When I think about the impact I want my externship experience to have on my students, a lot of things come to mind.  I want them to learn about the reality of genetic research and how it is being applied to benefit natural and human life.  I want them to get a sense of what it means to be a researcher.  I want them to come in contact with some of the awesome stuff I learned this summer (like that it takes 800 millileters of bacteria culture to yield 5 microliters of protein).

More than anything, though, I want my students to open up to the idea that just because they are good at one thing, doesn’t mean they can’t be interested in everything.  I’ve been thinking back to my earlier ideas about crossroads thinkers who can combine scientific and artistic knowledge.  Writing my curriculum proved to me just how difficult that can be!  While we can’t all be geniuses in the way of Divinci or Lovelace, we can all cultivate our curiosity and become Renaissance thinkers.   By sharing my internship experience, I can introduce students to the novel idea that an English teacher can also be interested (and successful!) in science.  As a high school student, I remember signing up for classes and wanted to take classes like physics and AP Chemistry and anatomy, but I lacked the confidence in my own abilities.

I want all my students to feel confident enough to do anything.  I also want them to know that just because they don’t look like, or have the same experiences as others, doesn’t mean they can’t do what they do.  I can’t wait to tell my students and my colleagues how I spent this summer.  I hope to inspire future Fellows, and future Renaissance thinkers!

I finished my internship yesterday, and finished, as Brian said, “with a bang.”  I was able to run an experiment all the way through, from cultivated the bacteria, to purifying the protein, to running an experiment on how the protein was bonding with peptides.  Even more exciting, I was able to get awesome results that Erin, my postdoc mentor, is going to use in her upcoming paper.  The idea that my figures and my methods are going to be included in a scientific publication makes me so proud.  I never imagined that I would be able to achieve that in this internship!

I think my “aha! moment” also came with the end of this experiment.  Throughout much of my internship, I didn’t feel that I fully understand all the elements of what I was studying.  I didn’t, for instance, fully understand all the different controls that I was integrating in to the experiment.  When I saw how excited Erin was about my results, I decided that I needed to sit down and figure out what I was missing.  With her help, I suddenly felt like I got it!  Flipping through my lab notebook, I could see the process from beginning to end, how each part of the experiment went towards building clear results.  I could also see my own progress.  A few weeks ago, my films were cloudy.  When I purified protein, there were multiple bands that I hadn’t eliminated.  My films yesterday were clean, publication quality.  They indicated clearly where protein was binding.  All of my controls were even and were showing up as we expected.

Part of what I wanted to get out of this internship was to get a grasp of the scientific process, of the thought that went into designing an effective experiment and following it all the way through.  I’ve discovered that not only do I understand, but I was applying this knowledge all along to make my experiments better.  When something was going wrong, I would talk to Erin or Brian to figure out how to make it better.  By the end, I wasn’t going to them at all.  For example, when I saw last week that my controls were showing too much signal on the films, I upped the concentration of the gel I ran so the protein couldn’t “spread” as easily.  I also loaded less with a higher concentration of loading dye.  When I did that, my controls came out perfect!

Now that I have my “lab cred” I’m excited about doing research in the future.  Understanding the process scientists go through every day to build successful experiments will help me design studies in education.  In the fall, I want to look into how augmented reality apps can help my English Language Learners.  Maybe I’ll even look into publishing in some education journals in the future!

Fun fact: the word ‘curriculum’ comes from the Latin for the tracks on which chariots would race.  I sometimes feel when writing curriculum that I’m figuratively going around in circles.  Writing my Kenan curriculum, however, was exciting because I got to work with content that is new.  I feel most successful in integrating and bridging multiple courses in my lessons: if it works as I plan, students will be able to experience different aspects of genetic research in English, Science, and History all in the same day!

The challenge that I’m having at the moment is translating terms that I’m used to using so that other teachers can understand.  I’m constantly finding in education that we lack a common lexicon: what one school calls PLT’s, another calls PLC’s, or Grade Level Learning Teams, or whatever.  I had particular trouble explaining jigsaw reading groups in a concise way that made sense.  “Jigsawing” is one of my favorite teaching techniques so I wanted to make sure it was clear.  I’m not sure how successful I was, but I’m looking forward to getting feedback next week and seeing what other people are doing!

A few family members were in town over the weekend including my two-year old cousin, so we decided to go down to the Museum of Natural Sciences to see the animals.  After spending about 2 hours looking at turtles and butterflies (Nathan, the two-year-old, is surprisingly easy to please), I decided to go in search of the lab where Team Mite works.  I must say, your facility is AWESOME.  I love all the open glass so visitors can observe.  It’s too bad y’all weren’t there.  I would have loved to see some mites!

My original plan for integrating my externship experience into my classroom was to link it up with a novel.  When I began looking at the logistics of this, however, I discovered that I simply wouldn’t have enough time in that unit to add anything else.

I took a new approach: finding the places in my curriculum that needed enriching and then brainstorming how I could apply my new knowledge to give my students a new challenge.

A major part of my 11th grade course is helping students understand how language shapes our thinking.  Genetic research, I realized is fraught with controversy, much of which plays out in popular media.  We hear about “frankenfood” and the “experiement” of GMO foods.  The media tells us that scientists researching cloning are “playing God” and “defying nature.”  The reality which I have experienced during my externship is very different, and a lot less shocking than the media would have us believe.

