “other side” of the study I participated in.  Most of time was spent in the lab analyzing samples of glycans trying to determine the best way to study them.  Eventually those determined procedures will hopefully be critical in determining which, if any, glycans can be used as biomarkers for ovarian cancer.  The chickens, of course, are our animal models, and in order to study the possible biomarkers, we need chickens with cancer.  It felt strange that we were all so hopeful that some of the birds had cancer, but we quickly got over that when we realized that at least 5 of them did.

I know that I will take all of the aspects of my study with me into the classroom this year and beyond.  I have made arrangements with my mentor to continue my relationship with him and his team and I truly feel like I am part of a new team.  I am going to use this great experience as a springboard for even bigger things.

I’m not really sure that I’ve had an Aha Moment that I can write about (I’ve already written a previous post about one such event), but I think this whole summer has been an Aha experience.  From working with other teachers who are excited about:  1) teaching, 2) teaching science and math, and 3) doing intense real-world science over the summer, to actually working in the lab during my externship, to learning about all of the technological innovations, I have been enriched by the entire experience.  I have made some friends and I know that I will continue to communicate with Fellows across curriculum boundaries.  I know that I am going to apply for some grants that I otherwise wouldn’t have or wouldn’t have even known about.  I start school next week, and while I know that I am excited to work with my new group of students, I am also saddened that the externship is coming to an end.  I’ve already talked to my mentor about coming back periodically and checking in on the studies that I’ve participated in.  Depending on what I end up doing next summer, I might see if he’ll let me come back and do some more work.  Of course, I also know that being a Kenan Fellow will also open other doors of opportunity for me too, so I’m excited to see what those might be going forward.

So, Lisa came for a visit today and one of the first questions she asked me was what and how I was incorporating my externship experience into my curriculum.  It’s an important question, but it’s one I have an issue describing as fully as I would like.  There is so much here I would like to incorporate and many ideas that my collaborators have given me, but a lot of it, I fear, is a bit too high level for my students.  Not that I don’t want to challenge them, but I don’t want do so without providing an adequate base, and I don’t want them to just say “this is too tough” and shut down.

Lisa, though, was pointing out that even some of the lab safety issues were things I could bring up – and I had just taken some pictures of some of the safety equipment and rules posted around the lab, so I definitely could incorporate that into lesson plans.

I think that the first lesson plan (which I called “An Analytical Chemist, a Biochemist, an Animal Scientist, and an Oncologist Walk into a Lab…No Joke”) was a fairly broad first piece.  I think on subsequent ones that I need to hone in on more specific topics (polarity, relative atomic mass, isotopes, bonding, bond dissociation energy, etc.).

I’m assuming that this blog post is supposed to be about the curricular pieces we develop from our Kenan experience.  However, as I’m typing this I have some other thoughts about curriculum and North Carolina’s ideas about it.  It’s looking like NC and the powers that be at the state level are going to remove us from associating with the Common Core.  Now, I wasn’t a big fan of how the Common Core was developed or implemented in the first place, but we (meaning the politicians in NC) don’t seem to have a much better plan in developing the NC Essential Standards either…and the Common Core is just standards – it’s not curriculum.  It’s objectives, standards and goals – not how things are taught, but what is to be accomplished.  I still think that people get confused about that.  The Next Gen Standards even make it a point to say that.  There’s still a lot of freedom for educators and also responsibilities on educators to develop meaningful curricular pieces and lesson plans…now, if we can just get the people making these decisions to see that we should have a large voice in what the new standards are going to be, then we should be heading in the right direction.

As I’m trying to make my first lesson plan based on my summer externship, I am struggling a bit with this.  I know that I am going to be able to bring back some big picture ideas (importance of technology, collaboration between different specialists, real world problems, scientific method/procedures), but I’m also struggling with smaller ideas that I can bring back and translate.  I don’t think I can count the times when I’ve said something like “could you explain that again?” or “you lost me there” or something along those lines.  The work that they’re doing here is really important and intense, but it’s also advanced.  I know I can bring back some ideas on polarity and hydrophobicity, but there’s a lot of biochemistry here.  My lack of familiarity with biochemistry (and I do have a degree in chemistry, I should point out) makes me uncertain how to approach this with my students and whether I can go into too much detail (time-wise and also making sure I don’t aim way over their heads).  My first lesson plan is actually going to be a project, so that should alleviate some of the in-class time concerns, but I’m going to really have to think more about how specifically I’m going to be pulling this experience in.  I have lots of ideas – just need to translate them into meaningful experiences for my students.

