Sixteen committed NW Noggin volunteers from Washington State University Vancouver and PSU made an early morning journey to the enormous (2300 student!) Skyview High School in Salmon Creek, Washington, just down the road from WSU-V…
We were there to meet students in three, 10th grade biology classrooms, along with their teacher Angela Fojtik, and GEAR UP representative Melodie Alfaro.
Classes at Skyview begin at 7:30am, and one of the first points we made is that adolescent brains don’t typically benefit from lack of sleep! (Neither do adult brains :). But despite the early morning hour, students woke up quickly when we started talking cerebrums…
Our Noggin volunteers are here at Skyview for more than one day. We’ve been meeting at the Chapel Pub in North Portland, planning a four session series of classes to introduce students to the brain…
We started this week with a big bang introduction to the cerebrum, and plan to build through discussion of neurons and synapses, drug actions and effects, and large scale networks that carry out decision making, internal reflection, memory, and attention…
On our last day we’ll bring along sheep brains for our students to dissect.
But this week we met our high school students, and asked them what they already knew.
This led to lively discussions about how we use only 10% of our brains (myth!), how each brain hemisphere controls movements on the opposite side of the body (true!), how you lose (and sometimes gain!) neurons throughout your life (true!), and other topics…
With three classes to work with, our Noggin students tried various approaches, in some cases asking students to act out the functions associated with various brain lobes. This game of brain charades led to some creative performance, and enthusiastic guesswork…
In all three classes, Jeff Leake orchestrated an art project related to illustrating those cortical lobes and their functional associations…
And on day one, everyone got the opportunity to examine brains up close, and ask questions. One student expressed his strong interest in becoming a neurosurgeon, and everyone was asked to think about what they’d like to explore over the next few weeks…
We also watched a short video (“The Unfixed Brain“) to introduce our students to what the human brain looks and feels like before it is immersed in formalin and “fixed” for preservation. It is a lot softer, and more vulnerable…
We are looking forward to another early morning visit next week..!
Some useful vocabulary for day one is available in the document below…