Centennial High School Visit

Walking into Centennial High School for the January 12th HPI Outreach Classroom visit, I am acutely aware that I haven’t been inside a high school in quite a while. As in, the last time I would have been a student here! As we wait to check our group in at the main office I desperately try to avoid doing the math on exactly how long ago that would have been… and fail. Wow, I’m officially ancient.

Our group sets up in the science lab: Tim and Leah, the HPI Outreach Committee coordinators who have set all this up; myself, Jeanie, and Colin, volunteers here to help; and intrepid HPI program manager Teresa who has overseen everything. As the students file into the classroom I keep thinking about my experiences back when I was a high school student. What would I think of the talk we were about to give? Did I even realize that this whole world of biology and scientific research I currently find myself in existed? I don’t think I even understood that the university had research labs at this age, let alone think that one day I might be part of one. 

Our group launches into our presentation, each taking turns to talk while wearing the amazing stuffed nematode worm another HPI member has hand-knit (thanks for the loan Janneke!). Watching the students as Tim talks, they’re clearly absorbed looking at his images of bizarre parasites, including one that actually lives inside a fish’s mouth, taking the place of its tongue (Cymothoa exigua)! When it’s my turn, I relish the disgusted-yet-fascinated looks I see when I flip to my image of a small intestine packed full of Ascaris lumbricoides nematode worms. 

We finish the presentation and switch into doing five small-group stations, each focusing on different parasites. We’ve brought actual, preserved samples of a bunch of these, and from my station across the room I can see students are completely absorbed looking at the giant tapeworm-in-a-flask and the muskox lungworms. I avoid looking at the liver flukes - even from here they creep me out too much. Meanwhile, I’m getting peppered with questions about all the different parasites, let alone just the slide of a wood tick I’m trying to make sure everyone gets to see through one of the microscopes we’ve brought 

And just like that, the period is over and in a panic we’ve packed everything up so we’re out of the way for the next class to use our room. As we retrace our steps back towards the entrance, barely managing to carry all the various samples and visual aids we’ve brought, I again try to imagine what I might have thought of all this as a high school student, but realize I don’t have to. I saw these student’s faces, and I heard their questions. We made an impression. With our current world, ruled by “fake news” and “alternative facts”, and a pervasive feeling of public distrust for science to the point that we can’t even convince everyone of the value of such medical miracles as vaccination, I can’t help but feel that things like what we’ve just done are more important than ever. Maybe today we’ve shown these students that scientists aren’t malevolent figures in white lab coats with a political agenda, but real humans who just happen to want to devote copious amounts of their lives figuring out how things work. Plus hey, maybe we just inspired the next great in the muskox lungworm field! If so, how about a co-author credit on your Nature paper in 20 years?