By Isabella Ying
On Monday, Upper School Marine Biology students got a change of scenery when they visited vibrant, noisy Lower School science classes.
Ms. Thornton, a Lower School science teacher, has known that the Upper School has “a wonderful marine biology lab, and I wanted to get my Lower School students in there,” she said. Ms. Kostka explained she wanted to make biology “more engaging and real-world for the students.” So, over the summer, they decided to create a unique collaboration between their divisions.
The goal of the program is to build connections between Lower and Upper Schoolers, with the older students giving their younger counterparts a taste of what they’re learning in their classes. After a successful pilot with 4th-grade lions, Ms. Kostka’s students taught several 5th-grade classes.
They began their lesson by giving a tour of the Marine Bio lab. During this process, Ms. Kostka’s students pleasantly surprised her. Although they hadn’t done much work with fish tanks yet, “my students were explaining the parts of the tank, and I wasn’t expecting them to do that.”
After the tours, the students returned to Ms. Thornton’s classroom.
At each table, a Marine Bio student sat with several 5th graders. “Instead of taking tests,” Ms. Kostka explained, her Marine Bio students “could show what they’ve learned and put it into a real-world practice.”
They presented the 5th graders with many objects, such as rocks and shells — one table was lucky to enjoy a horseshoe crab. (Ms. Thornton made sure to clarify that she did, in fact, not harm any animals to acquire those resources.)
With the guidance of their PALs, the 5th graders recorded observations and questions in their science notebooks.
But in true Lower School fashion, they were quite energetic as they worked, and the high schoolers bore the brunt of it. Junior Georgia Chen was called “gullible,” “chopped,” and “unc” while teaching Ms. Thornton’s students. Junior Jade Liu accepted her fate: “I’m used to it,” she said.
Senior Teo Demenkow saw both good and bad sides to this, reflecting that “They’re definitely enthusiastic about learning, but it is a little hard to control.” Junior Jack Mischner, who had expected them to be “super rowdy and just be constantly talking back to the teacher,” was relieved to find his kids “super well behaved and… really mature for their age.”
While the Lower Schoolers were meant to learn from the Upper Schoolers, the Upper Schoolers learned from them too. Jack learned “about all their Lower School experiences,” and “how much they like their teacher and how much they want to have the freedom you have in Upper School.” This made Ms. Thornton happy because she wanted her students “to see what they have to look forward to going forth.”
Ms. Kostka also thought that her students could learn because “the way teaching is, you often repeat yourself many times, so you end up remembering things more,” she said. But also, “it becomes more engaging.”
While Georgia found teaching Lower Schoolers tiring, she called it a perspective-altering experience. “They think of things we don’t really think about because often we get really scientific,” she said. One pair of girls, observing a crystal fluorite, mused, “I thought fluoride was the thing they put on your teeth.” This gave one of the PALs an opportunity to do some teaching. “You know the periodic table?” Teo asked.
In another class, Georgia’s pupils asked if corals are fish and how corals live their lives. To her, this showed how strongly they empathized.
One 5th grader reflected, “I suck at science, but I learned that this is fluffy and it makes your hands soft from some sort of chemical.”
Georgia appreciated the diversity of their ideas. “We kind of underestimate them a lot,” she said. “They know a lot more than we think they do.”
In the spring, Ms. Kostka plans to bring an interactive touch tank to the Lower School. She hopes that her students will be able to explain coastal Georgia’s (state, not the Junior) many different organisms, especially because Atlantans live so far from the coast.
But it might not take anything too exotic to excite these Lower Schoolers, who seemed to enjoy the experience. As one younger student put it, “You’re with old people.”
