Sci-Ed

I only noticed the cold after my fingers had stopped responding.

I wasn’t able to press the camera shutter button any longer. In that 20 degrees F night, I was standing in the sidewalk with Science Online friends, and I had only a party dress on.

We had attended a few days of SciO14 lectures, when the conference attendees gathered for a party. One of the party guests, astrophysicist Katie Mack, bursts through the double doors and approached us with the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. She had an ominous look in her face. It was urgent. Through background chatter and music, I overheard:

“Jupiter’s four Galilean moons are visible tonight. We got big binoculars and we are going outside.”

Everyone in an audible radius of Katie immediately followed. No questions asked. No time for coats.

A small crowd of Science Online partiers scrambled outside in the sidewalk. One of the attendees set up the giant binoculars on a tripod. The term “binoculars” does not give it justice: the instrument looked more like a small telescope on stilts. (It’s peculiar how Science Online attendees arrive prepared. In their suitcases I found vials of freshly-collected caterpillars, and supersized mascot costumes. Which gives me an idea for my next photographic project. But I digress).

People took turns shivering and looking through the binocular lenses. Every time someone re-joined the crowd, a “just-seen-a-ghost” expression took over their face. An expression I knew very well.

I had felt it growing up, every time I peered through my telescope lenses. My first time feeling part of the global community when I could, like them, see the same comet. Or, years later, about to witness a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, stood in a Florida sidewalk with NASA fans watching the International Space Station flyby.

You finally understand that something is truly, literally, out of this world.

Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and Io (my favorite) were all brightly visible surrounding Jupiter. I had never seen the moons before. The scene reached its poetic peak when Katie, trembling (cold, giddy, or both?), narrated the story of Galileo’s discovery.

I was not sure I would be able to describe that moment, which is why I had pulled out my camera earlier that night. I had to flash-freeze the “human behind the scientist” scenes I’ve been observing throughout the Science Online conference. Before, I was secretly shown a squirming caterpillar, heard a first-hand speech on lemur costumed gloves, and got pulled out of a party to watch Jupiter.

Those warm and fuzzy Science Online moments can easily make one forget any turmoil.

This community made me feel welcome.

Later I noticed someone had draped a fleece coat over my shoulders.

Photo credit: ScienceOnline Together

Tomorrow, Sci-Ed team members Cristina and John start their journey to attend Science Online 2014. The conference starts on the 27th and is packed with science communication topics (in fact, there are so many interesting sessions it makes it difficult to choose). The organizers call this event an “unconference”: attendees are active participants in open forum discussions.

I’ll attend the Non-English Science Communication panel, and both John and I will attend the video workshop, among several other sessions. We’ll also tour the Duke Lemur Center and hopefully see a sideways hopping Sifaka (fingers crossed).

Sifaka lemurs, when on the ground, hop sideways. Photo credit: Duke Lemur Center.

Feel free to send us questions (@russo_cristina and @paleoromano), and follow us in real time using twitter hashtags #scio14, #sciox, #sciolang, and #scioprep.

Anna Trainer and I share the love for Brontosauruses. Specifically, of Brian Switek’s “My Beloved Brontosaur“: it was during one of Switek’s readings that I first met Anna. We continued to bump into each other in science writing events, and she quickly became my go-to paleontologist. Finally, it dawned on me that it would be great to have her perspective at Sci-Ed. Enjoy her guest post below, and find more information about Anna’s background on the bottom of the post. 

Last November, I observed university professors, school administrators, and employers from large corporations doing something unusual: agreeing with each other.

They were all attendees of The Close It Summit, a conference designed to find creative solutions for the work-skills gap. They were discussing the work-skills gap, an increasingly prevalent problem in the United States. The work-skills gap describes the discrepancy between the highly skilled, often highly technical jobs available and the college graduates with the requisite knowledge to fill them (a problem that greatly affects individuals in STEM fields). The conference brought together educators and employers to brainstorm innovative solutions for addressing these issues. It was a refreshing experience without any of the blame game that usually accompanies discussions about the skills gap. Both educators and employers recognized that the situation must evolve on both sides of the equation for the gap to be closed. Some of the propositions discussed included developing more intensive on-the-job training, offering co-op and internship experiences for students, and providing apprenticeships for high school, vocational school, or community college students.

The Work-Skill Gap: What is the role of educators?

