Julia Somers’ Education Blog

Today was the first day that we were able to devote the entire day to research. It was a very valuable day, as we were able to play around with the FITC and the nanodrop machine, both of which are fairly new to us.

We began the morning by making 2 sets of gels that used the FITC instead of the dye (which we had been using prior to yesterday). We then were able to test it using the nanodrop to see the rate at which the FITC was leaving the gels. Because the dye that we had been using acts differently than the FITC does, we are not yet sure what concentration of FITC to use such that the nanodrop picks it up. Thus, we experienced a lot of frustration today, as the various levels of FITC barely registered on the machine. We are also still getting used to working the nanodrop and the pH meter, but I think we are almost proficient at both!!

Nearly panicking, we realized that we had run out of our prepared FITC solution in the middle of making a set of gels. We had to rush to measure out the powder, dissolve it, and neutralize its pH before our gels started to set. This taught us to be more careful in the future. The biggest issue that we ran into today was that we didn’t make the FITC solution strong enough. This may be hard to explain, but we account for the dye we put in the gels by subtracting from the water that we were supposed to put in. The rest of the time that we have been working with these gels, we have never wanted to add more dye than water, but today, we wanted to add more FITC solution than we were able to given the total amount of water. Thus, we recognized that the next time we make the FITC solution, we will have to make it stronger than we did today. Luckily, we have not yet approached the saturation point (and we are not that close to approaching it either!!).

Additionally, we have had the issue of having to wait a long time in between readings because the collagen concentration is pretty high. Therefore, we have decided to try to make the gels with a lower collagen concentration, so that we will hopefully see some movement of FITC if we test the gels every 15-20 min or so. There is so much more to test! I hope we don’t run out of time and/or materials.

Our project is getting more and more exciting as we go along. One thing that we noted today is that we’re having a lot of trouble with getting some of the readings to work out as we know that they should. We mused over how difficult/unclear our results would be if we didn’t have an idea of how they were supposed to work out. This really makes me respect researchers like Millie (our professor) and her team for the amount of background information that they must know, not only to motivate the research and experiment, but also to carry it out and give it the right direction. It’s such a pleasure to be working with them! Really being able to get in there and use all of these materials and run all these tests can be monotonous at times, but it has really been able to raise my interest in the subject matter. It allllllllllllmost makes me question my choice of career, but I’m not sure that I could ever come up with my own research project, and I don’t think I would be content to work on someone else’s project in the long term. I guess, in a way, teaching seems like my own project, so I’m pretty sure that I’m in the right place.

Yesterday would have been an ideal time to update, but we were in tech tools until the end, so I procrastinated a bit. I’m feeling very enthusiastic today… its one of those days when boredom seems impossible (which is actually pretty good for someone living in Newark over the summer). I think this is just because we’ve finally had some success, and I’m becoming very interested in our progress now that it seems evident that we will indeed have some.

One of the highlights of yesterday was the Tech tools workshop. Though some of the tools that we have learned have not really inspired me, the google reader really made sense to me. I’m glad we get the opportunity to learn how many of the “hot” online tools work, since I usually just fumble my way around until I’m passable technology wise. I really like reading the blogs, also, and its kinda amusing to log in and have new messages waiting (though it makes me a little uncomfortable that other people are going to now have to at least pretend to read mine to make those irritating bold 1′s to go away). At any rate, this is something that I can definitely see myself utilizing in the future.

This morning, we jumped right into the lab to make some gels. To give a little background on the the issues that we are currently encountering, we basically have two different ways of measuring the fluorescence of the buffer/gel- by biorad and by nanodrop. We hoped that we could use the same concentration of dye for each machine, but the biorad is faaaaaaaaaaaar more sensitive than the nanodrop is, thus making it impossible to test one set of gels with the two different machines. Knowing this, we were able to reset our plan for today.

Because we are more aware of the financial burden of materials, we snuck some trays into our office and washed them out for reuse. After all, we haven’t actually begun testing the “for real” material. Today, though, we came close, as we finally began work with the FITC!! We had to fight with it to raise the pH to 7, which was educational, since we learned how to use the pH meter. This also just made me want to dump the entire bottle of NaOH into the solution. We thought that it would take us about 15 min to make the gels, and it ended up taking us about an hour and a half. We’re going to take lunch early, and try to squeeze in looking at them before the tech tools workshop.

