Whirlwind and crazy-awesome students

Much of yesterday was spent considering the interface between science and society, largely because I can't decide what I want to do after graduate school and because I enjoy getting caught up in the human aspect of science. I'm getting started with an outreach project to teach middle-school teachers how to use ants in the classroom, and so there has been a great deal of initial excitement about those ideas. Then, myrmecology and I got into one of those "I don't know what I'm doing with my life" conversations. Taking a quick inventory, I'm guessing that that conversation isn't ever going to stop--my father is still asking that question, after all, and he's had many more years to work on it.

Then, teaching in the evenings is kind of difficult for me, because I have a hard time concentrating on other things beforehand and get really wound up afterwards. My students were a lot of fun, however, and patient with my fuzzy presentation of science. On the one hand, I'm a bit frustrated that my presentation was so fuzzy, but on the other hand, it's probably a more accurate picture of how science ends up working. I just hope they continue to keep thinking carefully as they write, and continue to ask a lot of good questions. That's key. I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to figure out how to meet the students at the right level to get them to expand their thinking.

We played Scrabble right after I finished teaching, which felt a bit like chaos upon chaos, but it was good. It's such a valuable chance to catch up with my friends and to expand my vocabulary (with SCART being the most recent amusing addition, as in, "I need to SCART me arse!").