Collecting Bugs to Change the Planet (and My Students)!

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

Homer is credited with saying, "The journey is the thing." Science classes require students to learn a great deal of vocabulary and basic concepts, but Homer was right, what's important is what you do with those concepts. How you get an answer is often just as important as the answer itself.

There's something truly magical, beautiful, and frustrating about high school students.

Honestly, while they make me crazy on occasion I really love watching them become adults, and more importantly, watching them learn what it means to be adults. 100% of our students receive free and reduced price lunch, and over 85% are 2nd language learners. My students also often have numerous responsibilities outside of school, including caring for siblings and helping with family expenses. Since we began offering AP Environmental Science (APES), which is a senior elective, I've had a wide spectrum of students, from our valedictorian, to students with GPAs that hover around 2.0, for whom this is their 1st and only AP class. Anything I can use to better engage my students and teach them lessons about the environment, and science, which stay with them beyond their time in my classroom is a worthwhile endeavor. Taking students into the field to engage in investigations has proven very effective.

My Project

A short walk from my room is a culvert that feeds a major river. Our local CoastKeeper program has helped my classes engage in annual water quality testing of the culvert. The results have been disheartening. With these boots, sieves, bowls and other sorting materials, we'll conduct multiple bioassessments each year in an effort to add to our current understanding of the health of the culvert. Students will actually wade into the culvert to collect macroinvertebrates, quantifying their tolerance of pollution as a way to measure the area's water quality. Additionally, students will try to determine the major sources of any pollution, then propose and implement mitigation projects of their own designs. The students will then analyze the effectiveness of their plans, suggest alterations, and share their results with the community at large. One of the goals is to change polluting behaviors, and inspire future community based action. Is there any better way to Teach for the Planet?

This project addresses multiple parts of the APES curriculum, such as pollution and water use, while we undertake field investigations to a greater depth than ever before.

Arguably, the most lasting value of this project will be to engage my students in real world environmental improvement plans of their own designs, with all of the challenges and triumphs that can entail. Ultimately, I want to give my students tools to positively affect the world in the future, since it will one day be theirs.