Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Robert Crowdler with the Center for Science and Culture. And even though schools out for the summer, we are going to talk homeschool online courses and curriculum and the new Discovery Institute Academy. There are a lot of resources for parents out there for most subjects, but when it comes to high school science, especially chemistry, it turns out that finding good materials is a challenge. So we at Discovery, decided to take the plunge into homeschooling curriculum. And more than that, we've developed what I think is a pretty solid online chemistry course. And when I say we, I mean the teacher and the other people involved in that. I'm not developing a a curriculum or a course, which is a good thing. But we wanted to have a chemistry course with a live teacher who can make things clear, can get kids excited about science and answer kids' questions. Science is not the easiest thing in the world and we really wanted to offer live interaction with the first rate teacher because that's really important to good instruction and that's why I'm happy to welcome that teacher, veteran teacher, Kristen Marray, to tell all about the new Discovery Institute Academy. Welcome, Kristin.
Speaker 3 00:01:35 Hey, thank you so much Rob for that really nice introduction. And I second what you said, it's chemistry is difficult and challenging and so there is a need to kind of put this out there.
Speaker 2 00:01:47 Yeah. Our new homeschool program, the Discovery Institute Academy launches this fall. People can find it
[email protected]. That's Discovery institute.academy. Our first course will focus on high school chemistry and you're the lucky teacher that gets to kick this off. So tell me a little bit about your background and how you get to this point in your teaching career.
Speaker 3 00:02:16 Yeah, so I am the lucky teacher that gets to teach this. There is no other subject, frankly, that I would rather teach. That's what I always tell people. I did a bachelor of Science in biochemistry and I really did it for only one reason and that was that the word chemistry was in the word biochemistry and I thought, this is fabulous. I can take as much chemistry as I can squeeze into my schedule while still kind of, you know, supplementing with some biology to kind of stay somewhat connected to the macro world that most people live in. But I've always just enjoyed kind of the elegance and the details that happen at the chemistry level. And so I really thoroughly enjoyed my biochemistry degree. I went on and I did a master's in teaching and currently have a Washington State certificate with endorsements in chemistry and biology and general science. I've got about 10 years of teaching experience in the public school arena and seven of those actually with an online, a fully online Washington state public school. Wow. And six of those, yeah, six of those seven years were, were in chemistry. So kinda long before Covid hit the show, I was already kind of deep in the online teaching world. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:03:37 You were an early adopter on the online courses and things. Do you enjoy doing it online? I mean, it's different than in a classroom with all the kids in one place, you know?
Speaker 3 00:03:50 Yeah, I do enjoy it online. I absolutely enjoy teaching in person as well. So they both offer kind of a unique set of experiences. But one of the things that I realized with online teaching that I really enjoyed, I am somebody who really likes technology and it's not that you don't have access to that in the classroom, but you rely heavily upon that in the online world. And I, I just really enjoyed kind of connecting chemistry with technology and finding creative ways to teach things. I think the other thing is the, the amount of technology that's currently available just continues to grow. And so there's more and more excellent YouTube channels to share with students. There's more and more excellent simulations and there are so many ways also to connect with students even if you're not sitting next to them in a physical classroom. There are so many ways that we're more and more in the online world, bridging the gap between teacher and student and all of those pieces are just kind of attractive to me.
Speaker 3 00:04:52 It's kind of a unique challenge. I think the final thing about online teaching is I found that a lot of my students who were online had very intentionally selected an online course for various reasons. And so they were choosing to be there. It's what they wanted to take, it's what they wanted to do. And so as a result, I had a lot of really wonderful connections with my students who had clear, you know, career plans, some of them very talented students doing unique things outside of the classroom and needed a slightly more flexible schedule. And other times they had students with severe health issues and they could not be in a building classroom and loved the, again, the, the ability to continue learning, but to do it from home. All in all, I just found there were so many ways to build relationships with the students, but also with their families who were very much kind of all on board with this decision for their child. So I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2 00:05:54 Yeah. Well it sounds like it, you have a, uh, passion and excitement and energy that comes through pretty clearly about your teaching, and I'm guessing you have that same sort of passion for chemistry and imparting knowledge of chemistry. So tell us a little bit about what will this Discovery Institute academy chemistry course cover? How long is it, what are the classes like? How often do they meet and so on? How does all that work?
