There are so many things that I’ve learned from my internship just in these past few days, it seriously seems like a dream. During the first day in the Paleo-Lab it is almost silly how much my teammates and I enjoyed sorting through a bucket of sediment to find shark teeth, but the more we looked and found, the more we started making observation and asking question about the teeth. Which snowballed into something amazing.
We were excited about learning again and we were thinking like scientists… Then it dawned on me, I am a scientist? Don’t get me wrong that idea excited me, but it just took a little getting use to. I’ve never really thought of myself as a Scientist, Artist sure, but Scientist… not really. Then I realized that *this* must be exactly how our students feel, a sense of disbelief with a twinge of excitement and hope.
Throughout these two weeks, my colleagues and I have learned tons of information about sharks, their teeth, and their jaws. Gone on an adventure to Florida and taken over 1800 pictures of individual shark teeth! But honestly the most amazing things that has happened so far came from just the four of us talking together. We talked about almost every facet of the educational landscape and how to make lessons like the Citizen Science projects, rock the educational work. We want to bottle the lightning that is our Kenan Fellowship for other teachers and create that sense of wonder that seems to have been lost in our current educational system.
This fellowship has solidified how I feel about integration and creating lessons that are REAL, about creating lessons that inspire curiosity and invigorate students into asking questions to digger deeper. I want to create experience for my students that they are never going to forget. And my only question now is “how do I create a year full of these lessons?” and I’m hoping that by the end of my fellowship I will have answered that question.