Recipients: Earth Science Teacher Award
As Appearing in the MAY 1996 AAPG EXPLORER
AAPG Cites Teacher for Excellence
Enthusiasm Shared With Students
By MICHAEL J. MAJOR
EXPLORER Correspondent
Frazier’s Teaching Philosophy
Jane Frazier, the recipient of AAPG’s first award for Excellence in the Teaching of Natural Resources in the Earth Sciences, has a specific philosophy of teaching natural resources.
Some of those thoughts include:
Teaching natural resources, environmental concerns and conservation should be a recurring, ongoing theme throughout the year.
“Two of my main objectives ... are to develop in each student respect and appreciation for nature and natural things and to foster in each student a sense of stewardship ...
“We progress through the year based each 12 weeks in one of the sciences: life, physical or earth. As we cover basic concepts in each science, applications in other fields are examined and explored.”
Teaching natural resources should include as much field or laboratory activity for students as possible.
“Books and videos are important as information resources, but nothing can capture students’ interest like the first-hand experience of panning for gold at Coloma Gold Discovery State Park, separating components of a mixture, crystallizing salts from a solution or discovering oil.
“My students, quite varied in ethnic and economic backgrounds, need exposure and experience. We do laboratory activities almost every day, leaving the book learning for homework.”
Teaching about natural resources must involve applications to social and environmental concerns.
“In class ‘board meetings,’ where students defend company expenditures on reclaiming water from industrial processes or homework assignments involving reporting mineral assay results to a mining company executive, give students a sense of relevance and an interest they lack in ‘busy work’ classes.”
Teaching about natural resources must include providing an example for student behavior.
“We must all work together to conserve, reuse, recycle and whatever else it takes to avoid depleting natural resources or spoiling the earth. Someone must show our young people ... ”
Teaching about natural resources should involve sharing skills and
ideas with other teachers.
What makes a great earth science teacher?
If you’re Jane Justus Frazier, who has been named the winner of AAPG’s inaugural Excellence in the Teaching of Natural Resources in the Earth Sciences Award, the answer is obvious.
“The number one ingredient is my own enthusiasm,” said Frazier, integrated science teacher at Natomas High School, Sacramento, Calif.
“If you are not really interested in what you are doing, students spot it instantly. But if you are really excited about what you are doing, that excitement level builds in the students. I really have fun teaching science.”
The AAPG award for teaching excellence includes a $2,500 prize for use under the teacher’s supervision for educational programs at their school, plus $2,500 for the teacher’s personal use.
The award is sponsored by AAPG and the National Earth Science Teachers Association.
Frazier also receives an expense-paid trip to the AAPG annual meeting in San Diego to receive her award, which will be presented, appropriately, during the Monday luncheon held as part of “Teacher’s Day” activities.
And while her enthusiasm for teaching is undeniable, her approach is just as important. Frazier has created a teaching philosophy that makes learing about natural resources not just fun for students, but a significant part of their entire lives.
Connections
Frazier graduated from UC-Davis with a major in biological science and minor in physical science. She taught general science at an inner city high school in Los Angeles while her husband went to UCLA to study to become a dentist.
The family then moved to Woodland, Calif., where Frazier dropped out of teaching for about 15 years to raise her two children, Jenifer, now working on her Ph.D. in genetics at UC-San Francisco, and Andrew, who is studying mechanical engineering at UC-Davis.
It was about 10 years ago when she returned to teaching, at a junior high school.
“For a long time I was completely out of the circle, and when I got back, everything had changed,” Frazier said. “Teachers were doing more and there was a much greater emphasis on hands-on activity, which is what I really enjoy.”
Frazier is in as much field and lab activity as possible. “At school we do a lab or go outside at least every other day,” she said. “‘The kids only use their books at home.”
Frazier’s teaching title of integrated science teacher pretty much sums up her philosophy of teaching.
“Natural resources, environmental concerns and conservation should be ongoing themes,” she said. “We don’t just build up to a test, then have the topic go away.We keep it coming back.”
