Nesting Place

BY

— By Brendan J. O’Brien

The literal knowledge, the facts and theories and applications, those will of course prove valuable down the road. However, it was an underlying life lesson inherent in Sarah Turek’s return to the college classroom, something that has always been present but is sometimes easy to overlook –like a squirrel nest high in the arms of an oak – which will prove most important in her work as an AP Bio teacher at Prairie.

Ever the scientist, Turek’s return to the classroom as a student started with her own real life scientific method in the form of a series of questions she found herself contemplating during the pandemic.

“COVID really prompted me to think, ‘What is next?’ ” she says. “At that time, I was also really taken aback by the change in parenting as my kids got older. They needed less hour-to-hour, day-to-day parenting. They didn’t need the structured, planned out summers anymore. It was time to take a step back and look at, ‘Who is Sarah?’ Beyond mom, beyond wife, beyond teacher. This was one way I could serve myself personally and professionally.”

Of all the biology-based Master’s programs she considered – and there are many – the Biological Science concentration from Clemson University offered one distinct advantage over all the rest.

“I could start right away,” she said. “While there are schools that offer the opportunity for on-campus labs, and that idea did appeal to me, the waitlist for those was two and a half years. I wanted to get started right away.”

Get started she did, and then some. Clemson allows up to six years for students to finish the 100% online program which requires the completion of ten different classes. Turek finished in two school years and one summer. Seventy percent of the courses were content-based, but it was the other thirty percent – those focused on research, communication, biostatistics – that ultimately proved most impactful. And the master opus was this spring’s individual study, an independent research project requiring Turek, and her students, to get out into the field.

But first, a bit about the smaller, more scurry-ish stars of Turek’s project – the squirrels.

“We are all doing scientific processing every day without naming the steps,” says Turek. “It was November, the leaves were gone, I just noticed the nests. And once you start noticing things, you begin asking questions. So, it was really just my intrinsic curiosity and developing a question from there.”

And her AP Bio students answered. Despite junior year being notoriously tough at TPS, well over half of Turek’s students took part in the voluntary work. The week after winter break she brought in a single picture of a single tree at Racine’s River Bend Nature Center. Not one person noticed the drey. The following day she had three pictures, each with a drey. One of 24 students noticed the commonalty.

“So, then we started talking about dreys,” she said. “The students had to bring in their own pictures which allowed them to start spotting nests in the wild. Many had never noticed them before. And once they began observing, they started asking questions which grew my own research questions. And that ultimately brought us to the quantity of dreys at River Bend and how they were oriented in trees in nature compared to the dreys along the city streets in Racine.”

The squirrels’ co-stars in Turek’s project delivered an equally powerful performance. The students recorded observations in the field. They analyzed data. They proofread Turek’s final presentation poster.

“If you ever need anything proofread, boy, give it to a junior or senior at The Prairie School. They took it so seriously and made my final project amazing because what they’ve learned in other classes. They really connected to that process.”

A newly shared perspective is the ultimate unifier. Turek’s work resonated with her students – one of their teachers was now in the same seat as them. And this, seeing the world through the eyes of her pupils, was Turek’s most important takeaway.

“I had not been a student in 25 years,” she says. “I was not efficient. Figuring out how to study and do the work was a process and it gave me a ton of student perspective. My first semester I got a B on a test and that did not sit well. So, for me to rest with that and think, ‘Okay, now what? What would I do differently? How does it feel when you don’t get what you think you should on a test?’ Boy does that make me a better teacher, better at understanding the lives of my students.”