Beginning now I will be blogging my experiences as a scientist and educator throughout my year in my Kenan Fellows program and hopefully beyond. I began by setting up my blog. I picked this theme and these colors and I thought about all the things that I wanted to say about my students, my school, myself, and my Kenan work and research. The one thing that really stumped me while setting up this blog was its title. I asked family and friends for ideas on what to call this blog where I would write my thoughts for the next year and even looked at blogs by other Kenan Fellows for inspiration. I was stumped, I had writers block before ever writing a post. This is something you will notice about me throughout the year if you read along, my obsessive tendencies take over and I become a pitbull who won’t let go of a problem until I feel it’s been solved. How could I title a blog that will cover my second year of teaching, my experiences in my Kenan Fellowship, my wedding, and all the amazing things my students do daily to amaze and inspire me.

I did eventually settle on a title, which is now obvious because you see it at the top of the page. Eventually I stopped trying to be clever or cutesy and started thinking about what I wanted out of this year for my students and for myself. As a passionate scientist since age 6, I knew I wanted my  students and myself to be a part of science, to help create new understandings and discover amazing things. This thought quickly led me to two posters that hang in my classroom. The first is a quote by Bill Nye (the science guy) : “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” This is the attitude I want my students and myself to approach the world with; you never know who or where new knowledge or exciting discoveries will come from. The second poster is one I constantly point out to my students and has become a large part of my teaching philosophy. It is one I made myself and has a quote by one of my favorite scientists and science educators: Carl Sagan. This poster says “It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has led to the stunning and unexpected findings of science”.

I use this quote to show my students how science is always changing, how there is incredible real science that seems like magic, and how there is plenty fake “science” and pseudo-science that seems real. I tell them to stay in that place between creativity and skepticism, that place where everything is exciting and feels possible and yet you’re also constantly questioning how it can be or could one day be real. That is what I want out of this year, I want my students and myself to questions what is possible and to push the limits of our scientific knowledge and engineering talents. So this year I will be quoting Carl Sagan.