Third Week

Wednesday afternoon, Kemin took all the summer employees out to eat and to the state capitol for a tour. This was a fun chance to get to chat with some of the other people who were new to Kemin. The other externs and I also had some really good conversations about what we were learning, how we thought we might be able to bring these things into the classroom and also what kind of strategies we currently use in our classrooms. It was really productive time and I'm looking forward to planning for some of these things for the beginning of this next school year.

The next day, Kemin held a gatekeepers meeting that included all of the innovation center employees, Kemin's president and Kemin's owner. In this meeting, ideas and projects were discussed to decide whether or not they should continue from that point. It was nice to see people asking real questions and offering criticism to try to better the project or use of Kemin's resources. This truly seemed like a team effort. I think this helped me focus on grading in my classroom. It should be results based and I like to think that it currently is, but I'm sure there is room for improvement. I believe all of the employees tried hard on their proposals and projects, but that didn't guarantee that they would move on or escape criticism. The employee's attitudes had to be of the mind to take the ideas and questions from the gatekeepers and try to make improvements. This is a great lesson for education as well. We need to give honest feedback to our students and help them build the mechanisms to take that information and keep improving.

I was able to be quite a bit more active in the lab this week and felt like I was being more helpful. We ran several test over the week. We also had to do some problem solving to try to get our tests to give consistent data and then we tested our possible solutions. Problem solving is a mentality that I need to continue to try to have my students develop. At the end of the week, I was able to sit down with the team and start to piece together the digestion test that we will be running soon. This was where the literature research was helpful and saved us a lot of time.

Second Week

After my second week at Kemin, I'm starting to get a little more comfortable with the different tests that the molecular biology team does on a regular basis. On Monday, I got to run another experiment on my own and it turned out pretty well. I also got my own Kemin lab book to keep track of all of the experiments that I participate in. I've had my chemistry students do lab notebooks for all of their experiments in the past and other times I have omitted them. I knew it would be great practice for college and now I see that the lab notebook is a big part the science industry as well. I also got to sit in on a training for lab notebooks and got to learn about some of the legal importance of a lab notebook. I'll have to make sure I continue to use some form of this to help students build skills in this area.

This week I also got to help out quite a bit with a milling process to prepare our samples for the experiment we ran. This was very different from the other things we had done in the lab and it reminded me that being a scientist isn't all lab work. The scientists here regularly need to make presentations, write papers, attend and contribute in meetings. I think these are probably common in business in general and the more practice we can give our students the better. Reading research is also a big part of the process here at Kemin and I've been able to do a bit of it myself. Much of this material would be nearly useless if you didn't have a strong background in science terms and concepts and I think we need to keep this in mind when working with our students. I think we are moving away from focusing on "memorizing the terms" in science education, but I think we have to make sure we don't omit them or stop using them, we just need to make sure we take concepts beyond the terms. I think for us to be able to say or at least prove that someone has a "deep understanding" of a topic, they need to know many of the terms and systems related to a particular topic.

At the end of the week, I was able to run another experiment by myself and it went pretty well. Earlier in the week I helped out with a part of an experiment and made a pretty silly mistake that cost us an hour of work. Instead of not letting me do that part again, their attitude was to make me do it again and this time do it right. Sometimes I feel like we try too hard to protect our students from failing and making mistakes. I learned a lot from this experience.

First Week

My first week of my externship at Kemin is over and it has been really revealing. The first day I had a chance to get to meet the other people who work in the molecular biology lab, which is were I'll be this summer. I was able to observe two assays and a gel electrophoresis being done during the first day and it was eye-opening to see how much technique and special skill, at least it looked that way to me, is needed to do many of the day-to-day operations. It's a reminder that I need to make sure I give my students a chance to practice the fundamentals of working in a lab and hold them to those fundamentals. I was able to practice using some of the equipment that I haven't used for awhile. Much of the equipment can be found in a high school science lab, but there are parts of the lab that are awfully expensive and probably not practical or durable enough for use in most high school labs.

It was interesting to see the difference in the level of persistence between the employees of this lab and my students. This probably isn't a fair comparison, but during the first week, the data that was being gained wasn't moving the project forward and it was likely that there were one or more things going wrong. The team looked into other options and tests to try, even when they required a quite a bit of effort to do. One of the experiments that we ran at the end of the week took two people about the whole day to run. The end of week meeting was awesome to sit in on. The team was brainstorming for solutions to the problems and putting together a plan to procede with. For many of my students, it would be more likely for them to give up when an unexpected problem arises or to just assume what they have is "good enough". This reminded me that it is important that we have high expectations for students and help them practice and develop their mechanisms for problem solving that actually have a chance of solving the problem.

The amount of time need to run any of the experiments I've seen so far don't fit in at all with the concept of a 45 min class period. One of the most stressfull parts of this experience has been getting to help out with parts of an experiment that were six hours in and dealing with incredibly small amounts of material that are indistinguishable from each other with the naked eye. I don't feel like the structure of school scheduling is very well suited for giving our students these kinds of experiences to help prepare them for college or their carreer. At the end of the week I got to run my own experiment. It took several hours and I had to ask a lot of questions. The amount of continous focus and dexterity required was surprising. Since the process was fairly new to me, I really had to keep an idea of what was just done, being done currently and what needed to be done all at the same time. It didn't turn out as well as I would have liked, but I guess I'll need to keep practicing!