Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I’ve just spent the last three weeks teaching STEM classes to disadvantaged students in a summer program all throughout the Tulsa metro area. I have to say, it was equal parts incredibly awesome and incredibly sad.

For those that don’t know, STEM classes are Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathmatics based classes designed to give students a good basis in the technical fields and encourage them to pursue future classes or careers in the hard sciences. Since I volunteer for the Nature Center, the classes I teach are basic Biology, and revolve mainly around the actual birds, plants, and animals that are common to our area.

On the awesome side, most of the kids were very interested, willing to take risks answering even when they weren’t at all sure their guess was correct, and they were quite observant.

The bad side?

The vast majority of these students are profoundly ignorant of even the most basic science.

I had numerous fifth graders, in different schools, ask me when the beaver pelt I brought with me would “be alive again”.

Really.

Unfortunately, they were not talking about decomposition- where the creature’s bodily nutrients return to the soil and fed other living things. A disturbing number of them actually believed that the beaver hide I held, a skin that has been on display since their parents were in grade school, would return to life.

Nearly all the students believed that ducks and flamingoes were not birds. I never figured out what they thought these creatures were, if not birds. Frankly, I was afraid to ask.

According to the kids, deer use their antlers to hunt for meat. Bird eggs take an hour or two to hatch. Reptiles don’t breathe. You will get rabies from touching a snake skin, or the preserved hide of a deer. All bats are rabid and eat blood, but they were divided on whether bats were reptiles or not. Several children told me bats weren’t even real. They also informed me that you can’t touch frogs because they are poisonous, and that the Amazon is near Oklahoma City. They couldn’t identify even the common robin or cardinal, most had no idea what a mountain lion was, and nearly all thought the chupacabra was as real as a coyote.

I’m not making this up, nor am I making fun of these kids. They are intensely curious, and want desperately to know the world around them. It is not their fault that they have been starved for knowledge.

They need to spend time in the actual outdoors. Even just a few experiences camping and hiking with informed adults would help these kids a lot. For those that can’t get out to see the real thing, they need good quality books, realistic nature programs without all the ridiculous hype, and trips to zoos or museums.

Honestly, I don’t know what the whole answer is, but I do know it is a problem.

How can people value a world they know so little about? How will they know what is important, or how to conserve what we have if they don’t even recognize it?

Most troublingly, how can we expect them to value life if they do not realize that life is a fragile gift, here one moment and gone the next?

I’m still working on those answers, one child at a time.

Cheers,

Michelle