Accretionary Wedge 44: My Most Important Teacher

Metageologist over at the All-geo blog network has put out calls for posts about most important teachers, which really wasn't something I had to think much about. I easily could identify that person.

My sophomore year of high school I decided to participate in Science Olympiad, I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew I liked science so I went out. Well at the first meeting I committed a great heresy; when my friend asked me to team up with her to try out for the Rocks and Minerals competition, I told her no, that it would be too boring. However, she called in an old favor or something like that, and twisted my arm into trying out for the team.

I barely knew anything about rocks and next to nothing about minerals, so when I met up with the team mentor I had no idea what to expect, but I was quickly proved wrong in my initial assumptions. The mentor, Coach Ford, was a science teacher I had never met, but I had only been on campus for a few weeks so it wasn't suprising. He was fairly tall, a little lanky, grey and wrinkled, but with a kind and wiley smile. He spoke extremely softly, and if the room wasn't silent you could easily miss almost every word he said. We started in on minerals, which was interesting, especially the crystalline geometries, though I had some trouble grasping them at first.

I wouldn't say I was that interested in the subject until he opened up a textbook and went over the rock cycle.  I believe we might have gone over it once before, but after having a grasp on the basics of geology, I was blown away by the implications of the cycle. The idea that all material on the Earth had been recycled was amazing and I sat at home dumbstruck that night. Then he started talking about igneous rocks, and showed us the basic identification chart and I was sold hook, line, and sinker.

If that's all he had done it probably wouldn't have been enough to become my most important teacher; however, you have to understand the trouble he had to go through to reach me. First off, I was a high school athlete, so instead of meeting after class we had to meet after wrestling practice (either at 7:00 or 8:00 pm) and then he would go over geology (as well as other competitions such as astronomy, ecology, oceanography, etc.) for up to two or three hours, thus he came back to work at all hours of the night just to teach us subjects; not because it was his job, but just because he wanted to.

Then during my junior and senior years, I took his classes and he still liked me afterwards, which is in of itself somewhat impressive. I wasn't a good student, I got good grades, but I didn't pay attention, I had a tendency to nap in classes, and was given to flights of fancy. School had never been challenging and I was bored, but he didn't get frustrated; instead he inspired me. We learned about a numerous miraculous phenomena, he took us on field trips, and he made us teach each other. Other classes were fun and other classes were useful, but the two classes I took (Environmental Science and Astronomy, Meteorology, Geology) were the most useful and the most interesting.

The best part of his classes was that he pushed scientific literacy; he honestly believed that our lives would be improved by a greater understanding of the natural world. Those of his students who took advantage of his teachings were greatly improved by this philosophy, although most probably didn't do so as we lived in a very religiously conservative area, and I would say this made his work even more impressive as he reached out his hand to students who slapped it away.

Suffice it to say that I would not be in this amazing field if it was not for Coach Ford, to the extent that whenever I receive a great opportunity (like a NASA internship) I e-mail him and thank him for inspiring me so much.

Accretionary Wedge 38: Things I Wished I Learned and Things I Want to Learn

I haven’t blogged much, mostly because I’m about as scattered brained as you could get (I was going to say I haven’t done much, but then I remembered touring the Lunar Sample Lab, the Trinity Site, and several interesting hikes which I should have written about, well I will get to that soon-ish) however, when I read about this topic, I figured I had a few things to say, so I would try to write some.

                First off, I wish somebody would have told me in High School that you could study Geology in college and what you could do with that education. I honestly didn’t even know that Geologists did actual science.  I thought they were more technicians in mines or the oil fields; I grew up in the Permian Basin with a working pump jack in my school’s courtyard and two oil refineries on the outside of town, so that was all the experience I had with it. I had been interested in Earth Science since I read a book on Plate Tectonics in the first grade, but nobody told me you could make a living off of it. This actually brings me to a related issue, that I wish a professor at New Mexico Tech would have told me the definition of petrology (or I would have just asked him to clarify) since my only understanding of  the prefix petro- came from petroleum I assumed the worst. And because my stated goal in going to college was first and foremost to get away from the oil fields, I thought that Geology wasn’t the field for me and went into college without a clear path towards a degree.

                Ironically, once I talked to one of the Geology professors I found out how much I could do with a geology degree, I promptly switched my major after an aimless two year period where I floated through the basics for every science and even wetted my feet in social studies (which ended fairly unpleasantly). While most of my classes applied to my Geology degree since you have to know a lot of everything to effectively understand geology, I still wasted a lot of time on classes that didn’t interest me just so I could realize that they didn’t interest me.

                Besides learning some technical skills, which are difficult to attain at a small university, I would like the opportunity to take a class with a holistic look at the geosciences. It would be nice once you learn about Mineralogy, Petrology, Geochemistry, Sedimentology, Structural Geology, etc. to put all that knowledge together and see how they interact with one another in real life. I know that it would be nearly impossible to cover all of geology so in depth in one class, but maybe just looking at one local phenomena and looking at how the different geoscience disciplines interact with each other in that instance. For example, in New Mexico we could study the Rio Grande Rift and see how the structures formed by it where influenced by different properties of the rocks and minerals affected. It was enjoyable in introductory Geology to look at the big picture; however, I think it would be useful to step back at the end of your undergraduate degree and look at the big picture again, in the light of all you have just learned.