Well it has been a week of
discoveries!
For example today I was rounding up
my two-week science teaching of middle school lab work with a video of the barn
owl. We have been covering body systems
and had started with the skeleton. Much
making of full sized black cardboard skeletons with labelled bones tied
together with wool or paperclips. In
fact my entire science lab resembles a bizarre Hallowen celebration with many
of the black shapes running on the walls, spread-eagled on corridors or waving
frantically from a board in the classroom.
We then moved on to dissecting an owl pellet. It was tricky justifying the expense of purchase of owl vomit in
these economically challenging times, but I got it. As owls cannot digest the bones, feathers and fur of their prey
they vomit it up in these pellets so I reckoned that would be a creative way to
allow them to pull all the bones out and reconstruct the victims of the
owl. Various parts of rodents, voles,
birds, shrews etc were all carefully extracted from these solid lumps and then separated
out into piles of each respective animal.
The lab echoed to excited cries of
“I’ve got a skull here!”, or “This is a pelvis of a rat” and they grew
expert at identifying shrew skulls because the tips of their teeth are
red. Tweezers and heads bent over dead
piles of bones has been our points of interest for some time and now all bones
have been stuck on black card board and identified. The corridors have been full of conversations like, “what did you
find in your owl puke?” After all these
experiences I decided to close the topic with a series of videos showing owls
vomiting up their owl pellets, in flight catching prey and finally one of an
owl swallowing a huge rat. So it was
with complete despair, while watching them, I heard a group of students crying
out, “that is so gross, what is that lump coming out of its mouth?” or comments
to that effect. At which point, several
of the brighter students turned and exasperatedly pointed out that we had been
dissecting owl pellets all week and of course that was what these were. Several students looked green around the
gills that they had been rummaging around in these horrid looking turds and
were outraged. At this point all my
satisfaction about my lesson plans and lab work drained away. I should have remembered when you take kids
into labs a part of their brains switches off and goes into a sort of “Bunsen
burner, test-tube, chemical, mesmerised state” that closes down all rational
thought. If I entered the lab and began
a strange witch doctor ritual with feathers and skinned rabbits around my head
it would make no difference. You can
tell, when they approach you in the lab and ask, “can we blow something up next
week?” Everything but explosions to
sixth grade is a complete waste of a lab session. Here is the owl video, be patient – it is taken by amateurs
discussing their camera storage capacity.
But for me the most beautiful part
is watching these birds in flight – this is 6 minutes long so don’t feel you
have to watch it but there is something angelic about their flight in slow
motion that grabs me. Okay the last
part is fairly gross!
It is all a learning
experience. From the sublime to the ridiculous, this life. One minute you think you are
running exciting educational science experiments the next you realize it really
is just all vomit. There is a metaphor
about life in that last line. Education
is just about regurgitating stuff and life usually involves vomit for some
reason!