I think we’re writing an “Aha” blog post in a couple of weeks – probably more pertaining to pedagogy – but I had an aha moment (or day) yesterday, so I thought I’d share.  I was at NC State yesterday from about 8am to 8pm.  The largest portion of that time was trying to trouble-shoot a piece of equipment (or several pieces of connected equipment – liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer machine).  I realized that these scientists (really, in this environment, the grad students) do most of the maintenance of the equipment.  They don’t generally call people in to fix the instruments – there just aren’t really people to do it.  I’m sure that Thermo and the other equipment companies have some people who can do some major repairs, but the instruments are so precise and intricate that there’s constantly issues with them.  And the equipment companies would rather sell new equipment than fix the old machines anyway.

I asked the grad student  who’s known as the instrument guru how he got that moniker and he just said that he probably played with the equipment more than the others….this is really expensive equipment, but I guess that that’s the only way they’re going to figure out how to fix things.  My first day here my mentor showed me one of the primary pieces of equipment that they use – two former grad students built it.  I never knew that this level of engineering was required.  Industry may be different, but I suspect that they still have to trouble-shoot a lot.  I should point out that we never did get the machine working quite right yesterday!  Hopefully we’ll figure it out today.

I think there are technology challenges that all teachers share – keeping up with them is one that springs quickly to mind.  I like to think that I am pretty informed and that the digital learning experts in my district are on the ball, but I learned way more about technology tools in a few days at NCCAT that I had over the last 5-6 years at other PD opportunities.  Sometimes it’s overwhelming what’s out there and figuring out when/if you can use things in class (or outside of class) to enhance the educational process.

Another challenge I suspect that most of us share is the technologies available across platforms.  I have a PC desktop, a PC laptop, a Chromebook, and an iPad at school (and my smartphone works on an Android platform).  These devices and the platforms don’t always work well together.  We’ve never really had computers for the students (we’re in a unique position at a community college campus), so having enough devices to run the same kind of program/app has been a struggle.  We have had limited access over the years to the community college’s computer labs, but it’s not like we can load software onto their computers.  Last year we started ordering some Chromebooks and hopefully that will help address this issue to some degree, but sometimes the best apps are only operable on iPads, so that can still be an issue.

Ultimately the major technology issue that we have, and one that I’m sure is universal, is expense.  The cost of technology precludes much of it from use.  Even apps that start out free sometimes end up changing into pay ones.  Our district does a good job in some ways of trying to get district licenses for certain items, but then when people don’t use them to their capacity, we drop them.  Other items are just too expensive to even consider.  One of the pieces of software that I’m using this summer is ChemBioDraw.  It’s phenomenal and certainly didn’t exist when I was in school.  It might be more than my students need, but I would love to have it as an option – I just looked up the price and just to get it on one school computer would be $1290 (that’s at a massive discount to the commercial price of $3090).  Alternatively, I could just get a license for one year – at $490/year.  We obviously don’t have the budget for that.

Going to stay positive about all this, though, because my school is in better position than it was a few years ago, and I now know about a lot of free/inexpensive technologies that I didn’t know about before last week!

I started my research on Sunday.  It actually takes about 5 days of prep time before we can analyze the samples and since Friday is July 4, we wanted to get started in time.  Luckily, one of my mentor’s grad students was willing to come in help me.  That prep took about 4 hours and we discussed the methods and procedure going forward.  Yesterday was pretty intense, although for a good portion of it I was watching water drip (ok, it wasn’t exactly just water, but that’s the joke around here) – as I was conditioning several Solid Phase Extraction Graphitized Carbograph Columns.  We had to use HLPC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) water which I was told cost about $300 per 4L bottle.  I told the grad student that that was more than my budget for most years – she was shocked.  The research world is truly different in many ways than the world of public education.

Today is long but relatively relaxed.  I had to freeze the samples overnight at -80C and the first five-six hours of today they are in an evaporating centrifuge.  Then I’m going to re-suspend them, mix them together again and then freeze them…then they’re back in the evaporating centrifuge for another 2-3 hours.  The prep work is pretty involved, but since the test has only been done a few times, we’re hoping at the end that the results corroborate what they have seen before – of course, the interpretation of the results are the most difficult part (according to my colleagues), so I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to go.  Looking forward to it, though.