Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Gates Mills Day 03: Something's Fishy (backlogged)

We are really not getting the hang of this being on time thing… yet. We had a few people come in late and ended up doing 15 push ups this morning. I’m pretty confident that when we are all together though, being on time will be a lot easier. We started the day with a quest - to get 100% on the lab practical from our dissections yesterday. Luckily for us, we had some time to review while Mr. Cawley and Ms. Swain set up the dissected squids and sharks. Then we got some even better news - the quest wasn’t solo - we got to work in our dissection teams! Things seemed to go smoothly for everyone, even if Evan was walking around taking pictures of other groups tests. I wasn’t stealing answers though… or was I?


After the test, we reviewed our spirit animals and tried to identify some Bahamian birds and fish solely based on their pictures. It was an interesting challenge, especially since we had only a picture to go on. It felt a little like CSI until some groups realized that it was possible to use reverse Google image search to discover the true identities of our targets. But, even though my group took that approach, we didn’t even identify all of the organisms correctly. For the groups that stuck it out the hard way, however, they discovered an online manual of Bahamian birds so cool that Ms. Swain could not resist squawking about it to the rest of the class. Finally, after suffering (or googling) for most of a block, Mr. Cawley went over the true identities of our wanted creatures. We learned about some cool birds like the Black Necked Stilt and Great Frigatebird that each had some weirdly disproportional body parts, as well as fish like the Scorpionfish and Foureyed Butterflyfish that looked almost alien. I am definitely excited to see all of these wacky creatures in full color in less than a week!

After taking a short break for lunch, we dove right back into the world of sea and sun, and even had the sun “come out” a little ourselves. We had some time to work on clarifying the problem we are going to address in our final presentation, and were able to come up with some fantastic team names including the Lion Tamers, Coral Chieves, and Ninja Turtles. We finished off the day by watching the first part of a documentary on Dr. Sylvia Earle, one of the pioneering woman marine scientists that really made you want to go out and protect the ocean. It was a great day, and we’re looking forward to tomorrow!


Talk to you later,
Evan and Abby


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