April 28: Earth Day

Earth Day is widely celebrated as a day on which we work towards becoming more aware of things we can do to maintain or even improve the quality the home upon which the human race is collectively dependent.  For this reason, I decide to volunteer at the Earth Day event at the Museum of Natural Science.  I worked at a recycling table where we showed people things they could make out of recycled newspaper.  My partner, Megan, worked on making gift bows out of newspaper comics and a newspaper flower wreath.  It was my job to make origami planters out of the newspaper and fill them with potting soil.  When kids walked by, I asked them if they wanted to plant sunflowers and showed how to bury seeds and explained the things they needed to do for their plant to help it grow.  I couldn’t help throwing in some fun facts about photosynthesis when older kids came to the table.  I thought the planter were an awesome idea; because the newspaper is biodegradable, when they get home, the kids can put the whole planter in the ground.

 I think that, like in Nano Days, the hardest part of the experience relaying the appropriate information to kids without being overcomplicated and losing their interest as well as without sounding condescending when I talk to them.  I imagine finding that balance as full time teacher is extremely difficult, but there’s not much that could be more rewarding than teaching a kid more than they expected they could learn.

April 27: CERT Vicitm

It was a terrible storm; the kind where lighting strikes trees and sets them on fire.  Poor me, trying to find refuge on my way to volunteer, saw a flaming branching flying towards me and I put my arms up to protect my face because, let’s get real, if that’s not the money maker, I don’t know what is.  Of course, I got these terrible burns on my right hand and let forearm and hand, the fingers on which had melted together.  For some reason though, the real pain was all along my right arm where the burn ends.  Eventually, some people in florescent vests and head gear found me and put me out with a bunch of other victims to be tended to by some frazzled looking teenage emergency response medics.  Being a victim is not all it’s cracked up to be.  It’s a tough job, and not just because of the pain. You have to constantly complain to get the attention of the health care workers at the scene, and that takes some serious persistence.  Luckily though, I’m well practiced in that respect.  After some exceptional moaning and nagging on my part, one of the medics finally came to me and she sucked.  I kept telling her where it hurt, but all she did was loosely wrap my burns and separate the fingers on my right hand so that they wouldn’t melt together.  I was later told by a more experienced medic that I had nerve burns and that that was the reason for my pain. 

On a more serious note, I actually learned a lot at the CERT training session.  The situation was way more hectic than anyone thought it would be.  I can only imagine how difficult it would be to deal with an actual emergency situation where the medics are far outnumbered by the victims and deciding who to tend to first is a nearly impossible task because it’s hard not to sympathize when every victim’s pain is real.  I think this experience may have helped me rule out emergency medicine as a career path because I don’t know if I’d be capable of being that detached in a situation so pressing. 

March 31: Nano Days

My first task as a Nano Days volunteer was to play a game of Nano iSpy with kids as they stopped at our table.  We would find conventional item that they encounter daily and try to relay the significance of that item on the nanoscale.  We learned that Blue Morpho Butterfly is actually more gold on the nanoscale and its blue color comes from the light, not pigment in the butterfly itself.  We also found a picture of DNA and I explained that it was responsible for the differences between the red hair of a little boy and the blonde hair of his younger sister.  Overall, the kids seemed fascinated by the information, and though the concept of a ‘nanoscale’ may not have become completely tangible to them, and I’m not sure that it is for me either, it is now at least fathomable. 

After the iSpy table, I was rotated to the Buckey Ball table where I helped kids assemble Buckey Ball structures out of colored paper.  There, I again tried to illustrate what it means to be at the nanoscale.  In reply to my statement that the same carbon that makes her Coke fizzy makes up much of her body as well the tiny Bucky Balls, a little girl gasped, astonished to learn the connection between things that to her seem mutually exclusive.  I think the best part of working with children is watching them learn and process the information I gave them.  I can’t imagine a feeling being more satisfying than the fulfillment one gets from learning aside from maybe being the person who made that feeling arise in someone else.