Benedictine U. program offers experience to new teachers

Christie Joesten will begin her new job as a high school math teacher this fall, but that wasn't always the image she had for her future.

"I went to medical school," she said. "I was going to be a doctor and then I changed my mind and here I go for the teacher's life. It was a big change."

Joesten is currently enrolled in the Alternative Teacher Certification program at Lisle's Benedictine University, which allows professionals in the science, mathematics or engineering fields switching to a career in education to start teaching in less than a year.

But like any other teacher, Joesten and her 22 career-changing peers need practice in front of students with some supervision before leading a classroom of their own.

The opportunity to do that came this week through the 10th annual, four-day Summer Sleuths science camp at the university, which started last Monday and focused on problem-based learning.

The problem more than 250 kids entering fifth through ninth grade from northern Illinois researched and tried to solve was titled "Plight of the Pumpkin Pollinators."

Put more simply: In recent years there has been a mysterious decrease in the number of bees nationwide.

"The bee population has declined drastically over the past three or four years and people all over the world, not just the country, are wondering what's going on, what's causing this," said John Zigmond, director of the alternative certification program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported a 29 percent drop in beehives in 2009 and a 36 percent decline in 2008. It is estimated about $15 billion worth of crops depend on bees for pollination and honey production is also affected.

"There's months of research that could go into this," said Brian Stachowiak, a former engineer who is also enrolled in Benedictine's Alternative Teacher Certification program. "There are Ph. Ds that have been made out of this research already. People make their thesis and incomes on research for this bee issue."

Of course, the students in the Summer Sleuths program aren't old enough to write a thesis, or to research the problem as in depth as a Ph.D. candidate, but they did make some fun observations over the four days.

Activities ranged from looking at a variety of dead bees and mites under a telescope to dissecting a pumpkin flower to observing bees in a pumpkin patch outside.

"It was pretty cool looking at the sweat bee," said 13-year-old Daniel Nielson, a student at Washington Academy in Rockford. "It just looks like a little black thing, but it's actually like a rainbow of colors and it's really beautiful."

Numaan Mahmood, 12, also had some misconceptions about bees before attending the camp.

"I always used to get scared of bees," he said. "But now I understand how important they are to the environment and how they're actually important to the economy and most people don't even know that. They hate bees."

The culminating event of the four days requires the kids to present their solutions and have them videotaped. But by day three they already had drawn some interesting conclusions.

"I figured out that a lot of the problems are just environmental problems that we've never fixed, like pollution and pesticides, that lots of other problems are stemming from," said 12-year-old Lily Benig from Trinity Christian School in Shorewood. "I think it's definitely something people should be aware of."

Jessica Ahlgren, 13, from West Middle School in Rockford, agreed and said safer pesticides need to be used on farms.

"The bees will be affecting our fruits and vegetables if they die off," she said. "Pesticides, parasites and pollution are killing off the bees."

She also mentioned factors such as radiation emitted from cell phone towers - which enters beehives and harms the honey production process - are adding to the decrease in bee populations.

"They are surprising me every day," Joesten said. "They're brilliant kids and so I'm proud of them for what they're coming up with."

At the end of it all, though, the teachers learned a lot too, and not just about bees.

Stachowiak said he had to scrap an activity he had planned on Wednesday for the kids because they were having such a productive debate about pollution and its affects on the bees.

"As a teacher you'll have these great moments that happen and you just have to say 'Forget what I was planning for the day,'" he said. "You have to be super flexible."

Joesten said despite the fact that her program doesn't offer a traditional student-teaching experience she is still getting a lot out of her week with the summer sleuths.

"This is our time to be in front of a classroom and finally be able to see how the classroom dynamics work," she said. "It's good to be in front of the students and see how they interact and how you interact with them."