For my outreach project, I went to Clarke County High School and helped the AP Environmental Students with their bacteria experiment. For this project, we showed the students how to count, label, and analyze the plates and data. This skill will be important for their labs in the future, and for my own. We used the plates that we had already analyzed in class, so it was easy for us to understand what to do with them, but for me it was a little difficult to explain to the students what they should be doing/to teach them what I already knew. It was important to be able to relate to the students as we helped them, because they would be more responsive. I don’t think that I could be a teacher in the future, but I enjoyed helping the students younger than me learn about the same subjects I was. I think that in the future, I would try to do things in a more organized way, so that the process would run more smoothly. I enjoyed being out of the classroom and having more of a hands-on approach. As I helped the students learn about antibiotic resistance, I felt like I was gaining a new understanding through the process of teaching them. I hope that it made an impact on them, so that they also understand the importance of the subject. I liked this project because it seemed like I was doing a good thing in the community, rather than just learning something in a classroom. I think that in the future I’ll try to think about the way that the things I’m learning will impact the next generation of students.
