Originally posted 18 Feb 2016
One of the things I enjoy is getting hands-on with history.
I love visiting places and trying to get a sense of what has come before. Throughout the world I’ve had the fortune of visiting ancient cities, landmarks, and places of significance. I’ve had the opportunity to make physical contact with artifacts that are thousands of years old. I’ve sat in seats that are older than many of the nations on earth and every time I’ve imagined who has been here before me. Who else has touched these stones or this statue? Who has walked this path? Who has closed these doors?, or used this object?. What were their lives like? Who were they? Then my mind wanders to the person or persons who made the object, or carved the stone or even uncovered it. What were they thinking and feeling whilst their hands rested exactly where mine do right now.
This love of connecting with history has followed me into the realm of science. Every opportunity I have to get my students hands on with scientific history is a joy. My current focus is fossils and connecting students to life that occurred on earth thousands even millions of years ago.
Ever so slowly I am building up a personal collection of fossils and artifacts to bring into the classroom. My most recent acquisitions have been a stromatolite specimen and remnant of the first lifeforms on earth (billions of years old) along with specimens of mammoth vertebra, mammoth hair, a large trilobite, diprotodon bone fragments, small ammonites and other fossils. These have been collected from auctions and places such as the Dinosaur Museum in the ACT. These join my dinosaur egg shell fragments from the University of Otago and a selection of meteorites from Sibera, New Mexico, and the United States.
To hold in your hands the remnants of a living being. Something that was born, lived, felt, breathed, ate, fought and died is more than just an honour. Holding it connects you directly to that living being, it transports you back to the time when it was alive and to know that it has not changed since then. Even holding a meteorite that has traveled the vastness of space, perhaps has even travelled from beyond the edge of our known solar system and is quite possibly as old, if not older than, our planet is a change to connect with something far greater than ourselves. A chance to place ourselves in perspective in the grand scheme of the universe. A chance to realise we are part of something greater than what we sometimes feel we are.
This is the experience I seek to give my students as well as my own children. This is science in the making for me. It is one of the most important things I can do as an educator.
