Clark Central High School Outreach Reflection

By Eryn Hasty

On Friday, August 27, 2019 I went to Clarke Central High School to work with Mr. Gonzalez’s AP Environmental class. A few weeks prior, the CCHS students collected soil samples and had them sent to UGA for my biology class to plate samples of and test for bacteria in the soil. After plating different soil dilutions on three types of plates that contained varying amounts of antibiotics we counted the number of colony forming units for the plates. With this data we were able to analyze how bacteria in soil samples from different areas have different antibiotic resistance characteristics.

Prior the students and I did research about antibiotic resistance so we would have a general understanding for the concept. The reason we needed to do this was so that we understood what we were testing for with the varying amounts of antibiotics on the plates. I may use this similar method in the future if I am running any kind of experiment. The research I did helped me understand any background facts I may need to know as well as help me form my hypothesis based on this background knowledge.

I first explained how my class performed the experiment of plating the soil in the lab. I did this so they knew how the soil can be plated and bacteria can be grown. If the did not know this they would not be able to explain their findings as effectively, and they would not be able to replicate the experiment in the future. I also explained that we were looking for the number of colony forming units (CFU’s) that are on the plates and what a CFU is. After this I let them count the CFU’s on the different plates. I then explained how to actually run the calculations and enter the data into the PARE site before letting them complete it. I gained my information for the topic through readings, instructions, and completing the same tasks on my own a few days prior. Presenting the topics helped me understand the data as well, especially because I learn best by teaching others.

I tried to make the project intellectually stimulating by letting them do everything. I did not count or perform calculations, just explained. I found the students were more engaged as they completed it on their own. I also made sure to keep the information in terms they would understand so it would be relevant. I could tell each student was very smart, but also, they are only freshman in high school. I had to be sure they were following along and were not afraid to ask questions if they were confused. Finally, I tried to be creative by asking them questions and have them try to figure out the answer on their own before telling them the correct answer. This way I was not just reciting information to them in a boring way.

Through this project I learned I really enjoy teaching. I have always had leadership qualities, but this is one of the first times I have been able to take a major role as a teacher. I also realized the students were a lot more interested than expected. I was worried I would go into this project and the students would not care what was going, but they surprised me and were very interactive!

I went in with the mindset I would feel out how confident they were in taking charge on the project. I could tell which students were more outgoing compared to those who were very shy. I focused more on interacting with the more shy students to ensure they were participating, and the more I asked them questions the more into the group project they became. I realized this was an effective method that helped me reach the entire audience, so I will most likely do this in the future too.

The entire project as a whole went well, especially with the part of the project where I instructed the students on how to analyze the data. Next time I would practice a little before how I would lead them just for timing purposes because we were a little crunched for time.

By teaching the content I had to know it very well in case the students had questions. This helped me prepare by studying the information in a detailed manner, and they even asked some questions I did not even know I had! It helped me expand my knowledge with them. I can definitely use this in the future because I am pursing a career in nursing so my information delivery is very important. The project helped familiarize me with communicating effectively with those I do not know. I feel like everything I wanted to teach the students came across how I planned. There were a few times I had to clarify, but overall I was very effective.

Overall, the project was very effective and interesting to me. It helped numerous groups of people (high school and college aged) residents in the area become more aware of a serious situation we face right here in Athens, Georgia. I really enjoyed the project and hope to do something similar again in the future!

Bio Outreach Project – Trudi Sundberg

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.

Clark Central Outreach

On Friday, September 27^th, I went to Clarke Central High School during their last period to assist AP Environmental students in the antibiotic resistance lab. Two other girls in this Biology class and I worked with a group of 6 students to count the number of colonies on each of the plates. We showed the students how to count them, explained what a colony was and looked like, and described what we were actually doing. Our soil sample was actually collected by one of the high school girls in our group, which she found in her backyard.

