A Hit in School, Maggots and All (our kids DO like science)

[ensho]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12angi.html?_r=1&ref=science


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Projected onto the classroom screen was live-action footage of putrefying poultry, the image blown up to festively pulsating proportions by way of a digital microscope. And lively the action was: maggots of all ages and body-mass indexes wriggled across the slick carnal landscape, some newly hatched and ravenous, other older ones on the verge of pupating, looking as plump and pompous as earthworms.

But did the students in Scott Rubins’s advanced forensic science class at New Rochelle High School shriek or go “Ewww gross” or even so much as wrinkle their noses with revulsion? Not over their dead bodies. For one thing, Mr. Rubins doesn’t tolerate squeamish outbursts in the classroom. “No one is allowed to react,” he said. “If you’re reacting, you won’t be able to learn.”

For another, the students were too busy furiously waving their hands in the air, begging to be chosen as the day’s evidence collectors. Far from being disgusted by the maggot-cam feed, they were desperate for the chance to snap on a pair of disposable rubber gloves and retrieve the rest of the decomposing chicken that Mr. Rubins had deposited outside a few days earlier. They wanted to pick up the slimy three-and-a-half-pound ex-bird and flip it this way and that, to lift the wings and the legs and find the dark, warm crevices where flies in training like to hide.

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They also end up getting a lot of serious science without necessarily realizing it. “We do chemistry while studying soil composition, toxicology, all the different tests for drugs,” said Andrea Schwach, who teaches two of the New Rochelle forensic classes. There are forays into biology and anatomy: the biology of blood, hair and skin, how fingerprints form, and how DNA can be extracted from the tiniest personal remains. Students learn how to distinguish a healthy liver and set of lungs from the organs of an alcoholic or a smoker, and how to analyze stomach contents and figure out what a victim ate and how long ago. Let’s not forget forensic entomology, those magnificent maggots, and how a sampling of detritus recyclers can help estimate the breadth of a victim’s P.M.I. — post mortem interval. Physics comes up in studying ballistics and explosives, or when students must reconstruct a car crash or make sense of blood spatters. “They have to understand how force affects spray angle,” Ms. Schwach said. “There’s a lot of math involved in that as well.”
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wonderful

[glowing]

1. Math and science can actually be fun.. especially if taught right.

[annabanana]

2. The "ick factor" evaporates once the mind's engaged. . . n/t

[meow2u3]

3. Doctors use purefied maggots to treat necrosis

The flies are carefully bred, kept free of disease-carrying pathogens, and then the docs plant the fly eggs who then hatch into maggots which then feed on the dead tissue. Question is, what happens when the maggots turn into pupae? Do the docs remove them and then trap the adult flies?

This is an example of gross medicine. For further details, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy

[soothsayer]

4. They send in a bird to catch the fly, they send in a cat to catch the bird,

they send in a dog to catch the cat.....

[Wednesdays]

5. K&R

:kick:

[nichomachus]

6. Kids love to learn and use their minds to think creatively

Fortunately, the corporatocracy has found out how to beat that out of them.

[XemaSab]

7. I think virtually all high school science should be hands-on

We did the ballistic pendulum lab in high school.

With a real M-1.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/25/TEACHER.TMP

[Shanti Mama]

8. advanced Forensic Science at a high school

Wow! That school, in Westchester County, must have some money. How did the students have time to first study bio, chem, physics and beginning forensic science?