Science Fair & America's Crumbling Infrastructure

Two months until school ends and I am looking forward to summer when, "Bam!", meetings for science fair begin to bombard me. Those of you who are reading may think, "Science fair sounds like fun to me." Yeah, sounds good if you are not the one responsible for helping 110 kids design, develop, and present their projects! It is cool though, I have a plan of attack unlike last year.

Design  

& 

                                                     

                                                                          Develop

Last year was my first year teaching and science fair scared me to death; I seriously had nightmares. Nobody held my hand or guided me on where to begin teaching kids how to create massive projects that require higher level thinking.  I had no choice at the time but to teach myself. I began to  think about what I would enjoy talking about for a month and started from there. The result was a rigorous earthquake proof bridge building project because I love infrastructure.

      

Students anxiously waiting to test the strength of the bridges that they designed and built.

I wasn't always passionate about infrastructure. During my senior year in college, I was stuck on what I should write about for my senior thesis. My mentor suggested looking at the shared infrastructure between Mexico and the United States. Honestly, I had no idea what the hell "infrastructure" meant, so rather than looking stupid I said, "Sure that sounds great, I'd love to research that topic."At that point, I had no choice but to once again teach myself what I didn't know. It seems that I often have to teach myself what I do not know....Eventually, I figured out what the word meant and why it was important. For those of you that don't talk about infrastructure on a daily basis (mostly everyone),  it is the basic structure or facilities (roads, bridges, dams, energy, etc.) needed for a society to operate. What has and continues to fascinate me about this subject is the shabby quality of the United States' infrastructure. Our country needs all of these systems to function, yet we were given a D on our infrastructure report card. Infrastructure in the United States is practically failing and if left unfixed our nation will face dire consequences. Imagine not being able to drive to work, no electricity, and not having anything on shelves in your grocery store. Mass hysteria would be unavoidable! If my students are the future, it is important to educate them on this issue so that maybe they can fix the problems. Last year, I used science fair as a platform to teach students how America is crumbling right before our eyes and despite all the anxiety, headaches, and heavy workload, my students won 1st place at our school's science fair.

I plan on my current students winning this year's science fair. I created a to-do list a week ago and it was as follows:
1) Create bilingual science fair flyer/contract
2) Collect student's money to buy bridge kits
3) Order the kits (shipping takes about a week)
4) Create Smartboard notebook/Power Point presentation for each level of project
5) Create all customized handouts and practice sheets
6) Create lab write up template

I have managed to get through all six! All that is left to do now is execute the project and that is the hardest part. Hopefully, I will not have any re-occuring nightmares. Dealing with 1, 000 questions being fired at you and potential behavior issues popping up will be exhausting; however, the next two months will be my last two months ever teaching seventh grade, so I am going to enjoy it as best I can. Do not get me wrong, I sincerely love my students, overall teaching seventh grade science is just not for me. I dealt with a lot of guilt over not liking teaching, but I dealt with it and have a clear conscience. I can move on without feeling like I'm leaving my community. I still want to work with Latinos, but in a different way and definitely not solely seventh graders.

Being Latina is complicated.