When we first separated the plates into Set 1 and Set 2, we noticed that Set 1 did not have a sufficient number of colonies on the plates and that maybe people in our biology class plated them wrong. The second set, however, had more visible colonies that were actually countable. We gave each of the high school students a plate and a marker to count the number of colonies, which they then would write the plate description and number of colonies on a piece of paper. To ensure accuracy, we would then switch the plates between the students so that each plate was counted twice. These numbers were then reported to the one student who entered the data into the spreadsheet and website. I felt more knowledgeable this time around, compared to when we counted them in class because I wasn’t sure what to count as a colony and what we were actually finding from all this counting. Now, I could actually explain to the students what we were doing and the effect of the antibiotics on the soil.

Overall, I think this experience was a lot of fun- I met two girls who I helped count plates with while they asked me about college life. I was a little surprised when I walked into this AP Environmental Science class, mainly because they all looked younger, like freshmen and sophomores, whereas at my school you had to be a junior or senior to take this course. Some of the students seemed more interested in counting the plates than others, but overall, I think that the students enjoyed having college kids from a big school like UGA come into their classroom to help.

Rivers Alive – Toby Fu

What we did:

About one and a half weeks ago, I participated in the Rivers Alive program at the MLK Greenway site. I choose to go there directly and did not attend the 8:00 am opening at Sandy Creek Nature Center. There were a lot of people there – some were from UGA (one specific group I talked to a lot was a grad English program group), and some were from a high school. There were also some who were just locals and wanted to contribute.

Our role in this cleanup was to go along the roadsides and pick up garbage. It was pretty hard work, especially since some of the metallic garbage, tires, and beds were buried deep behind dirt or carpets. It may be hard to see in the photo, but the photo is of a piece of carpet that’s been lying on the ground so long, a sizable bush had grown out of it, it’s roots weaved around the carpets fibers.

It was cool going around and meeting the other people who were also cleaning up. We chatted while we tore carpet off the mound by the road, and remarked about the various antique garbage we found. We went to two primary locations: by the road, and behind a house. We picked around the area, rolling down massive tires, pulling out bed springs, and lugging down rubber hoses. Someone even found a bike. Around 11:30, we were all extremely tired, and we got together and called it a day.

How I feel:

I was extremely surprised by the amount of trash collected by the side of the road. In the early few minutes, I was actually quite amused with the different kinds of unexpected garbage laying around. As I continued picking, the amusement faded, replaced with a feeling of sadness and disappointment. Then, somewhat frustration. A lot of the garbage by the road was covered with carpet. That means whoever threw all that away, as well as subsequent times the garbage was seen, they just decided to cover it away, instead of picking it up and disposing of it. It was things like bottles and cans, but then it turning to metal pipes, tires, and even cinder blocks. Some metals were stuck so far in the ground, we couldn’t even manage to get it out, and some of the cans and bottles look like they were from the 50’s.

Something that stood out to me while I was there was when someone held up a Styrofoam egg carton. It looked like it was probably only months old, but it was laying under garbage that (from it’s labels) where probably from the late 70’s/early 80’s. After all that time, the Styrofoam has barely degraded at all. I was frustrated that people from before decided to just dump their garbage wherever they wanted. I was disappointed that people just thought it was okay to do this. I was sad that some of this garbage had been here for so long, and by the way things looked when we finished, there are probably still mounds of garbage buried beside – and maybe even under – the road.

So What?:

My experience from volunteering that day really changed my attitude towards cleaning my environment. I never really cared about it before, and had always thought the area around me was clean. It wasn’t until I dug a seemingly bottomless pit of garbage from the ground that I realized the damages littering and waste has done to the environment. My experience from that day had greatly changed my outlook towards cleaning the environment. Before, I was less inclined to do anything, and thought everything was going to be okay. Now, I am much more motivated to help the environment.

Now What?:

I plan on volunteering more to clean up the environment – not just here at Athens, but also in my hometown. I want to contribute more to improving the health of the town’s ecosystem, and clean it up to be better. While cleaning the environment is not a very big part of my major or many of the potential career paths associated with the major, I still plan to take time to help clean the environment by volunteering.