I have decided, therefore, on a series of lessons that we will complete while my students read 1984 and Brave New World (which pose ethical questions about manipulation through language).    I have selected texts reporting on genetic research for my students to analyze and will give them an assignment to find their own texts and speculate what the influence of the text might be.  The timing of these lessons also coincides with the annual international festival at my school, giving us the chance to research and present on genetic research around the world.  Throughout, I can also provide a counterpoint with my own observations during my Kenan experience.

In other news, this week I successfully completed a peptide pulldown for a protein of interest.  The purpose of the pulldown is to isolate the protein with a series of peptides to see if they bond.  The protein I worked with this week is thought to not have any interaction with the peptides, but what I discovered might prove that wrong…

I am incredibly fortunate that my school embraces and assists teachers in integrating technology into the curriculum.  We have a plethora of technology tools, both to share and to use individually.  We are allowed to have students use their phones for instructional purposes.  We have consistent wireless internet throughout the school.  Students are always eager to use technology in the classroom.

The greatest resistance to technology in my school comes, oddly, from parents.  I think that many parents expect school to be like they remember it, and they may perceive anything involving technology as frivolous or fun (which sadly they equate to not serious learning).  Parents may also feel that their students are at a disadvantage if they do not have the technology tools at home that we have at school.   Students also tend to have a lot more “learning curve tolerance” than their parents do, taking the time to struggle and trouble shoot with a new piece of technology until they learn how to use it.

One of my greatest challenges in created a technology-driven classroom is helping parents understand that their children will need to be technology literate in order to succeed in the workforce.  As cliché as it is, the world is changing and it’s hard for the adults of today to imagine the world the younger generations will eventually inhabit.

More than anything I want to create great curriculum from this experience.  I want to show that collaboration between the humanities and the sciences is possible.  Basically, I want to put the “A” in STEAM.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Steve Jobs’ biographer made an interesting link between the Apple CEO and other great thinkers, such as Ada Lovelace and Leonardo Di Vinci. He calls them “innovators” and assigns a new, specific meaning to the word: people who gain a high level of both scientific and artistic knowledge and apply both to their work. In schools today, we don’t seem to be focused on raising young innovators. We create scheduling restrictions that force students to choose between taking band or taking advance science classes. We reward the passing of advance courses with extra points on GPA’s, thereby discouraging the most competitive students from taking classes in the arts. Even the geography of schools encourages a separation. The arts have a “wing,” the sciences occupy a newly renovated shiny building, and classes like English are tucked away in a mildew hall that hasn’t been updated since the 1930’s.

I think that we’re doing our students a disservice, not only by restricting the courses that they take but by imprinting them with the idea that STEM disciplines are distinct from everything else. Worse, we give them the idea that the types of thought required to be a good scientist, a good critic of literature, or a good sculpture are drastically different processes that can’t, and shouldn’t, overlap.

In completing my lesson plans for my Kenan Fellowship, I want to pick up the idea of innovators, but make a particular change. To some degree, the word “innovator” doesn’t adequately encompass the brilliance of someone like Lovelace or Jobs. Jobs himself said that he wanted to exist on “the intersection of technology and art.” The idea of an intersection, of two distinct paths that converge and overlap, seems a more fitting metaphor for the type of thinking we should strive for. Our aim in education should not be to teach students to apply different disciplines of knowledge on a hierarchy, but rather to make use of them simultaneously. Imagine, for instance, that a dance teacher and a physics teacher collaborated on units where students would apply their knowledge of physics to become better dancers, and their knowledge of dance to test and explore their understanding of physics. Fun fact, the reason women are able to complete say the 32 foute turns at the end of Swan Lake and men are not is because breasts provide a counter weight to help the dancer maintain the centrifugal force of the movement.

My learning goal for my time in the lab was to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that control gene expression and find a possible route of application to what I teach. I played with the idea of genetics as a language, but I quickly found that it is far more complicated than even the miraculous complexity of the signifiers and signified. In my Junior Language and Literature class, my students spend a semester unpacking and defining a series of contexts from an inclusive, global perspectives. One of these contexts is community and its role in shaping the lives of individuals and societies. In broad terms, the idea of DNA, histones, and enzymes as a community appealed to me. Just like a human community, we have distinct parts with distinct roles working together. Chemicals may not have a consciousness of their shared purpose, but I would argue that we really don’t either.

During our unit on community, we read the novel The God of Small Things by A. Roy. The thesis of the novel, if I can apply that term generally, is that of all the macro- and micro- forces that govern our lives, it is the micro-, the small things, that have the most sway. This is somewhat of a paradoxical idea and if you’ve read the novel you know that Roy presents it in labrythinan and abstracted terms. Students have a hard time accepting that a moment of fear on a bus ride through the mountains can have more of an impact on an individual’s life than a monsoon or a war. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to integrate some of what I learned here, for what could be smaller and more profound than what happens in the nuclei of our cells.

This connection gave me the idea for what I’ll call the “Small Things” project. In this project, students will get to extrapolate how concepts they learn about in their science classes impact human individuals and communities. They will also become crossroads thinkers as they simultaneously apply STEM knowledge with a humanities focus.
Working in their biology, chemistry, and English classes, students will craft answers to the following questions:

1) What are examples of Roy’s “micro-forces” from the sciences? Which am I personally most interested in?
2) To what extent does my micro-force of choice impact individual human life?
3) To what extent does it impact specific communities?
4) Can the analogy of a community be applied to understanding my micro-force? How?
5) How can I harness my understanding of this micro-force to improve human life?