Woodstock School

Got up around 7:15 this morning, ate a tasty breakfast, and it was off to talk to high schoolers. The visibility was a lot better today, thankfully, and the area here is beautiful. I mean, the view of the mountains, heavily forested, the terraced agriculture off in the distance. It's great. I talked to two juniors in a biology course, one from Delhi and one from Korea, along with Nate and Matt. As per usual, afraid of butchering their names, though I do know them. We discussed climate change, biomes, where they were from, a little bit of general stuff. From there we went to present to 5th graders. I was nervous about this part, but it actually worked really well. The coral reef group did a cool thing to demonstrate destabilization of food webs (which led to me having to answer a question about what happened when all the dinosaurs disappeared at once, with support), the desert group got a little bogged down in questions (Allen taught them what “endemic” meant) but did well, and their make-a-monster thing was fun, and we “took them on a hike” through a tropical wet forest and a tropical dry forest, teaching them to observe like we observe with Becky's pictures. It worked really well, the kids were super-engaged, a few asked a few too many questions but some of them were GOOD, one kid asked me the percentage of sunlight that made it past the wet forest canopy. I talked to the teacher a bit, a guy from Pittsburgh who had also spent a lot of time in Colorado, in Boulder. He encouraged me to spend some time in the Rockies... well, we'll see. It's one more vote on the table, though, he apparently just loved it out there. We went to another bio course and talked to some more students, but since we were the last group we got there late and didn't really get in to talking. I talked to Darhab, our host for a while. From there we went on a little hike around the area, got to see the “Granddaddy Oak” which is this beautiful HUGE oak tree, as well as lots of other vegetation around the area, very fun. Gorgeous mountainside, like I said before, it's just so very green. Deciduous broadleaf trees, which is weird considering we're 7000 feet up a mountain. We came down, had a tasty lunch (Chinese food, the chicken in oyster sauce was WONDERFUL), and then off to talk to AP Bio students. These two were a little harder to get talking, but we had some fun, the one guy (also Delhi and Korea, by the way) had seen Three Idiots so we talked about that. Both of them were aiming medical, the guy (again, afraid to misspell his name) in India, the Korean girl (Cindy was her nickname) in Hungary. I also got to hear a bit of David spieling/rambling about liberal arts education, I didn't realize it didn't exist outside of the US. I mean, I didn't expect it in India, but I didn't know even Europe gets super-specialized after high school. We went to the gym, which was nice, hung out there, I really wish I was able to climb on their rock walls (3 walls of a room, all walls), talked to Darhab some more. Went down for tea, wrote some in my orange journal for Denny, and came back up to Hanifl Center to fart around the internet and post all these.

Wednesday, February 10th, roughly 5:05-5:15 PM local time