FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) - Summer vacations bring beach trips and a two-month hiatus from school for many teachers, but for Lamar High School math teacher Michelle Greene, summer brought a two-week excursion on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship.
From July 15 to Aug. 3, Greene and scientists tracked cetaceans, whales, dolphins and porpoises, in the northern Atlantic Ocean near Rhode Island and Nova Scotia, Canada, through the NOAA Teacher at Sea program.
Greene said she decided to pursue the program after having a student who was interested in weather and would tell her about weather tracking.
Though she didn’t have a science background, Greene was willing to learn and follow the scientists’ lead, she said.
“They were very generous to sit down with me to tell me about some things,” Greene said.
There were two crews aboard the boat: a visual sighting crew to track the watch for whales when they break the surface of the water and an acoustics crew to use a hydrophone to listen for whales’ clicking noises during hunts.
Greene spent her time helping as a data recorder with the visual sighting crew.
“I’m a math teacher,” Greene said, “so the data recorder was where I was.”
The crews mainly focused on tracking beaked whales - especially the True’s beaked whale.
According to Greene, True’s beaked whales are deep divers and are harder to track. She said they live close to the continental shelf so they can dive 800 to 1,000 meters deep to hunt for food.
“They’ve not been studied much at all, because they’re very elusive,” Greene said.
Overall, the crews collected different types of information from the whales, such as EDNA, a type of DNA that whales shed in their skin, and their dive patterns.
Greene said she got to name one of the whales.
“I’d been having a hard time finding the whales, because knowing the difference between a wave and a whale breaching was hard, because they’re about the same color,” Greene said.
But two or three days before the end of the excursion, Greene had her moment, she said.
She spotted a male True’s beaked whale that she named Elvis. The whale also traveled with five or six females.
When the crews lost sight of Elvis after 13 hours of tracking him, Greene said, “Elvis has left the building.”
Greene said the experience is one she wishes all of her students and colleagues could experience.
“I felt like every day I was more like a sponge, trying to get as much of it as I possibly could, and it was so rewarding in that that I’m a piece of history, because these whales have not been studied a lot,” Greene said. “Now we know more information about them, and I was a part of that. That’s pretty exciting.”
After taking part in the NOAA Teacher at Sea program, Greene said she wants to use the information she learned to better educate her students.
Greene is using some data on whales in her math classes to create presentations and a website to present to the school and her classes about whales.
“I’m taking everything that I’ve learned and trying to make sure that the kids have some aspect in which they can touch upon,” Greene said.
Greene also said she learned about a brand new career field to tell her students about.
“I try to expose my students to the real world as much as I can,” Greene said.
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Information from: Morning News, http://www.scnow.com
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