Speaker 3 00:06:24 Yeah, I will, I will say that this love of chemistry, Rob goes back to high school for me, believe it or not, like 11th grade student sitting at my desk learning chemistry. And I, I jokingly tell people, but I think it's true, I got into a little bit of trouble actually for tuning out in class and reading my textbook <laugh> instead of participating in the class discussion. So there, there's a huge love of it. And the way that that translates to this particular course and kind of as you said, what are things are gonna look like, what are the specifics? So this is gonna be a fully virtual course that students can connect with from, you know, the comfort of their own home. It's gonna be a synchronous course. And what I mean by that is that the students will work in step with me and also with their peers.
Speaker 3 00:07:11 So that's in contrast to say an asynchronous course. And I've taught in that kind of capacity too, where you, you're teaching a course, but each of your students is working through that at their own pace. And so it means that you have students that are in all different parts of the course kind of working independently. This course is meant to actually be a little bit more in step with one another. So it's a fully synchronous course. We're gonna progress through each unit together week by week. I think that students are gonna find that there's a lot more support and kind of cohesiveness and engagement doing that together. And the way that we'll do that, it's an 18 week academic course per semester, so a 36 academic week course between first and second semester. And it's a course that we will be meeting about three times a week in live Zoom sessions to both cover content, you know, work some problems, you know, do some q and a.
Speaker 3 00:08:09 We're also gonna make sure that there are optional drop-in sessions for students, you know, after class. So you, you get a student who is already having questions about that day's homework and is thinking, I do not wanna tackle this by myself, you know, tonight. So they stick around after class and we've got an optional drop-in session to start hammering away on things. And for your kind of shy student or even just a student who needs a little bit more kind of intentional focused help, there will also be opportunities for students to set up one-on-ones with me for that much more support. So I think it's meant to be a course that has a lot of opportunity for teacher student engagement and student to student engagement. And it's also meant to be a class that is gonna have a lot of different, and we can talk about this later, a lot of different ways to learn and to show your learning.
Speaker 2 00:09:03 Yeah. Uh, I saw that in perusing the website and the syllabus, which is up there and people can go there and check that out. Uh, so they get an idea of what those 18 weeks really look like and there's information on the textbooks and the supplemental materials and those things. One thing that I have to ask is what in the world is a wet lab <laugh>? I saw something about a wet lab and I thought, well, this is interesting. Do you need a wet suit? Uh, where does that take place? I dunno,
Speaker 3 00:09:34 <laugh>, uh, maybe I should have done a better job of thinking about my audience. You know, maybe that's not a term people just toss around over coffee, you know, <laugh>. So when I say wet lab, I, I'm kind of indicating a lab that's gonna involve materials that you're, you're gonna need to collect some things, you're gonna need to actually run this experiment physically in your, in your home or whatever designated space you have. And that's in contrast to say a virtual lab where you're, you're running a simulation online and there is no need to kind of, you know, collect materials and so forth. This course plans on offering both of those types of activities and we're doing that very intentionally. So we are in contract with an awesome company called Lab that produces super high quality simulations that are used I think, in a variety of institutions.