Employers complain that they cannot find skilled workers to fill their vacancies, even when we were in the midst of the economic downturn. They maintain that the American education system is failing to prepare student for careers in highly scientific or technical fields. The reality is that the situation is complex and there is no simple solution. Although employers often blame the education system, educators contend that it is becoming more difficult to prepare students with the specific job skills when budget cuts hamper their efforts. Additionally, there is debate that the fault may lie not with the education system but with employers themselves. One simple solution often recommended by economists would be for employers to offer higher wages in order to get the skill sets they desire; oftentimes, with so many people desperate for jobs, it became easier to complain of a skills gap then to offer higher salaries. Students themselves, some of whom have earned degrees in STEM fields, are left frustrated at their inability to find good jobs. The problem continues to grow, and meanwhile the gap between the highly skilled and well compensated, and the low skilled and poorly compensated worker continues to widen.  Despite these issues, there is evidence that our educational system is not keeping pace with the demands of STEM careers. In a time where access to education should be more prevalent than ever in the United States, with knowledge and resources readily available at the click of a mouse, what is the explanation for the shortage of science, math and problem solving skills in our students?

What does money have to do with it?

The answers may not be the result of a deficiency on the part of education, but instead may be rooted in economics and politics. From pre-school through college, there are socioeconomic barriers to education. For example, preschool is not available to all students, despite the fact that it has been repeatedly demonstrated to be beneficial, both in terms of school performance and eventual socioeconomic status. Teaching has become less attractive as a career option, with teachers rarely being compensated competitively, combined with funding cuts, large class sizes, and ever-intensifying pressure to raise students’ standardized test scores. Barriers to higher education for individuals are difficult to overcome if they were raised in a low or even middle income family. With the costs of college seemingly exponentially on the rise, many people either decide not to go to college at all, or drop out with their degrees unfinished. The result is a young American populous pursuing jobs that they do not have the skills for, applying at companies who have no interest in using their own resources to train them.

It seems that even college graduates are falling further behind. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development demonstrated a troubling trend: American students are losing ground to their international peers in math, reading, and problem solving skills. Additionally, current American students are also falling behind earlier generations of Americans on literacy tests, with the current generation testing more poorly than 30 year olds did in 1994.  Another recent report agrees with these trends, citing inadequate education as the driving force behind the skills gap. However, the burden must not be laid solely at the feet of the academic institution. If employers are seeking the students with the best skills for their positions, they need to think of innovative methods for finding and training these workers.

Educators can’t do it alone!

Academic institutions are not designed to be vocational schools. Employers must also be willing to train workers for the jobs they have instead of looking for inexpensive employees who already have the skills. Apprenticeships, internships, and student co-ops are all viable options and should be further pursued across the scientific disciplines, as studies have shown that students with co-op experiences have higher starting salaries and employment rates.  In the meantime, college grads with degrees in the STEM fields will continue working for food in the hopes that the skills they earned in college will be enough for an employer to take a chance on.

The talented and skilled workforce is out there. There are thousands, if not millions, of college grads with the requisite skills for the workplace that are being overlooked by employers. The real difficulty seems to be in getting these individuals connected to the available jobs (and having an employer willing to pay you the wages your skills demand!). Recently, educators and employers have been joining forces to provide students with the necessary training. The Close It Summit is an example of this, but more work is needed, and requires a collaboration of employers, educators, and policy-makers. Opportunities in STEM fields will continue to grow; we just have to ensure that our workforce is given the chance to use their skills, and that those still in school are ready to achieve these opportunities in the future.

 Citations:

• Barnett, W. Steven. “Benefits of Preschool for All.” National Institute for Early Education Research (2006).
• Samuel Berlinski, Sebastian Galiani, Marco Manacorda. “Giving children a better start: Preschool attendance and school-age profiles”. Journal of Public Economics (2008)
•  Munby, Hugh, et al. “Co‐op students’ access to shared knowledge in science‐rich workplaces.” Science education 91.1 (2007): 115-132.

Anna Trainer is a Biological Anthropologist who enjoys all things related to human evolution and science education. Her recent research includes examining the variation found in the modern human mandible and pondering the age old question of why humans have chins. She has additionally studied hominin occupational behavior in the Middle Paleolithic time period of Central Asia. Anna can be contacted via Twitter at @AnnaKatieT

John Romano with an Eastern Indigo snake.

My wife is very forgiving which is why I can store my frozen rodents in the freezer. No, we are not dining on these rodents, but the menagerie of snakes in my life are.  In my previous post I discussed the benefits of keeping snakes in the classroom. An animal long stigmatized has the ability to instill confidence and curiosity in students.

I have been keeping snakes since I was in my early teens and worked as a reptile behavior researcher before becoming a teacher. The entry of snakes into my classroom was a natural progression for me and it was because of my vast experience with them that my administrator had no problem allowing them into the classroom. I have discovered science teachers get a little more leeway in acting eccentric. So a snake as a classroom pet is within our realm of normalcy.

