{"id":13726,"date":"2018-10-30T11:31:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T15:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/?p=13726"},"modified":"2018-10-30T11:34:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T15:34:24","slug":"using-every-tool-in-the-education-toolbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/using-every-tool-in-the-education-toolbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Every Tool in the Education Toolbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Carol<\/a><\/p>\n

Carol Detrick Garner<\/h2>\n

Allegany County Teacher of the Year, 2013<\/h2>\n

The mighty Gymnogyps californianus<\/em> was proving to be one tough bird.<\/p>\n

To make a long genetic bottleneck lesson short: species that have been driven to almost extinction tend to have very little genetic diversity, and the California condor is a prime example. If I had known that moments later I would be kneeling on the floor with meter sticks in my hands in order to describe this bird; I may have picked say, the golden hamster? Would Mesocricetus auratus <\/em>have had me on the floor? I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

They just weren\u2019t getting it, they had no guesses as to why a bird with a 10 foot wing span may have trouble hanging out in Southern California with a bunch of Homo sapiens?<\/em> So I stepped out their wing span on the institutionally accommodating 12×12 tiles; still nothing. I\u2019m getting a little wound up now, I think I may have started to spit when I talked at this point and I\u2019m telling them \u201cthe bird is this big, like its wings are like 2 feet longer than each of my arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yep you know what happens next. I got out the meter sticks and I\u2019ve extended my personally lame forelimbs out to the majestic 10 foot wing span of the California condor and I\u2019m flapping around the room. Finally, one student says \u201cyou\u2019d need a lot\u2019a room for that kinda thing.\u201d Someone else chimes in with \u201celectric lines\u201d then someone uses the h-word (habitat) and then the conversation gets all sciencey.<\/p>\n

The point of this isn\u2019t to say that education needs to be a performance, but it does need to recognize that we can\u2019t rely on saying things louder and slower. We can\u2019t just keep repeating ourselves. We need to recognize the blank faces and use all of our educational powers for good and think outside \u201cthe box.\u201d<\/p>\n

If I find myself kneeling beside \u201cthe box\u201d, meter sticks in hand, peering at faces of understanding; so be it.<\/p>\n

Addendum:\u00a0 For those of you who wonder why I was on my knees; the majestic condor is only 4.5 feet tall, I am well over 5 feet, they also only weigh 30 pounds but there was nothing I could do about that!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
\nCarol Detrick Garner
\nAllegany County Teacher of the Year, 2013
\nThe mighty Gymnogyps californianus was proving to be one tough bird.
\nTo make a long genetic bottleneck   …Learn more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":14069,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-toystoriesblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13726"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14181,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726\/revisions\/14181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.maryland.gov\/msde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}