At Natomas High students are offered three years of science – and the first two are integrated.
Her unit description, in fact, quotes John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
“My unit on natural resources,” she continues, “is not really a unit but a series of recurring lessons and events. Though not everything we cover during the one-year course applies specifically to the areas of natural resources, environmental concerns or conservation, these themes crop up often ...
“All of the strands of science are interwoven,” she said. “It's when students see the interconnections between things that they really learn them.
“We start with physical science then move into earth sciences and biology and then bring the strands back so everything is shown to be a part of the same big network.”
Starting From Scratch
Frazier had the opportunity that most teachers dream up. She was able to build a curriculum from scratch.
Natomas High is a brand new school, in just its second year, and is the only one in its district.
“Most of the time you come to a school that has 10,000-year-old equipment,” she quipped, “but I was the first teacher hired, and so had the chance to pick out the equipment. And we were able to shape the way we wanted the courses taught.”
The school has an extremely diverse student body, in terms of both ethnic background and ability.
“Students on a higher level move faster, delve deeper and ask more questions, but students on the lower level become real interested, too. I trick them into thinking that it’s their best that I am looking for, which is really not a trick, of course, for it’s what I am looking for.”
Frazier found that her Rip Van Winkle hiatus from teaching made her ability to relate to this diverse group easier than it might have been a quarter a century back.
“In the old days, you just taught and the kids wrote a paper,” she said. “But they have since thrown in so many more techniques into teaching. Kids sit around, making environmental decisions from a corporate perspective, giving and taking ideas and seeing their ideas get bigger, then go to a lab, and then another lab, and then watch a video. There are so many more ways now of making the subject interesting.”
In teaching about plate tectonics, for example, students learn not just the basics of the subject but also what mineral deposits might be found at various plate boundaries – and they then predict where the same minerals might be found elsewhere in the world.
For another example, there will be a number of different “wells” – plastic bottles with numbers written on them – each containing different types of contaminated water. The students then test the water to figure out where the contamination came from and what it will take to clean it up.
“I think it’s more interesting for them to see how the world works, or the job they might someday have, rather than just saying, here, you're going to test this water and see if it turns blue,” she said.
Sands of Time
Another project involves testing different kinds of sand to determine how much salt is concentrated in the various samples, and learning what plants could grow in the sand. This idea resulted from a situation several years ago in which Los Angeles drained a lake for its own water use, leaving behind an arid, dusty desert, with an alkaline air pollution.
A professor at UC-Davis had the idea of attempting to stabilize the area through the use of plants, so that water might be returned there. This particular project didn’t fly for lack of funding. But Frazier uses it as an example of “how growth problems are created by man, but creative thinking can potentially solve them.”
Finding what plants might grow on sand is only one example of what is a major theme in Frazier’s teaching – sand, and the insights it can provide.
For instance, one project involves a Sherlock Holmes exercise in scientific method and deduction by analyzing sand from the shoes of different suspects in a crime or mystery, and to thus find the culprit.
“We talk about how glass is made from sand, how glass beads were made in early Africa and then work to figure out what the trade routes were by analyzing the same,” Frazier said.
It’s a theme that has been a proven teaching winner for Frazier. In 1991, when she was a science teacher for the Woodland Joint Unified School District in Woodland, Calif., she was named outstanding educator and eventually received a national Toyota “Tapestry” grant award on the project, “To See the World in a Grain of Sand.”
Another of the lab activities Frazier created for her classes at Natomas consists of lessons in biostratigraphy, getting the students to observe and study layers of earth to find fossils – early ones at the bottom, later ones toward the top – and to figure out such things as what the climate was like in ages past.
Or, more immediately, as she says, “‘where you might find oil. We also study the characteristics that make for oil-bearing sand.”
Frazier is yet undecided what to do with money awarded her for being the first award-winning teacher. The school has appointed her to allocate the $2,500 given to the school, and she thinks she may use some of that to take the students on some tours.
For the $2,500 given directly to her, she’s torn between buying a laptop computer or traveling.
No doubt to a sandy beach.