Teachers Without Borders, South Africa, June/July 2009

Barbara Mayer, Science

Teaching is not a job; it’s not a profession; it’s a calling. I’ve felt this way ever since I stumbled into education as a volunteer educator at an Audubon Society nature sanctuary north of Boston back in the late 60s. There can’t be anything more rewarding than facilitating the process where someone learns something new about themselves, their fellow man, or the world around them.

During the 2009 summer I had the exhilarating, and exhausting, opportunity to facilitate professional development with science teacher colleagues in South Africa. Who wouldn’t want to participate in the learning experience with teachers like the ones pictured above -- intelligent, hard-working, motivated, funny, inventive, curious and critical?!

We teachers shared many “eureka!” moments; one activity in particular stands out. RSA has an excellent senior phase natural science curriculum. Among other concepts included in the content are introductions to the fundamental theories of plate tectonics in geology (“Earth & Beyond”) and evolution and natural selection in biology (“Life & Living.”) To understand these theories, one must comprehend geologic time.

All of the teacher-participant groups were really “into” their geologic time lines. As the handout directed, each group was taking a large piece of paper, cutting it into strips, and then taping these strips together to make a narrow, 5-meter long time line. The teachers had no trouble calculating and marking off distances along the line to represent four eras in Earth’s distant past:

• Earth’s formation at 4.6 meters
• trilobites’ domination of the oceans at 54 centimeters
• coal deposition at 30 cm
• the time of T. rex at 6.5 cm

But, when it came to making a mark for 20,000 year old petroglyphs carved by the San (Bushman) people, ancestors of some modern South Africans…well, how to put that on the time line? That line needed to be drawn 0.002 cm from the mark for “today;” how can such a close mark be drawn?! And of course that was the point of the activity -- to experience how recently even ancient people have lived on Earth, compared to the age of the Earth. All of us teachers smiled and laughed! Eureka! Wow; geologic time is long! Yes! We could do this activity with our learners/students so they could have this learning experience, too!

And so, I feel extremely honored and privileged to have been a member of the TWBSA09 team.