Just came back from another Citizen Science program at Bard College. This is my second year teaching this course, and as like last year, you cannot predict what is going to happen when you try teaching Science to Liberal Arts college students. These students are mostly first year undergraduates, with a couple of hitchhikers from second year. And most, if not all of these students HAVE NO interest in Science, let alone spend two weeks in the middle of cold winter talking about Science.
This year's topic, taking inspiration from the incident at Flint, is about contamination in the water. There are a couple of classes where we have to teach basic chemical structures and statistics, proved to be a bit more challenging in keeping the interest of the students. In most cases, I kept the classes pretty simple and fun, since the goals of the course was to increase the science literacy of the students. They were not expected to learn any chemical compounds, biological concepts etc, just knowing how to find the evidence behind the pop-science articles, and relay them to their friends and families in a non-scientific manner. If they can do this, my job is DONE!
I am blessed with a good class this year - no one was particularly hard to handle, everyone handed in their homework on time, and no one was absent for no good reasons. At the end of the course, two other faculty members and I combined our students' presentations, and made it an event. There was posters, videos, games and even cakes and cookies.
Although it was winter and most days we were running from one class to another or preparing materials for the next class ... I remembered to take a moment once in a while to enjoy the views.
