[Rockhounds] rockhound kits

[Alan Goldstein]

Providing rock and mineral kits to schools is a great service. However, on 
their own they will probably be under-utilized. Sure, there are a couple of 
"go-getter" type teachers in each school, but that seems to be an 
unfortunate exception. Most educators that teach geology as part of their 
class curriculum have never had a geology class in college. Thus the real 
challenge is combining those kits with professional development. Something 
that is free tends to be regarded with little value to keep and unlikely to 
be used for years. That's a hard fact of life in the school system. Without 
spare specimens to replace broken or stolen samples, kits won't stay intact 
for more than a couple of years. The hardest part is keeping them from 
disappearing into the storeroom never to be seen again until the custodian 
comes in over the summer to clean it out.

With regards to copyrighting the teacher's manual for the kit... what's the 
point? Teachers have to copy material if they are going to share it with 
their students. I've seen some copyrighted manuals with activity sheets that 
say "Copies of this page for classroom use is permitted" or something like 
that.

How can we - as rockhounds - overcome this force against progress?
1) Go to the science curriculum coordinator in each school district --  
discuss the best way to get kits out to schools and get them used.
2) Offer a professional development class (1/2 to full day depending on 
depth) for educators - the science curriculum coordinator can help get it 
done.
3) Charge a nominal fee ($5 or $10) so educators will see there is a 
perceived value to the workshop and will be more likely to show up. (Sound 
strange, but it is true. I've done a paleontology workshop for years for 
free with modest numbers. When I charged $10 last year, the PD session 
filled up completely!)
4) Partner with museums and science centers. They may not have all the 
resources that a club collectively has to create educational kits, but they 
have professional development down to a science. Student programs are the 
meat and potatoes of most museums and generate a lot of revenue.
5) If the club has enough volunteers to go into schools (many districts 
require volunteers to have a police background check of some sort), get to 
know the teachers who use the kits. If there are teachers who don't use the 
kits (and should), talk to them and find out why. Chances are they are 
intimidated because of their lack of knowledge on the subject.
6) Target inner-city schools and those with high numbers of free and reduced 
lunch students. Historically, those schools have had the worst equipped 
science labs and those students have the lowest scores on standardized 
tests. They would get the greatest benefit.
7) Get and study copies of the science curriculum as it pertains to earth 
science. (It can be tough to read, but peel away the non-earth science stuff 
and there is a lot less to read.) You can target the kits and more 
importantly - activities for students - if you know exactly what the 
students will need to learn and what they will be tested on!
8) Instead of providing ready made kits, provide the empty kits and set up 
"stations" with a bucket or box of each rock, mineral or fossil type to go 
in them. Let the teachers pick out their own. It gives them a sense of 
ownership and a personal connection to each specimen. I offered a "Museum in 
a Box" PD session for 20 teachers in 2005 & 2006. I had received a huge 
collection donated to our park museum in 2000 and we needed to get rid of 
it. Each teacher could pick out 100 specimens and the afternoon was spent 
helping the teachers identify what they picked out. Very intensive to be 
sure, but each teacher had a kit that was customized to them - they created 
it!
9) Go beyond specimens to web-based resources for the classroom. A club 
website can have a student or teacher section with activities and lessons 
geared to the kits or the local/regional geology. Go beyond Seek and Find, 
Fill in the Blank and Crossword Puzzles. Provide some meat to the content!
10) Partner with the educational TV organization in your region or state to 
develop a 30 minute (max.) program on geology connected to the area. The 
Kyana Geological Society in Louisville did this. Our original plan was to 
put it on a DVD and give it to each school in the metropolitan Louisville 
area. After further discussion it will was decided to be on file with KET 
and available to any teacher served by the Kentucky Educational Television 
system (8 states) so it can be broadcast into the classroom upon request. 
Instead of benefiting a few dozen teachers, it has the potential to be used 
in thousands of classrooms - THOUSANDS! Now I will admit, we have an 
insider - one of our members produces a well-known show called "Kentucky 
Life." He used his own camera and volunteered his time. We paid for someone 
to edit the production and for a teen age girl to serve as narrator. The 
effectiveness of this production will depend on how it is marketed. I do not 
know the detailed, so stay tuned! You are talking some money hear, so those 
corporate sponsors can help!