Speaker 3 00:10:25 And so we're really excited about that. They've got some terrific simulations for chemistry that we're going to have available to students in the course. And for parents and guardians, you know, those types of simulations, those are not gonna require the purchase of materials, but they're still really great opportunities for learning. And in addition to that, we are also a course that is gonna offer those wet labs and there's some fun experiences in store for students. I'm actually knee deep in kind of finalizing our materials list for the activities as we speak. And uh, some of those fun activities, Rob, are things like the flame test lab, really cool experience where students can kind of see how metal cation produce really cool colors. It's kind of an underlying principle of firework shows actually. There's an opportunity to do precipitation labs. These are really cool experiments where you're, you're mixing two solutions and suddenly like some solid or a weird gloopy substance appears that wasn't there before. There's opportunities to do Equilibrium Labs where you see reactions that are reversible and so you, you can shift a reaction towards the products or back to the reactants. There's even opportunities to design your own labs. So in one of our labs, the students are gonna design their own reaction rate lab and they're gonna look at ways to see how can I increase the rate of this reaction, how can I measure the rate of that reaction? Just a lot of different fun ways to again, learn and engage in the course.
Speaker 2 00:11:55 Yeah, it sounds pretty engaging to me. I was not a great chemistry student, but the hands-on things were always the exciting part. So seeing that you've got both that plus some simulated things to take advantage of the technology is pretty cool. How does this chemistry course, how is it gonna differ from some of the other homeschool options that are out there?
Speaker 3 00:12:19 Yeah, great question and I think that's a question a lot of families are gonna be wondering about. Cuz as you noted early on, there are so many options, right? For curriculum and coursework out there. So what, you know, what's gonna set this apart? What's, how is this in a different category so to speak? Um, I think one of the things that is gonna be unique about this course is just the fact that it's connected to d Discovery Institute is a really unique aspect of this course. You know, if, if you're a student who's having really specific questions about a topic that perhaps I am not able to answer, I have at my disposal a whole artillery of incredible speakers and scientists and experts in various fields that are all connected in some way to Discovery Institute either formally or informally. And so there's an immediate connection, if you will, for students to Discovery Institute's experts just in that I can relay those questions to people and get solid answers if I need to on that student's behalf.
Speaker 3 00:13:29 That's a really cool, unique aspect of this course that we can offer to students. I think another really interesting aspect of this course, and this is certainly new for me too, Rob, is integrating intelligent design related thinking and perspectives into a chemistry course, right? Yeah, certainly there's been some curriculum out there to think about doing that with biology, but I have the unique challenge of thinking about how can we connect this to chemistry and what does it look like for a high school student to think about some of these questions and these intersections, if you will, between ID and chemistry here and now. Uh, so that's a really also another unique element of the course. I think a final thing is sometimes with online learning, there's not enough to teacher to student interaction. That's just my personal opinion, right? So the online instruction could look like we have a once a week course lecture and it's one hour or an hour and 15 minutes and then it's over. This course is offering three weekly sessions with instructor followed by optional drop-in sessions and opportunities for one-on-one. We are going over and beyond the call of duty to make sure that we are present and engaging with students and I think that's a really cool extra bonus as well about the course.
Speaker 2 00:14:54 Yeah, having that live interaction is a big piece and uh, the ability to do one-on-one sessions with students to answer questions outside of the scheduled sessions and things is, is great and obviously something that, uh, is a really big perk for people who wanna do this. We're just about out of time. I want to thank you Kristen, for joining us to talk about the new Discovery Institute Academy. I really appreciate you taking the time, uh, and we appreciate all of the people listening out there. If you have friends or family who are homeschoolers or maybe you're homeschooling your kids, please share this information with them. You can check out the new chemistry course
[email protected]. That's Discovery institute.academy and those of you thinking of registering for the course in the fall, it starts in the fall. You can register now and there's a great discount available if you register before June 30th. And that's at Discovery institute.academy. Uh, as always, be sure to visit the podcast
[email protected] and get show notes there. We have links to all of the resources of the various shows that we discussed on ID the future. Also, you can check out all the past podcasts we've done. We've been podcasting ID the future since 2006, so there's a lot of shows there covering lots of great material related to science and the debate over intelligent design evolution. Again, thank you Kristen for joining us.
Speaker 3 00:16:35 Thank you Rob Pri, appreciate your time as well.
Speaker 2 00:16:38 That's all at ID the future. I am Robert Crowdler at the CSC in Seattle. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 00:16:47 Visit us at ID the future com and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