Rivers Alive Cleanup – Rory Bowles

On October 5th at 9am I attended the Rivers Alive Cleanup. I participated in the cleanup at the Derby and Branch location. I collected trash in between the road and the river and put it into a trash bag. We found many different items including tires, bottles, cans, rugs, electrical equipment, an animal skull (the picture above), and even a couch! We collected the trash for around 2 hours then we left.

It was heartbreaking to find all the trash by the road. I collected almost 100 old bottles while barely covering an area of 30 yards. Many of the bottles were buried in the dirt and appeared to have been there for many years before I found them and threw them out. Also, I found a plumbing pipe that had a tree root just growing through it. It was almost as if nature had begun to adapt to and grow around all the trash in the area. I did, however, have a glimmer of hope when I saw all the volunteers energetically helping with the cleanup.

It is very important to clean up our rivers and the trash in nature. Trees, plants and animals simply are not evolved to deal with trash and other artificial objects in the habitat. Although plants can grow around the bottles and old cans it is not ideal for their growth. Trash found in and around rivers has many unfortunate effects. This can dilute the water quality of the river which makes it uninhabitable for some aquatic animals. Also, the trash can build up and alter the natural course of the river.

At the end of the event I was proud of how much trash we can collected. However, then I recognized that this group of approximately 20 people had barely managed to do a relatively superficial clean up of this 100 yard stretch of road in two whole hours. Despite all our hard work I felt like we had barely made a dent in the bigger picture of trash in the world. Although events like Rivers Alive are nice and certainly help the rivers and surrounding area, if we want real change it will take more than an annual two hour event. Instead, people need to make an effort to first limit their littering, and second, there need to be more organized lasting efforts to clean up the existing trash. I enjoyed the event and I want to continue to make efforts to clean up the abundance of trash found in the wild.

Climate Simulation

Participating in this exercise, I felt that I gained a better understanding of the urgency of the climate change issue. My group as a whole began to see more of the importance as time went on and became more and more open to the stances and ideas of the other groups. We also went from an “us-versus-them” mindset to that of a group working towards a goal.

We, the United States, started with a very isolationist and protective stance. On Day 2, we realized that this approach was not going to get us very far and some of the other groups were taking the place as frontrunner which we should have held. Watching the other teams seemingly make all this progress without us and in gaining more information about the issue, we became more open.

I do think that emissions need to be cut in order to slow global warming. This is a key critical issue for us and for the future generations of earth. There are many obstacles in the way, though, chiefly being the hefty financial burden needing to be undertaken by developed countries to help foot the bill and the partisan disagreements between nations over how to best handle solving the problem. If the nations of the world could be more generous financially and open minded, tackling climate change would not be hard at all.

In the United States, we most importantly needed to bring the issue into education. Educated citizens have a strong correlation with supporting the fight against global warming, and this only grows as you filter down by age. A massive effort must be undertaken by America as a whole to raise awareness and work towards change.

Climate simulation – Mary Catherine Meno

When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt fairly helpless. My role was developing countries, and we had no resources or money to contribute to reducing climate change. However, after negotiating our outlook got better, as we realized that there were various steps we could take to do our part since the other countries were willing to help us out with funding. Our group originally felt that we would be able to make the most impact if we drastically reduced our deforestation and increased afforestation. These ideas changed once we realized that even if we put 100% of our efforts into the forests, it didn’t contribute that much to decreasing the overall change in global climate. I think that it will be very difficult to cut emissions, but that it is something that can be done. Each country would have to focus a lot of their time and money to do this, though there are many people and countries who don’t believe that we should. The major costs and barriers to implementation come from protecting the forests, planting new forests, and especially from attempting to decrease the amount of CO2 released by each household in well developed countries such as the US. Change in the US can be catalyzed by passing legislation that significantly increases the restraints on corporate green house emissions.

World Climate Negotiation Activity

When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt worried about the future of planet Earth. If we didn’t do anything as a planet, the global temperature would raise over 4 degrees celsius by 2100. What made me more concerned was that even after two rounds of negotiation and hundreds of billions of dollars spent per year on reducing deforestation, promoting afforestation, and green energy, the planet will still be 2 degrees celsius warmer by 2100.

