Field Trip

After having good experiences on other field trips during the year, I promised myself to arrange an outing for my sixth graders. Originally, the trip was supposed to have happened a couple of months ago and not at the end of the school year, but when students learned the latest, they were ecstatic. It meant a day of being out of classes, more so that it came almost before focusing on our final exams. The plan was to visit a cave, visit the small town of Taulabe nestled in the mountains between Tegus and San Pedro, and finally stop at a butterfly reserves just infront of Honduras' largest lake - Yojoa and then head back home to Sigua by 1:30PM.

Mr Cierra and I departed from Sigua with 26 students and a couple of parents and guardians. Some school trip rules were explained, but I dont think they heard them in the excitement. Not that I needed to worry about this bunch. Along our way Mr Cierra decides that we might as well add fossil hunting in our itinerary. It was rather simple, just get off the side of the road where you see locals selling slate.
"Usually," Mr Cierra explained, "they find fish fossils in rocks that they keep to sell. The idea is to not pay more than 100Lps ($5USD), so we will have to haggle for less." We got lucky on our first stop, since that was the best fossil we found. We got a complete fish fossil that could have been more than a foot long. The kids and I couldn't believe that fossils could be easily obtained at so cheap a price. Turns out that these fossils are so common that rocks which contain fossils are used for construction and seen on house walls or floors in Taulabe. We tried other places but the fossils were either incomplete, misplaced, or had just been sold by a phantom buyer that was ten minutes ahead of us each time.

Next we stopped at the Taulabe caves after our little Indiana Jonesy fossil hunt. The tour was about forty minutes long where a guide explained what he probably says many times during a day. He monotonously explained the discovery of the caves which was by accident as they were building the main road in Honduras between the capital and San Pedro Sula during the 40's. Kids were a little jittery of the fruit bats that whizzed by, but seemed to enjoy the caves specially when it came to the story of the lost treasure. We had profound discussion such as "do bats piss on themselves if they are upside down?" and "why do the rock formations remind us about caramelized pastries?" "how deep is the cave?" and "is that a shark jaw I see on this rock?" I left the cave feeling a little insignificant timewise. The general rule is that a stalatite grows 10 cm per 1,000's of years, so standing next to a pillar that was about 10 meter high meant that I was standing next to 100,000+ years of geological history???!!!

Continued to Yojoa lake, only about 30 minutes north of the caves, and visited the butterfly reserve. We saw in full detail the reproductive stage of butterflies. Two were mating at the entrance (kids enjoyed seeing that), another was laying eggs on a banana leaf, they joked that a butterfly next to it was encouraging it to "push!, push!!, push!!!, and right on the same leaf we saw a caterpillar squirm out of an egg. Had lunch at the same stop where some decided it was the right time to take a shower. Mr Cierra and I knew it was time to head back before other bad ideas were mentioned. It was a great trip. I have decided to have all sixth graders sign the back of the fish fossil rock and donate it to the science lab for posterity. That way other science teachers can show their students the fossil when they reach that chapter.

A Honduran Science Class

Reviewed my class one morning,and it occurred to me that we could have the class outside. The topic was plant tropism, and what better way than having my sixth graders wonder around outside our Honduran nature. So we went to look at sunflowers. Kids wondered what exactly made them move, so we discussed phototropism. Along the discussion, I remembered that song that Methodist missionaries taught me a long time ago: "Like a sunflower that follows every movement of the sun, so I turn towards you to follow you my Lord..," there was no need to get into that with my kids but they wondered about my sanity in my humming.

There were the "dormilonas" (mimosa pudica;sleepyheads;tickle-me-plants) waiting to be touched so that they could hide within themselves, the simple explanation is that they do that to protect themselves from foot traffic (cows, goats, humans etc.), there are bunches of them on campus and merely considered weed, I imagine that people actually think of these as special plants elsewhere. The kids were running everywhere touching them as though they had never seen them before, they had, but not in a science class context.

On another day we discussed rocks. I gave them an assignment, to go outside and look for sedimentary rocks and other types if they could find any. I warned them to leave big rocks alone, I didn't want them bitten by snakes or dangerous insects. They were all excited to be outside once again, but this time hunting for rocks. In the end I had a bunch of rocks brought to me with different explanations as to what they were. Amazingly someone found a magnetic rock with bits of shiny gold look-alike pieces (fool's gold we are guessing).

Next up - clouds. We went cloud spotting. We found them around. Cirrus, stratus and cumulus. We also found dragons, sofas, a nose, a bear and someone farting in the skies.

Recently, chicharras (cicadas) began singing their mating songs, and how convenient that we are currently discussing animal behavior and mating behavior specifically. This time there was no need to go outside. I asked them to be silent for a minute and to just listen. The sound had been there all this while, its just that we were not attuned to it. It washed over us increasing in sound gradually. A jarring noise that at first seemed a cacophony became a uniform intoxicating sound, a symphony of maracas. I think that I'm becoming addicted to the sound of these insects. I respect these creatures that spend 17 years underground developing and growing to come out this once and sing for a few weeks to attract a mate.