What Happens When Your Students Hunt For Unnamed Algae (And What It Teaches About Real Learning)
Last October, I stayed late after school to help three 10th graders pack up their samples from our annual creek collection. Mia, the quiet one who always sits in the back and draws in her notebook during lectures, was still hunched over the classroom digital microscope, twisting the focus knob back and forth. Her vanilla iced coffee from the gas station down the street was sweating through its cup onto the lab counter. “Ms. L,” she said, not looking up, “this one doesn’t match anything on the list.”
We’d signed up for a citizen science project through our state university’s biology department, where local schools collect freshwater algae from regional waterways to build a public biodiversity catalog. I signed up mostly to get my kids out of the four walls of the classroom for a week, to check off the state standard on ecosystem health. I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary. We’d spent the morning wading in Willow Creek, the one that runs behind the school football field, pulling algal mats off rocks, tucking samples into plastic tubes. Most matched the reference photos we had: the stringy green spirogyra, the brownish diatom clusters, the fuzzy blobs of cladophora. This one was different: brighter green, thinner strands, covered in tiny little bumps no one could recognize.
We followed the project instructions: uploaded the photos to iNaturalist, slipped a small subsample into the pre-labeled bag, and dropped it in the mail with the pre-paid sticker the university provided. A month later, I got an email from the grad student running the project. She said their initial DNA sequencing didn’t match any recorded species in the global database. It’s likely new. No one has ever named it.
When I told the class at the start of the next week, the room went quiet for a beat, then erupted. Javi, one of the other kids on the collection team, yelled “No way!” and slammed his hand on the desk. Mia just stared at me, then said, “You’re not messing with me, right?”
I’ve been teaching high school biology for 14 years, and for most of that time, I’ve bought into the same routine most of us do: cover the content, do the pre-written lab where you get the expected result, test on the facts. Kids get the message pretty quick that all the important discoveries were made hundreds of years ago by dead white guys, and their job is just to memorize what those guys found. That’s the quiet learning issue I see every semester: kids think learning is just absorbing other people’s answers, not finding your own. Most kids leave high school convinced there’s nothing new left to find, that discovery is only for people with fancy PhDs and million-dollar labs.
This experience changed how I approach small, hands-on learning, and it didn’t cost me anything extra or take more time than a regular unit. The project provided all the supplies for free, we just folded the collection and sorting into our existing ecology unit. I now tell other teachers and parents who ask that you don’t need a fancy setup to do this, either. The concrete steps I share are simple: If you’re a teacher, swap one canned pre-planned lab for a local citizen science project this year that fits your existing curriculum. If you’re a parent, next time you’re at a local park or lake, spend 20 minutes on a “mystery organism” walk: take photos of anything that looks weird or out of place, plug them into iNaturalist, and leave it at that. When your kid says “what is this?” don’t jump in with the answer first. Ask them “what do you notice that’s different about this one?” If the app comes back and says it can’t ID it, don’t brush it off as just a weird weed or pond scum. Tell them “that’s cool, let’s submit this to the catalog, someone will look at it later.” That’s all it takes.
A lot of people assume this kind of discovery is a one-in-a-million fluke, but it’s not. Every year, citizen science projects turn up dozens of new species, most of them small things like algae, insects, or fungi that professional scientists don’t have time to catalog everywhere. Last semester, another one of my classes found a fungus growing on a fallen oak that had never been recorded in our state. It’s not new to science, just new to the region, but that didn’t matter to the kid who found it. He’s now working with the local extension office to map where else it’s growing, and he’s talking about majoring in environmental science next year, something he never considered before this.
Mia and her team are already talking about what name they’ll propose if the algae is confirmed as a new species. They want to call it Tetraspora willowcreekensis, after the creek where they found it.
It might not work out, of course. The full sequencing could show it’s just a weird genetic variant of a known species, altered by the runoff from the nearby farm fields. Even if it is confirmed as new, the international committee that approves species names might reject their proposed name. That’s okay. That’s part of science, too, the part we never teach kids: most of what scientists do is mess around with things that don’t pan out, not make big Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Failure to get the “big result” isn’t failure here. It’s just part of the process.
Last week, I walked past the creek after school and saw Mia and Javi there, hand-me-down waders pulled on over their jeans, collecting more samples further upstream. They’re trying to figure out if the algae only grows in that one shaded stretch of the creek, or if it’s found further down toward the lake. I didn’t stop to bother them, just leaned on the fence for a minute and watched. The sun was hitting the water, and the algal mats glowed bright green.
There are millions of things like that, growing all over the world, unnamed, undiscovered, waiting for someone to stop and look close enough. Our job isn’t just to teach kids what we already know. It’s to give them permission to look for the things no one else has found yet. It’s still too early to say if Mia’s algae will ever get an official name. But even if it doesn’t, I can’t think of a better lesson for a bunch of 15-year-olds to learn.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Happens When Your Students Hunt For Unnamed Algae (And What It Teaches About Real Learning)