Overall, my interest in everything we’re doing is rising daily. It’s becoming easier and easier to want to read things, work in the lab, learn to use the tech tools, etc. I reached a point this school year at which I no longer knew what productivity meant (when doing work for certain courses) because I found it difficult to motivate myself to learn about the material. What I’m trying to think about is why it is so much easier to charge into work everyday and learn about things that I don’t have any background in. This will be something interesting to think about, so that I can hopefully apply this to my last year of school and then my teaching in the future.

I haven’t been very good at updating lately…I’m going to try to update every day this week.

I am going to provide a general outline for what we are currently working on, though I feel that we are moving forward at about the rate of snails.

Generally, in order to do any research, we always have to begin by creating hydrogels, which we have discovered are very receptive to a little bit of patience (with regard to setting). Thus, we often have to try to plan it such that we can create the gels and then busy ourselves with something for an hour or two before we can analyze them. Though this has been an entirely infuriating process on the whole, we have developed our technique in many ways. The unfortunate part of this, however, is that though we are learning a lot for our benefit, we still are not sure that we are discovering things that we could apply to our classrooms (my future classroom). My goal throughout this research is to learn a little bit that I didn’t know concept wise, but more importantly, to develop ways that I can incorporate that which I previously was unclear on into my curriculum. Hopefully, once we are finally able to overcome all the technical issues that we have on a daily (hourly) basis, we will be able to make great strides forward.

The other important thing to mention is that we are constantly having to refer to different people, methods, tools and references to define the process that we should be employing. Though this is irritating at moments, I find it very useful and realistic. At first, I was worried that we wouldn’t feel like true researchers, since the impact of what we discover will not be too profoundly felt. However, it is great to have to go through the motions of investigating how to use things, what concentrations to use and such and how long to let things set. Though it is not practical at most times to apply this type of learning into a high school or middle school curriculum (unless you know for sure that it’s going to work out ok in the end), it is interesting to see how much you can learn from the process of messing up and having to be innovative in order to “solve” the problem. This has helped me recognize the benefits of Math curricula in which discovery learning (attempting to solve problems before the methods have been taught) are heavily emphasized. Now all that we can hope is that our own research will work out as well as the problems do.

On a closing note, one of the graduate students that we work with said, “That’s what you learn about research, it always fails.” The other graduate student, however quickly called her a pessimist and stressed to us the benefits of learning along the way. I have to hope that we as teachers and researchers can take the second mentality. (If our failures don’t let up soon, though, I’m not so sure…)

Today we had the opportunity to enjoy a few speakers and labs related to engineering. We also teamed up with about 15 other teachers who were here for the engineering concepts workshop. They were lucky enough to have done two additional labs yesterday, and briefly explained to us what they had done.

Losing no more time, we first heard from Professor Pei Chiu, who is a Civil and Environmental Engineering professor here at the university. He clearly explained the benefits of using iron to remove contaminants from water, which proved to be very interesting. Though we were not able to explore the actual process by which the iron is put into the groundwater, we were shown the advantage of using an iron wall to purify the water while it is still underground as opposed to pumping it out, treating it, and then returning it back into the soil.

After listening to him speak, a grad student, Nicole Walsh, informed us on soil and rock in construction. She very correctly indicated that most people only think of the materials used when building and not what is being built upon. We received a preview of what we would discover later in the lab that day.

We then were asked to make a lesson plan based upon what we had heard from our two speakers. We struggled with it a bit, since we did not feel quite informed enough to make up our own activity. Thus, we created an outline and vowed to finish it after we had done the labs.

The labs were great and helped illustrate the basics of what we had heard in the morning. In the contamination lab, we were able to see the immediate effects of iron and zinc on “contaminated” water. In the soil lab, we looked at soil and classified it based upon how much remained in a variety of sieves.

Overall, the experience was very helpful. I think the labs in particular helped me to see the shape of such topics as they could appear in my future plans. Hopefully, we’ll keep doing activities like this in the future!

Today is our second day in the the NISE program. We’re learning how to use all the tech tools, including the blog, which is what I’m using right now. I have to say, its a bit overwhelming, since we’re using google tools for some things, wikipedia for others, and now this edublog site. I hope that I get used to all this!! I hope this summer overall proves to be a good experience. A lot of information has been thrown at us so far.

My goals in this program are to gain a good background in Engineering and applications of math and science so that when I become a Math teacher, I will be able to guide my students towards these disciplines and provide good answers for the question, “what do i need this for anyway”