Branch to Branch

From age to age, branch to branch, wisdom is passed down from generation to generation. Some of it sticks with you, and other pieces slip away. What has stuck with me is the wisdom of my high school chemistry teacher. Over and over he would say, "you're the best of the best, but you're not that good." A phrase that has come to personally mean: never stop learning and exploring the world of science.

This wisdom couldn't be more appropriate in this day and age when the opportunities to learn science seem endless. But what should you learn? How should you learn? And who should learn from? All fundamental questions in building a personal learning network.

And that's why I've chosen to build my network to focus on science (research and findings) from an academic institutes (Penn State through Twitter) with real people (Mr. Wanek, a fantastic teacher of 35 years, corporate education directors and science education program coordinators). With these types of connections, I will find valuable, wise and cutting-edge information.

(Pictured left) Mr. Wanek, best chemistry teacher ever, and scientist Jacquelyn pointing to her 100% qualitative analysis score on a chemistry lab cabinet door. The cabinet door was rescued by Mr. Wanek recently as the old high school will soon be torn down.

In fact, while staying in my fort up north, I had some very wise visitors. Mr. Wanek, best high school chemistry teacher of all time, and I visited about science education in the fort. First, we walked down memory lane and talked about the Qualitative Analysis project - best high school Honors Chemistry project ever! (Mr. Wanek made up mixtures with different elements and put them in the vials. Our job was to figure out what was in the vial. It was self-guided, but we could ask the opinion of our peers. Mr. Wanek knew it was a formidable project, but truly saw the value in allowing us to do science in a hands-on way.) And then, we analyzed the current state of science education (some teachers have gone to doing only demonstrations because of room spacing in the classroom). And what were great Mr. Wanek's thoughts on this? Basically, how are you to learn science, if you're not allowed to do science? Scientists are scientists because they experiment and try things. And furthermore, in his great words, "are given the opportunity to do things wrong."

It's this kind of wisdom that I want to branch out to, even though it's not the normal horizontal branch-to-branch network. We must remember in networking to not only look around, but also up and down. Vertical branching is key to passing down meaningful science education knowledge.

I will never be able to thank Mr. Wanek enough for inspiring me to become a chemist, and for always making sure I got the chance to get my hands on science.

He will always be the strongest branch on my science-learning tree.