Students make the grade

When you live in a college town it is sometimes easy to forget that the kids who are puking on your lawn on Saturday night were doing good things in the classroom during the week.

I was reminded of that recently when I was asked to judge a research and poster contest at SUNY Potsdam. I probably don’t have to tell you that as a guy who nearly pulled a 2.0 grade point average at a state college that was only a couple of hours away from the University of Michigan, I’ve always been pretty confident about how smart I am. Judging the work of these SUNY kids made me feel like the poster child for dumb.

If the student wasn’t there to explain the work I was judging, the charts and graphs and words all appeared to me as foreign as a calculus class is to a college rugby player. But I am not here to talk about the actual work these students presented. You can read about that in a story published in the Watertown Daily Times on the day after the SUNY Potsdam Learning and Research Fair ended. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090417/NEWS05/304179934

As impressive as their final products were, the real genius was in the methodolgy. Jason Gokey went fishing. A lot. Kyle Ashley and James D. Carl got to enjoy the splendor of the Adirondack Mountains. William Romey’s freshwater ecology class went snorkling on the Grasse River. Margaret Zee hung out at Black Lake. This is the kind of academia a magna cum zero guy like me can understand.

Kalen Casey and Jessica Crandall are the only students whose project didn’t involve getting a tan. They are probably still kicking themselves for choosing a topic like, “The Historical Demography of the St. Lawrence County Almshouse,” which required plugging a lot of data into spreadsheets. That’s not nearly as fun as fighting and landing a five-pound smallmouth.

I wasn’t able to talk to all the students whose projects I judged, but I suspect they all had the same passion for their topics as Ashley did. Ask Kyle about the petrology of a multiple meta-igneous intrusive outcrop in Tupper Lake – the topic of his presentation – and you can feel how into it he is when he responds. I spoke with him for several minutes. Actually, I listened to him for several minutes and understood several seconds worth of what he said. But I did walk away thinking that I knew what was driving him and his work: That if you want to understand what is going on now, then you have to understand what has already happened. That’s a pretty good place to end up, even if you have to deal with intrusive rocks to get there.

While me and four other judges were only asked to critique projects that had ties to the north country, there were some 80 other posters on display in the Barrington Student Union during the fair. I was struck by how much work, how much learning, was going on in my neighborhood. That is something that is easy to forget, even when you live in a college town. Or, especially when you live in a college town.