Adventures in Science Communication: the Middle School Crowd
Way back in February, I had the opportunity to give a presentation about insects to a local middle school. I have a friend who was student teaching there for the semester, so she knew they had a science club for the kids on Fridays. Well, the teachers were interested in getting someone passionate to talk to the students about science... ...guess who they called. I had two weeks to prepare and wasn't quite yet besieged by schoolwork, so I started outlining what I wanted to talk about and reached out to others on Twitter for advice. I follow some pretty erudite people on Twitter, so their comments were of course integrated into my plans. I wanted to bring stuff that they could hold, as well as stuff for them to take home. I ended up bringing both live specimens (a hissing cockroach and a few species of millipedes) and dead specimens (local butterflies, a drawer of assorted beetles and other insects from the college collection), as well as many pictures. I wanted to focus my presentat...