There are two other related matters I want to touch on.

First, among the clubs across the country there are resources that should be 
shared. Our club developed egg carton kits for individuals at the Kyana show 
and the Fossil Festival. It is a fundraiser. People can select what they 
want for a $1 donation to fill each space in the carton. For years, we had 
about 25 different items, today we are up to 50 different rocks, minerals 
and fossils (everything labeled) - so people will often get two, three or 
four egg cartons. We have access to vast numbers of invertebrate fossils 
(i.e., corals, bryozoans, brachiopods, crinoid stems), sedimentary rocks 
(like limestone, shale) and a few mineral species (i.e., calcite, dolomite, 
fluorite, gypsum, and pyrite). We don't have ready access to slate, schist, 
basalt, garnets, kyanite, etc. Wouldn't it be great if a network was 
established to allow clubs to exchange resources?

Second, I mentioned last year or earlier than some universities are in short 
supply of disposable resources for student geology labs. Individuals with a 
club or the club itself could provide minerals for hardness and testing of 
other physical properties, rock and ore samples for thin sectioning, etc. I 
donated eight boxes (hundreds of pounds) of ore samples to the University of 
AZ school of mining and mine engineering in Tucson. Universities have their 
own UPS / FedEx billing accounts so you don't have to pay to ship a 50 box 
of rocks! [So do school systems!] It is probably easiest to talk to the 
geology professor(s) at the nearest college or university and see if they 
need material. I'm not talking about selling for profit (although some may 
have a budget for some purchases), just a way to get rid of surplus junk - 
yard rock - to folks who can use it! I challenge every collector on this 
list to adopt a geoscience department - or your local school system - and 
help them!

Regards,
Alan G.
P.S. If anyone wants to reprint the above note all or inpart for their club 
newsletter, go ahead! I'd like to know who is using it, though.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "tango juli" <tangojuli at yahoo.com>
To: <rockhounds at lists.drizzle.com>
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 12:55 AM
Subject: [Rockhounds] rockhound kits


> I've chronically behind in my email, but wanted to respond to this 
> particular thread. I read someone's reference back a few wks ago regarding 
> the Ventura (CA) club's rock kits. As our SCFM was getting ready to meet 
> that week, and a few of us had talked about doing something similar, I 
> called the group mentioned and talked to Donna and Larry, who coordinate 
> the production of these kits. They agreed to come to the LA Co. Museum 
> where we met a few weeks ago.
>
> Folks, I gotta tell you--the kits they make are amazing. Built to last 30 
> years, and with such care and thought and engineering-its the kind of 
> thing you'd expect an established company to be producing for wealthy ivy 
> type schools (valued at $600-900 a kit). They take a long term approach to 
> durability and production, trying to do only 30+ per year, with goal of 
> serving the 250 ventura co. schools. The high quality, custom-designed, 
> stackable wooden crates, printed color materials, laminated in easy to 
> understand formats, with a teacher's manual that has chapters for each 
> grade that is also aligned with CA curriculum and testing. It is pretty 
> awe inspiring to behold. 12 fist-sized samples of each: igneous/meta/sed. 
> But some of the samples - its amazing they don't get stolen (beautiful 
> garnets adorned one of the metam. specs). But the clubs associated w/ the 
> effort also have a QC system, visiting the kits (property of school) once 
> a year to make sure they
> weren't running short. One story was told of a principal who sighed when 
> they came to QC the kit--apparently he had to break up a fight over the 
> kit--between two teachers who both wanted it at the same time.
> I think we all try to do what we can to elicit interest and not bite off 
> more than we can chew. But this group inspired our entire meeting to a 
> hundred questions, lots of discussion afterward. They are generous with 
> their information, shared the plans for the boxes they build and gave us 
> lovely copied information to take away. (note--teacher's manual is 
> copyrighted)
> They also told us of how they have more corporate sponsorships to support 
> production than they know what to do with--how many folks can say that? 
> Clubs may want to think about this aspect to produce attractive and 
> durable kits for school systems.
> While we don't know if this is the route we will go down, the bar is high 
> now, quality- wise in whatever project we will undertake.
> Appreciate list members who mentioned the ventura group and the hook up.
> PS--now we just need to figure a way to ship heavy materials to each other 
> to provide specimens to places far away like Alabama!
> Best,
> Tina