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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Teacher to Give Island Lesson

By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
    Kerri Lathrop's recent 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands was anything but relaxing.
    "It was not a vacation, by any means," said the East Mountain High School science teacher, one of 24 educators selected for the trip sponsored by Toyota.
    Lathrop described her time there as "very scheduled." In addition to a busy slate of activities, Lathrop said she caught a cold halfway through the trip.
    Observation of environmental projects on the islands and a two-day forum with local teachers were all planned for the visiting teachers. The intent, according to the official Toyota blog, is for the teachers to return to their classrooms with those experiences and enrich their students through them.
    Lathrop and the other teachers each presented a lesson plan to each other, the local board of education and a few educators from the islands.
    Lathrop's plan was about the carbon footprint of a meal. She traced all the food items of a typical meal to their source and calculated the amount of carbon dioxide generated in producing, packaging and shipping those items.
    The teachers had to give their presentations in Spanish and English. Lathrop said she had help translating the presentation into Spanish beforehand.
    "I still can't conjugate any (Spanish) verbs," she said.
    Lathrop saw a number of exotic animals that frequent the islands, like blue-footed boobies, white-tipped reef sharks and sea lions, she said.
    She said the highlight of the trip was a day she spent on San Cristobal, one of the islands in the Galapagos chain. She and a few other teachers rented a taxi and went to Las Negritas, an area of black volcanic rocks, where they saw a colony of swallow-tailed gulls.
    The nocturnal seagulls have black and white bodies, red rings around their eyes and red feet.
    "They just really are very striking," she said.
    In addition to being an interesting place to study animals, Lathrop said, the Galapagos Islands are "also a social lab." Part of the reason for that is the insular nature of the islands.
    "A lot of the same issues that happen all over the world also happen there because it's an intensified area," she said.
    Much of the drinking water has to be delivered from the South American mainland about 600 miles away. Because of the island's relative isolation, trash disposal is an issue, according to Lathrop. Overfishing and poaching of sharks are also a problem, she said.
    Lathrop said national parks make up about 97 percent of the islands, which means residential areas have to build upward to expand.
    She contrasted the islands with a trip she made last summer to New Zealand to study geothermal resources as part of her master's degree program. While New Zealand is self-sustaining, she said, the Galapagos Islands must constantly import or export items.
    She summed up her experiences on the islands:
    "I wouldn't say it was a saturating experience ... at some point I stopped taking notes and just started experiencing it."
    Lathrop will present photos and a talk on the natural history of the Galapagos Islands and environmental issues on Nov. 1 at 6 p.m.
    The presentation will be at East Mountain High's community room in building one. No reservations are necessary. For more information call Lathrop at the school at 281-7400.