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Bad weather- sNOw problem!

February 9, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This might sound crazy, but last Saturday I and four of my friends went on a snorkelling trip. When we woke up and saw snow we were tempted to cancel, but after spending lots of time planning and borrowing equipment from others we felt that we had invested too much time into the excursion to cancel. I admit I was slightly terrified about the cold.

Saturday was my third time snorkelling in Victoria, and it was by far the most fun and the most frigid. Because our group was short a pair of fins, I decided to try out using my old pair of fins that are designed for competitive swimming. As you can see from the pictures I have attached below, these look very different from typical snorkelling fins.

Fins Designed for Snorkelling:

Fins Designed for Competitive Swimming:

I had expected my fins to be inefficient, but I loved using them! I found that I had more control over my feet, which allowed me to kick more powerfully and stay underwater for longer. My movement feels limited with the snorkelling fins, since they are made of hard plastic that does not bend with the foot.

Because I was able to spend more time underwater, I saw so many more things! I saw a few white sea anenomes that I looked up on iNaturalist, and found that their technical name is Metridium farcimen. I saw some other anenomes as well, but sadly was not able to take good enough pictures to properly identify them. I’ve discovered that I tend to see more at Breakwater Park than Ten Mile Point – Ten Mile is beautiful but the breakwater has much more diversity of wildlife. I’m not sure if this is actually a characteristic of the two areas or whether the water is just shallower at the breakwater, allowing me to see more – I will try and investigate the science behind this before I go snorkelling again.

I made an iMovie to document Saturday’s snorkel trip. I didn’t get any footage of the aftermath because I could not stop shivering! This was hard for me to make – I am looking forward to improving my videography skills by using the resources we were given after Friday’s class. I also want to credit my roommates, Makenna and Sarah, for not only getting me into snorkelling but taking some really amazing photos of the experience. Some of them look too good to be true, but I promise they are 100% real!

Enjoy watching!

Coffee Chat Conversations

February 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Over the weekend as I visited with a friend from home and watched the snow fall outside, I thought about expanding the scope of my inquiry project. Aside from being passionate about the ocean (I am a kayak instructor back home, but do not have access to kayaking here), a big reason why I wanted to get into snorkelling was because of wanting to expand my outdoor-related knowledge. Despite being a huge outdoor enthusiast my whole life, I find myself in the dark about the wildlife I see on a daily basis.

I reluctantly admit that I was a Pokemon GO kid- I remember going to Stockholm with my family as a child, and the most exciting part of the trip was that my hostel was a PokeStop. So much of my time that summer was spent on my phone looking for tourist hubs where I could catch different Pokemon characters. When chatting with my roommate over coffee, she discussed how the iNaturalist app has a similar addictive effect to Pokemon GO- only it doesn’t promote engagement with made-up characters, it encourages students to go outside and take pictures of plants and animals they see in their natural environment. We were talking about how cool it would be to get students in a competition to try and upload as many unique sightings to iNaturalist as possible. Uploading specimens to iNaturalist gives students outdoor literacy skills, promoting a greater understanding of their surroundings. Let’s be real here – most of my future students are going to be addicted to technology. Given that this is the case, why not introduce them to apps like iNaturalist that provide a productive way to spend time outdoors and enrich an important knowledge base?

When I first moved to Canada as an 8-year old, neither I nor my parents were literate about the world around us. I saw my peers eating random berries they found on trees and every time got anxious because my mom had told me never to eat anything in the wild. I don’t like thinking about what could have happened to me if I had ignored my parents’ advice and eaten some random berry that looked vaguely similar to one my friend ate often. Nature literacy isn’t just a fun little activity for students – it is a must for young children growing up in British Columbia. However, how am I supposed to teach nature literacy if I know very little about plant identification myself?

While I will continue to upload content of my snorkelling journey, I will also be trying to gain more familiarity with the plants I interact with every day. My friend and I walked up Mount Doug on Sunday, and I was able to learn so much – I now know what a salal plant looks like, the appearance of a licorice tree, and that maple trees can be identified by their opposite branching patterns. In the next few weeks, I will be doing my best to expand my knowledge from this very rudimentary baseline.

Getting Started with Snorkelling and iNaturalist

January 27, 2025 /

Here is my second inquiry project post. If you can’t tell, I’m quite obsessed with the photos my roommate and I took while snorkelling! Before proceeding further into this course, I thought it would be useful to describe my general plan for this passion project. I also wanted to get started with some of the technology I will be getting used to (iNaturalist).

When I (hopefully) teach outdoor education in my future, I want to use iNaturalist as a tool for helping my students become literate about the plants and animals surrounding them daily. I’m quite bad at using the app right now, but that’s why we have a growth mindset and keep practicing!

Reflection – Most Likely to Succeed

January 20, 2025 /

Although I was unable to attend class on Friday, I read through your slides and watched Most Likely to Succeed independently.

I found it really interesting to see the differences between my own (perhaps more typical) high school experience, and the experience of the students at High Tech High. What really resonated with me was the statistic that if students had to take a test a few months after they had studied for it, they would remember very little of the content. I can relate to this as I recently completed a psychology degree and ever since have been feeling like I should remember more of the content I learned.

High Tech High’s innovative model allows students to fully engage with material they learn at school, in a way that works with them and their interests. School is more about completing a task that students are really passionate about, and less than rote memorization. To be honest, I would have liked high school much more if I had gone to High Tech High. However, I share the concerns of many of my classmates that these students may not be ready for the academic structure of most universities. Times may be changing, but getting into higher education (ex. medical school or law school) requires a very high GPA. Students at High Tech High will not come into university with exam experience, and I am curious how they would handle this extreme shift in their schooling. Personally, I had never taken a three-hour long exam when I attended university and I found this to be a huge jump – it would have been way harder if I had never done a written examination before!

Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

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