In this post I hope to give other educators a good foundation for keeping snakes in their classroom. A classroom pet is always a good way to teach responsibility. Administrators love any outside-the-box methods of teaching. Let them know students will be using this animal not just to learn science, but to learn important life skills like responsibility and compassion.

Your administrator may bring up questions about health risks. Salmonella is often associated with pet reptiles. This can be a bit misleading. Most animals, including pets like hamsters and guinea pigs can carry salmonella, but because turtles are wild caught, and often live in terrariums there is a better chance of salmonella living on their shell. In fact the CDC considers turtles, water frogs, chicks, and ducklings to be risky pets. I have seen all of these animals in classrooms. Most snakes are kept in the same cage setup as hamsters and have little risk of ever having salmonella on their skin. I have been handling snakes for 25 years and admittedly have poor hand washing skills and have never had an issue. I do keep multiple bottles of hand sanitizer in the classroom and make sure the students properly sanitize after handling and/or cleaning.

I would wager students are more likely to salmonella in the lunch line than they are from snakes in a classroom.

So how do you get the students interested in taking care of snakes?

Most kids have a natural curiosity that will lead them there. A great way to pique this interest is to handle the snake in front of the students so they can see how easy it is. Modeling is always a great method for teaching students. Once one student comes up and holds the snake others will follow. From this point, when you have students asking to hold the snake is where you begin to add in the caretaking responsibilities. Which believe it or not are minimal. A student needs to changes the water bowl every couple of days or whenever it gets dirty (snakes love pooping in water bowls). When the snake does not defecate in the water bowl spot cleaning needs to be done. Simply taking a paper towel and picking up the feces. Other than feeding (we will get to in a minute) this is all that needs to be done.

I have a rule with my students, you cannot continue to hold and interact with the snakes unless you partake in the care taking process. Of course I let them interact with the snakes before they have any cleaning responsibility, you need to get them hooked. Plus you need to make sure they feel confident going in and out of the cage.

Feeding the snakes is what the students want to see. I do not feed live rodents. I learned my lesson when I was breeding mice for snake consumption and a student came up to me asking where Mocha and Cinnamon had gone. I feed my snakes frozen/thawed rodents. Simple, easy to do, and much cheaper.

I will on occasion feed a live rodent to a snake for students because it is an amazing process to watch. For most students it is like have a nature documentary unfold in front of them.

I do let the students personally feed the snakes, they really love this part. It makes them feel very accomplished to be able to say “I fed a rat to a python”. Which they will often brag to their friends about which will in turn bring more students to me asking to be involved.

I have set up a system where I have one student leader, this year she is a senior. The student leader has proven to me over the course of a year she can handle the animals and is trusted to lead younger students in snake keeping. There are about five other students who come twice a week to take care of the snakes with her. To sweeten the deal they earn community service hours, a requirement at our school.  I am there in case anything happens but I try to step back and let the students own the program. The worst case scenario is a student gets bitten by a snake. This is not a frequent occurrence but it does happen. Usually the end result is them taking a picture of a tiny spec of blood. All of them comment on how little it hurt and they were more scared of the surprise than of the bite. Smaller non venomous snakes don’t really pack any sort of a punch. A paper cut hurts worse than a corn snake bite, but the initial surprise is what frightens most people.

Once bitten, the students lose most of their fear and wear it as a badge of honor.

The most important aspect of making a snake work successfully in your classroom is you. The level of enthusiasm and interest you have dictates the level the students have. If you begin to lose interest in the animal so will the students. But really, who could ever lose interest in a snake?

If you are looking for more information on the nuts and bolts of keeping snakes I highly recommend the website. Kingsnake.com I have been using it for 15 years. It has everything you need from care sheets to breeders to reptile events.

As always, if you have any questions you would like to ask feel free to tweet me @paleoromano. I will be more than happy to answer any questions.

“Mr. Romano, I finished my work can I go get a snake?”

This often asked question by my students is the reason I became a teacher. More so, I have discovered that snakes can be an unbelievable teaching tool in the classroom. Lessons from Mendelian genetics to evolutionary adaptations reside in the cylindrical body of one of the most misunderstood animals on the planet.  I have been keeping snakes in my classroom for well over a decade. I keep a variety of species from my first boa I got at the age of 16 to an Eastern Indigo, a fascinating and protected species of snake.

The biggest reason I keep snakes in the classroom is not just for my enjoyment. I keep many at home as well. The reason is that snakes have the ability to instill confidence. Snakes, like bugs, come with a stigma. A fear that is so deeply rooted in some it is believed to be innate. I have had many students complain about the snakes in my classroom when they first enter my class. The complaints are generally about the inability to focus because they are nervous, but my favorite snake complaint so far in my teaching career was when a student raised his hand and said “Mr. Romano, that snakes keeps looking at me.”