In the first round, we (the developing nations) asked for $200 billion to save trees, plant trees, and move towards green energy. Many countries were not willing to meet this number. After the second round of negotiations, once other countries realized how important the money was to producing results, we were able to receive $190 billion per year in order to reduce the global warming. The negotiation periods were stressful because other countries had different motives and goals that didn’t seem to always align with just saving the planet.

Our group changed our ideas because we were initially more concerned with saving the Amazon rainforest and planting more trees, but what was even more important was moving to green energy and reducing carbon emissions. We ended up spending around $20 billion a year just for green energy.

We decided to focus on green energy more because of the future climate calculator. Having 100% of our resources dedicated to trees was not as effective as dedicating some to the trees and some to green energy.

In the end, I do think emissions can be cut. Technology is progressing rapidly, but the problem is getting everyone to do their part. It is a worldwide effort to make sure that emissions can be cut.

There were major economic and social costs to make these proposals possible. It takes billions per year to try and cut emissions and utilize green energy and maintain forests. It also requires people around the world to be more conscious of carbon emissions.

I believe that the United States needs to lead by example. In the simulation, the US always just matched China or matched another country, but if they took the initiative, it is possible that other countries would be more inspired and make more of an effort to save the planet.

Climate Simulation- Ted Otto

When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle against a phenomenon that has already progressed too far and against other groups who either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything to help stop its perpetuation. I felt like the world police, trying to get everyone to follow the rules for their own good even if it seemed hopeless.
Over time, I became more sympathetic to the plight of the developing world, as it is being asked to commit equally to stopping a process they had little to no involvement with in the first place. It’s easy for developed nations to cast blame on these nations who are causing increasing amounts of pollution compared to the rest of the world, but I realized that their behavior is completely understandable, as they haven’t had a chance to grow as the developed world has.
We became more willing to contribute to less developed countries as we listened to their problems, and we had to take an increased international role in order to make up for the lack of participation from other groups.
The unwillingness of other developed nations to initially contribute or match our promises, as well as the obvious need for aid in the less developed countries spurred us to make an even larger contribution.
As the world stands now, I don’t think a simple contribution to a global fund and reduction of emissions will be enough to maintain a livable level of climate change. Technological developments and international agreement in conjunction with domestic policy and willingness to contribute, however, still could stand a chance if that change starts very soon.
Developing nations had emissions per capital that were too low to reasonably reduce further, and the rest of the developed world at the beginning of the simulation was hesitant to even contribute to other nations’ limited emissions, much less to limit their own production. Most of this was overcome however, resulting in a significant, although ultimately insufficient, reduction in climate change.
Personal change in consumption to more environmentally friendly products signals desire for change in production standards. The speed with which change can take place with significant impetus is very promising in a free market economy like that of the United States. Additionally, demonstrating irrefutably the havoc that climate change can and will wreak can help to catalyze these efforts, and education of the public can help to disseminate the most effective ways to combat the crisis.

Josh Messitte- Climate Simulation

In the simulation, I played the role of other developing countries. When playing my role, I felt like I was at a disadvantage. The climate issues present in the world today didn’t originate from developing countries, but yet we need still pay the cost. When trying to stand up for ourselves, we often lacked the resources and power to do so effectively. Across the rounds, the way we negotiated changed, but so did my reactions to the situation as a whole. While we were clearly at a disadvantage, my opinions about being at such a disadvantage changed a little when we didn’t have to give anything to the fund, but instead asked for aid. However, it was very clear we were paying reparations for issues we didn’t create when talking to nations like China and like United States. Our group changed our ideas to prioritize forestation efforts for our land made up of rainforest, a crucial part of global carbon removal. This change was prompted by looking at how out protection of the rainforest impacts global emissions and temperature change, While I think it may be hard for a lot of people and it is going to require a worldwide effort, I do think with time emissions can be cut. Costs and barriers in implementing proposals made includes things like the fact that a ton of countries that are still developing, while they make up a large part of emissions, probably can’t realistically cut that many emissions. In the US, we can do every little thing, from carpooling and turning the lights off, to shortening our showers.