Finally...our Classroom Invert Zoo!

[Raventears]

I have industry experience as well as degrees in Horticulture, Agriculture and Extension Educ, and half of a M.S. in Forensic Entomology, I can contact my former professors and friends at UN-L or NMSU for input. I am not ignorant to data applications in many sciences (as well as the application of Entomology into each as well) but will research and contact those people I need to in order to give my students the best experience I can. I currently teach SPED\science so can, will, and do incorporate the zoo into each of my classes to expand the kiddos' experience, the days info can go into each of the classes I teach differently. (Bio, Chem, and Physics are what I'll be teaching next year.) Thank you for the ideas\suggestions! I will keep them in mind! Maybe you can provide some of that input one day. (Just a thought since you offered the advice.)

 

[The Snark]

@Raventears FANTASTIC!! With a background like that you have all the tools to take it from just another class in skool and turn things into a life enriching series of programs.
I don't mean to tell you your business but just a suggestion: intrigue. Instill incentive. Excite curiosity. Make every student a scientist working on their own hypothesis. All scientists are detectives, each with their own methodologies in solving mysteries. Data gathering, critical and destructive analysis. Multiple hypothesis. All the scientific methods have their roots in the most basic easy to understand functions and processes.

A science class. The project on the blackboard: "Let's drive path lab crazy." Every student took four swabs from somewhere on their bodies and cultured them. Then pass analysis, determining the predominant organisms. Then the detective work. Probable origins of the organisms. Pathways. Time frames. Ideal growth conditions. Off into forensic analysis. Predictions to be held against critical analysis. And a little comedy here and there as the class discovers who took swabs from around which locations or orifices. That's a fungus. Do we have a foot fetish here? Gram neg reminiscent of...? Oh come on. Give us a hard one.

By the way, when teaching science it always helped me to be reminded that all sciences are open ended. They are constantly growing, learning and adapting like all successful organisms. A nutshell with examples of this would be the VLT which has various condensed simplified progressions of it's evolution well documented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope. Something an on top of it teacher could take students on a virtual stroll through in an hour or a few days.

 

[Ferrachi]

That'a to bad about the website... I never even got to see it, can't wait for the new website !

Classroom invert zoo, such a great idea !