The students may enter the year uncomfortable with the room, but daily exposure to snakes  in a controlled environment soon turns that fear into comfort, and comfort soon becomes curiosity.  Watching the body language of a student change as they hold a snake for the first time is what teaching is all about. Timid, stiff, and shaky when its first put into their hand. Then as the snake calmly moves around and they realize they are actually holding a snake they fight an urge to smile, stand a little taller, and in today’s current age of technology say “Can you take a picture with my phone”.

This is the real essence of teaching science, to develop curiosity and confidence in the student.  This combination provides the foundation for education, especially science education. The drive for inquiry is only as strong as the person’s ability to deal with setbacks. Students are going to face obstacles in both their education and their life. I know my students will face adversity in their pursuit of science in higher education. I may not be able to bring  equality to the world, but I can bring out the confidence in a teenager so they can overcome the inequalities and succeed.

Enter the serpent.

I have been keeping a variety of snakes in my classroom for over a decade. Each student is exposed to the snakes within their own comfort level. Minimally they see the snakes in the cages in the room, and at the other end of the spectrum they will participate in holding and feeding the snakes.  Regardless of where they start, all the students end up shifting forward on the spectrum. Those that were only comfortable viewing them from across the room eventually view them from in front of the cage. Those who were comfortable watching someone hold them eventually end up holding one themselves.

The ultimate reward for me came when one of my students decided to start a reptile club for other students. Saniyyah is a senior and has worked with me for a few years. This year she has gained enough knowledge to work with the snakes unsupervised.

Saniyyah attended Science Online Teen and was in a session about Women in Science being moderated by Hilda Bastian. Hilda asked the students to write something positive someone has said to you on a notecard. I was not in this session, but through the power of twitter I was able to see her response.

There is grandeur in this style of teaching, that from so simple a form as a snake, endless lessons most inspiring and wonderful have been, and are being learned.

Oh, a snake’s ability to instill confidence is not limited to just students, it works on Phd possessing PLoS Sci-Ed bloggers as well.

Sci-Ed blogger Cristina Russo holds her first snake, A green tree python. Her smile says it all.

Next week I will lay out the simple task of acquiring and caring for one of the most misunderstood animals on the planet.

When I was a child I suffered with this puzzling question: if my dreams feel so real, how do I know that life itself is real?

I was not a unique child – many others have the same question. It was only much later, when I was already in college that I came across some of Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophical concepts of defining reality. Curious child Evie, however, already got her answer to this same question at 5 years of age:

“Often we have dreams and they feel so real that we might wonder whether we’re dreaming right now too. It feels like you’re wide awake now, but doesn’t it feel like you’re wide awake in dreams too? How on Earth can you tell the difference? Maybe you’ll wake up in a moment and realize you weren’t reading this book — because it never existed!

 Well, at least you know you’re probably real. Because even if you were having a dream right now, there would have to be a you somewhere who was having that dream about yourself. But before your head starts spinning too fast, here’s the important thought. We only ever really know about the stuff we see and hear and feel, and that’s only a tiny part of what’s around us. (For example, you can’t see what’s happening in the next room, or in someone else’s head.) We can only guess at what’s real from the little bit we know about — and often we get it very wrong. … So even though you’re probably not dreaming, it’s worth remembering that you’re only aware of a small part of what’s real, too.”

That’s how invited guest Derren Brown answered to a kid’s question on the book Does my Goldfish Knows who I am? Big Questions and Instant Answers. Editor Gemma Elwin Harris compiled several kid questions and sought scientists, writers, philosophers and many others to answer them. Other questions include: why do we cry; how does our brain store so much information; whether the universe has an edge; or – my favorite –if animals have accents:

“Different breeds of dog may have different kinds of bark, and you may even be able to recognize an individual dog’s bark just as you can an individual person’s voice. But a dog’s bark does not depend on where it grew up and who its friends are or where it went to school — which are the main things that determine your accent or mine.”   

Answers like those are not just lovely, but a great way to enchant audiences – I’d even risk say they work for any age, not only for children. Going through the answers might help us – science educators and communicators – with our goal of communicating with clarity and ease.

Finally, I should thank wonderful cartoonist and illustrator Samanta Floor, who first pointed me to the book.  Along with the link, she sent me the comment:  “it reminds me of you answering science questions”.  You just made my day, Samanta, you just made my day.

Artist Samanta Floor also illustrates scientists and their dogs.