I cannot believe that I am actually a Kenan Fellow. I will admit that I applied for the program not knowing very much about it. I knew I would get to do some kind of science, and I knew it would give me new, relevant material to bring into my classroom, but it wasn’t until this week that I really started to get an idea of what it would be like to be a Fellow.
Personally, I am excited to have become part of this group of fantastic educators, all of whom seem to be taking on dozens of different projects and initiatives. I am someone who likes to keep striving and taking on new challenges, and I think that this program is going to provide plenty of challenges of its own, but also open up a world of professional advancement that I haven’t been able to learn much about since moving to North Carolina. I am so looking forward to having this great network of teachers to share resources, ideas, and opportunities, and to continually push me to push myself further.
Of course, I’m not just in this for myself. I also know that my students will benefit greatly. The teachers at my school heard frequently last year that our students needed to spend more time looking at and analyzing data. As a science teacher, I think this is a great idea in principle, but in practice I have a hard time finding meaningful, manageable data for my students to work with. Now, with the help of the great researchers I’ll be working with, I can give my students access to real data, relevant to the topics we are studying, and, with a little work on my part, presented in a way that is reasonable to expect them to handle. This summer, I get to spend four weeks in a cutting edge genetics lab. I can’t bring my students with me for those four weeks, but with a little luck and the help of my mentor and fellow Fellows, I should be able to bring some of that lab experience to the students.