Tomorrow I embark on my 4th Earthwatch trip, this time to the subarctic in Canada. It is an unexpected trip, as I took one last summer to Andorra, but a former student of mine, Lilly, asked if I would do this trip with her, and how could I say no??!!?? Here is a fun picture of us at a freezing tennis match 7 years ago (I also coached tennis back in the day)
When I taught high school Biology at Beacon Academy in Evanston, IL, I took students on Earthwatch trips: for high school students, to be able to immerse themselves in the science they studied in textbooks, to see their faces light up when they made a classroom connection out in the field, to gather data that actually was important to scientists – it was often a highlight of a student’s memory of their teenage years.
Lilly was part of a group of students who were supposed to go on a trip in the spring of 2020, but needless to say, COVID erased that, and she has a credit that she will use on this trip. A fun science connection, I remember when Lilly and her friend Abby first used the microscope: most people are like, whatever, it makes things look bigger. But actually, this is not true: microscopy doesn’t increase the size of things, it increases the resolution – the space that you can see between things.
So we peeled some red onions, and then popped them under the microscope, and this, this folks is where Lilly and her friend Abby were hooked: they kept looking at the red onion, and then looking at what they saw under the microscope (which were the individual cells that made up the skin of the onion), back to the red onion skin, back to the microscope…
↓↓↓
And then, after school that day, both Lilly and Abby came to me and said “Abby cut herself – she’s fine, but can we look at her blood under the microscope?” !!!!! I just laughed – again, how could I say no!?! I wish I had a picture of those cells, but the girls were so amazed that the human red blood cells were so much smaller than the onion cells, and so spherically shaped in comparison….and in a drop of blood squeezed out of poor Abby’s finger…
The love of science – exemplified that day – is so infectious…
