Friends of the North Fork considers the teaching of environmental science and earth science to our youth to be essential components of their education. These subjects are important not only for knowledge acquisition and life-context awareness, but also for values formation, as our young people prepare for being responsible adults, and, hopefully, involvement in organizations such as ours.
As opportunities occur, we will feature items on the activities and accomplishments of our area schools, faculty, and students, in the areas of environmental science and earth science.
Our first “teacher feature” recognizes Mr. Chris Kaznosky, of Central High School, Woodstock, for receiving the “Virginia Earth Science Teacher of the Year” award. Mr. Kaznosky provided some details regarding his award and his teaching.
It is an impressive array of learning, transmitting, and doing in a subject directly related to our mission and goals. We are fortunate that Mr. Kaznosky is teaching in our area.
Q: How were you nominated, and what were some of the highlights of the submittal?
A: I was nominated by Dr. Eric Pyle of the James Madison University Geology Department. I was selected as much for what I do outside of the classroom as for what I do within. It is my belief that I constantly need to learn so that I can bring a better understanding of Earth Science-based topics to my students. Thus over the past few years, here are some things that I have done for my schools, my students, and my education:
1) I teach Earth Science to mostly freshmen at Central High School and Geology to mostly juniors and seniors;
2) Prior to arriving at Central High School, my students and I researched and built two rain gardens at Elkton Middle School;
3) My students and I at Elkton Middle sampled water on the South Fork of the Shenandoah and took part in riverside demonstrations by DGIF [Department of Games and Inland Fisheries] and the Shenandoah Valley Soil and Water Conservation District office;
4) In 2007, I became endorsed to teach Earth Science after completing approximately ten courses in a little over two years. These included courses in geology, meteorology, oceanography, and water science;
In July 2008, I completed eight days of training with teachers from around the nation at The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program's Core Repository at Texas A&M. This included hands-on learning about how core sample taken from the seafloor can be used to help understand the Earth's past as well as current climate change;
http://www.oceanleadership.org/schoolofrock2008/
6) I currently am assisting Dr. Steve Leslie one day each week with his conodont (microfossil) research. These 4cm long eel-like fossils lived between 400 and 500 million years ago and can be used to help date rock as well as learn about past environments. These can be found in this part of Virginia;
7) I am the co-chair of the CHS Green Team (committee) and as such promote conservation-minded activities around the school;
8) I co-sponsor the CHS outdoors club, The Back Tracks Trail Club which has both hiked and kayaked this year;
9) I have been a teacher-of-the-year three times; and
10) I have helped both Elkton Middle and CHS earn Virginia Naturally School Recognition including currently at CHS. To do so, I documented the school's environmental activities and education and coordinated input from numerous sources in an application that I sent to DEQ.
http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/education/van-schools/recognition.pdf
Q: What classroom and field activities have incorporated in your curriculum and instructional practices which are relevant to, or based upon, the North Fork Shenandoah watershed?
A: Watershed education is a part of both the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) and my geology curriculum. That said projects related to the Friends of the North Fork include the following:
1. Students have made models of our local watershed;
2. Students in my Earth Science Honors classes have completed a climate change-based book study and are currently conducting Internet-based research on climate change-based topics on which they will present PowerPoints;
3. This will follow with the field testing of a lesson plan / project that I created as part of a requirement for my attendance at the School of Rock. It is based around sediment provenance, the idea that sediments can be traced back to their point of origin. For example, beach sand at Virginia Beach could be possibly traced back to our mountains.
I became interested in this because although we infer that we affect the Bay, is there hard geological proof? There's lots of inferences that because researchers sample pollutants at places like the mouth of the Potomac River, then in turn, the pollutants must come at least in part from the Valley. Sediment proof in the form of sand grains from the Valley found in the Chesapeake Bay would provide a stronger argument. Unfortunately, I have not found research on this yet.
So as an analogy, my project traces sand grains drilled from the seafloor off of the California coast to ancient ice dammed lakes in Montana, the same ones that created Washington state's Chanel Scablands.
My students will be given seven journal published and research-based articles as a basis of proving my hypothesis. This will teach the students about how scientists conduct research and on how they piece together data to prove hypotheses and theories; and
4. In about four weeks [around April 20th], my honors students will start on an Earth Science of Shenandoah County project where they will see how earth Science really does occur in their backyard. Small groups of students will collect, analyze, and present data. At least one geology professor from JMU has committed to help. I hope to incorporate local watershed and climate change data.
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