Growing Science in the Bronx

Pick a Scienceblogger - any Scienceblogger - and you'll find someone who loves science, and thinks that everyone should be exposed to it. That's one of the reasons that we spend time hammering out these posts. We also, as a group, have this funny belief about science education. We think it's important. We think that it's a good thing for children to learn about the way their world works, and we're all for anything that helps with that.

That's why there are, as you may have seen on the main Scienceblogs page, a whole bunch of us clamoring for your money right now. We're embarking on a Bloggers Challenge to raise money to help teachers teach science. DonorsChoose.org provides a way for individual teachers to take their proposals for projects directly to the public. What we've done is to set up challenges at the DonorsChoose website, where we've selected proposals that particularly appeal to us, and set our fundraising goals. My own goal for the challenge is on the modest size - less than $1,000 - but I think that the proposals I've chosen have enormous potential benefits. All three are at schools located near where I grew up, in The Bronx, New York. All three, if funded, will expose the students to something that most have absolutely no experience with - nature.

It's difficult to describe the experience of growing up in the inner city to someone who didn't. Many of the things that people in other parts of the country take for granted - like grass - are extremely uncommon there. In the neighborhood where I grew up, the largest stretches of grass were found in two places: the football field at the park, and the median of the parkway. The football field grass was usually pretty dead. The parkway median grass was usually in decent shape, but you had to be pretty careful throwing a ball around there. Aside from a few small houses with postage-stamp back yards, the only vegetation found outside of the parks consisted of some very well fertilized trees along the side streets and the occasional bit of decorative greenery in front of an apartment building. The non-domestic animal life was largely restricted to insects (particularly roaches), pigeons, squirrels, mice, and rats. A skunk that had an unfortunate encounter with a teacher at one of the local schools was the talk of the neighborhood for weeks.

There are children - lots of them - who live in environments like that, and never leave. They do not have the experience with living and growing things that so many other children do. Imagine trying to teach someone to love biology in circumstances like that. It can be done - I'm proof of that - but it requires more effort than many parents are able to provide.

Curiosity is the most important characteristic for a scientist. It is also a characteristic that scientists share with most children. The thing about curiosity, though, is that it really requires things to be curious about. I think that the three proposals I've picked will do just that. Two of the proposals are requests for funding for gardening equipment, to allow schoolchildren to use nearby community gardens. Gardening might sound like an ordinary experience to many of you, but I can assure you that it will be an exciting novelty for most Bronx schoolchildren. Getting hands-on experience growing plants is also the single best way to get kids interested in what makes plants grow. The third proposal is for butterfly kits, so that the children can watch that process. That's a pretty standard elementary school science experience, but the funding levels are so low in these schools that right now they are working with one insect per class. Even if that one insect survives, which is doubtful, that's not an insect:student ratio that's great for learning.

To donate to those three projects through this Blogger's Challenge, click on the link here. When you're done, Donors Choose sends you a confirmation email. If you forward that email to: sb.donorschoose.bonanza@gmail.com, we'll enter you in a drawing to receive some incentives that we've scared up from various sources.

Please do donate. If you don't like the projects I've selected, take a look at some of the other projects that other Sciencebloggers have selected. Science education is too important to be ignored, and the people who are trying to teach it, especially under difficult circumstances, deserve all the support that we can give them.