Share Your Stories with Kids

Courtesy of Michael Manion Recently on my way back from a well-deserved surfing trip to Baja, I had quite an interesting experience. My traveling buddy and I were staying with Geoff, a friend in Los Angeles who couldn't join our expedition. Although a passionate globetrotting surfer himself, Geoff is more dedicated to his students than to the call of the ocean. While we spent a few days recovering from Baja-belly and from sampling the local surf, he invited us to school to talk with his students about our careers. As further enticement, he offered to show us the 12-foot albino python he keeps in his classroom--part of a twisted award system for students. His institution, Elizabeth Hudson School, is a California Distinguished School, which means it performs much higher than schools with students from similar backgrounds (80% of the students are on meal programs (free or reduced cost) for low-income students. The emphasis is on providing these kids with a future, and college and career top the agenda. Yet, none of the students had ever met a professional scientist. I told them about running experiments: setting up equipment, recording data, analyzing the statistics, and checking them against my hypothesis. I explained that I loved the fact that my whole career was about using my brain, my knowledge, and my education to understand a little bit of nature. I even told them about my occasional 10-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week schedule. Okay, I didn't want to scare them. So I related that when finished high school, I chose biology because I thought, "I never have to do math or chemistry ever again!" This class was math and science, so the kids saw the humor. They asked intelligent questions: When did I decide I wanted to be a scientist? Who influenced me as a kid? What were the most challenging aspects of my career? How could they follow a similar career path? My friend and I were stoked from our 'surfari', and we could tell that these kids were stoked, too. Then we got to see their enthusiasm get channeled into their work for the day, as Geoff started his classes. These kids are stuck by their poverty and circumstances in their own neighborhoods, at least for now. It is only through this kind of encouragement and motivation that they will have insight into the worlds that we mostly take for granted. They are lucky to have a special kind of teacher who recognizes the value of exposing them to positive role models. He's even willing to give up precious Baja waves so they can prepare for a better life. Being a postdoc is more than just getting that next experiment to work or writing the paper. We need to be ambassadors for science. A big part of that is to encourage the next generation of scientists, to make them aware of the possibilities and rewards that science may offer them. For us, it was simple; just a few hours spent meeting this class. Oh, and we got to see the snake eat its weekly rabbit, which was very, very cool! Michael Manion (mmanion@fhcrc.org) is a postdoctoral fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Share Your Stories with Kids

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