School kids squeal with delight in face of science writers

I was thrown back to 1990 (also known as grade 5) yesterday. I sure didn't see it coming when I signed up to attend event #30 Science Fact and Science Fiction, with Jude Isabella (editor at Canada's only kid's science magazine YES mag) and Rochelle Strauss (science educator and author of One Well).

But there you had it. I was seated in the back of the Waterfront Theatre with a heaving squirmy kinda familiarly smelly mass of late elementary school kids (remember the smell of the cloak room after recess?). The kinetic energy and attention deficits were palpable.

I hadn't been surrounded by such a keen and audience in a long long time. "We love science!" one end of the peanut gallery spontaneously shouted out with glee at one point. Their pure nerdiness of heart was both heartening and terribly entertaining. In other words, these kids were really REALLY excited to be there.

No small task then for Rochelle Strauss to reign in the hoardes with her version of An Inconvenient Truth (yes yes, she's not Gore, and her crisis is not one of climate change but one of the global water crisis, as told in her book One Well. But really, the two presentations did bear a resemblance).

With her prop of a red bucket ("in North America we use 55 buckets [as she waves it over her head like a trophy kill] of water every day!") and her heavy use of metaphor ("imagine that all the fresh water in the world fits in that fuel truck") Strauss managed to capture the imaginations of the crowd to get her message across. YOU! can make a difference. And so it was that her talk ended with a challenge to arms - or of faucets and hoses perhaps.

"You ready to take on a challenge?" YEAH-AH!!! the kids screamed back. My ear canals screwed up tightly with the high pitch. "Do one thing to protect Earth's well in the next week," she spurred them on.

I was surprised that the kids didn't march off there and then, galvanized by her talk, to form some youth action group that would make the hardiest of scouts look like wet noodles.

Really quickly, Jude Isabella's talk was just as important. It made the case for skepticism in the face of scientific discovery or misleading news headlines touching on such peers as Balloon Boy and various other scientific hoaxes through history.

So I suppose after Strauss built up the kids sense of wonderment in the face of scientific discovery (one girl exclaimed rather loudly "that's crazy!!" upon learning that jelly fish are 97% water), Isabella quickly took science off its pedestal. But that's probably exactly where it should be for kids these days. It should be down on the ground next to them, approachable and in their sights, something that their squirmy selves can easily clamber onto and conquer.