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.