I am a Scientist

Week one over? Really?

The first week of the externship is over and it is really hard to believe.  On one hand it feels like we just started and on the other Monday’s opening activities feel like forever ago.  It’s that weird feeling you get when you are engrossed in what you are doing and loving every minute.

I am really intrigued by the idea of Citizen Science.  Mostly, I am trying to find the best way to teach my students the importance of giving to the scientific community and, by extension, impressing on them the importance of global citizenship.  This idea has surfaced in two major ways this week:

Chris and I working out photographing really small teeth

One – the product-oriented goal:

How can we increase the accuracy and efficiency of student citizen scientists using the shark teeth identification project as a model?  Our team has been talking about this idea and this week we had a few ‘A-ha’ moments.  More to come on that as we work to develop our product.

Two – the goal that is more impacting on me:

Some back story: My team has been finding shark teeth this week.  Every morning we show up in the lab and walk straight to the bucket of sediment we got to play in at the beginning of the week.  Within minutes, we are dropping tiny fossils onto a plate.  We’ve found big ones, small ones, average ones, really unique ones.  Sometimes, Bucky can’t pull us away from it.  It’s awesome.

I’ll be honest, there’s a twinge – an urge – to keep them.  To make those teeth into a necklace.  To take them home to my kids and show them and let them have a couple to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over…and I’m 38.  I am going to be taking 13-yr-olds through this activity and fight the teenage version of these feelings.

So I brought it up.

Hey Bucky, don’t the 8th graders want to keep some of these teeth?  Do we have the ones for the ‘project’ sent to you and then have them sort a couple for themselves?  Shouldn’t all the teeth go to the museum?

And it sparked a great conversation about the ethics of fossil finding and got to a major point of science.  There are some amateur fossil hunters doing scientific work – rabid for finding and classifying and naming the fossils that they have found – and keeping it to themselves.  They have a great display piece for their home and the world has lost that piece of information. But the work that citizen scientists do is for the greater good and knowledge of the world.  The sense of giving back is the reward.  Knowing that the work done has led to sound research and will be stored in a museum collection for future generations is amazing.

This idea was driven home when we got a tour of the Prairie Ridge Ecostation Research Lab’s extensive ‘wet’ collection (wet because most of the specimens are stored jarred in pure ethanol).  We went through aisle after aisle, room after room, past millions of documented species. Most of them had green dots on the lids and it was explained that each specimen in those jars (with green-dots) had been used in published research and were available for future scientists – professional and amateur – to look up and study.  That’s when the idea and the importance (and the magnitude) of museum collections really hit me…like a ton of embalmed hagfish.  This lab was one part of one museum’s collection, in one state, in one country, in one…oh my gosh.  The tradition and importance of donating finds to scientific research is finally impressed upon me.

That afternoon I headed back home to see my family.  Excited, but a little filed with dread.  Since telling my five-yr-old son, D, about my externship he’s been asking if I will bring him a shark tooth.  I have been side-stepping the question for four months and now I had to deliver the bad news. Lying next to him that evening I broke it to him…and was floored at his response:

You mean the teeth I find will stay in the museum?  The paleontologists are going to look at the teeth I find?

Its that sense of wonder and awe at contributing that I saw this week at the research lab and in my son that I will be working to foster in my students from now on.  To me, it is at the heart of the citizen science movement and may be the most important lesson we teach throughout our developed lessons.