Wahoo! Summer has started! I finished my last  class today, and I’m free, free, free for the summer! I’ve got huge plans for the summer, with lots of stuff to add to my todo lists, but I wanted to stop and just revel a bit in the joy I get from teaching. My job at the University of Redlands is to teach lab science courses to non-science majors…this often means seniors who have put off taking science because they hate it, or feel they’re no good at it. So I design courses that teach them the scientific method in ways they can relate to! During this crazy month called May Term, I teach a class called Mother Earth Chemistry: we make beer, cheese, soap, and learn all about dyeing: fiber reactive as well as natural dyes. We even got to try indigo dyeing!

Today my students put on a feast, bringing in food they made using the concepts we learned about, and they all wore/brought the things they dyed. What is awesome is to have them realize that they could predict and (at least partially!)  control the dyeing process. Here’s a slideshow of all their successes:

We had a fantastic time, and today’s final presentations were fun moments I’ll enjoy remembering!

alamodestuff Linda has started a weekly meetup based on taking a moment each week to really notice something as you go about your daily grind life. I need to do this. You may want to too – read more about it here:

Mr. Rude's 1/2 combo class, Smiley Elementary, 2009

The kids were happy to see their shirts we all dyed together yesterday! They really did these mostly by themselves (after a short reminder about the color wheel and a demo by me on Mr. Rude’s shirt) – the  only help most of them had was a reminder to check the bottom of the milk jug to see if dye had soaked all the way through!

Logan & Mr. Rude

Another commissioned tote complete:

And yesterday was Tie Dye Day in my son’s 2nd grade class. This was fun, because I’d done this with the same teacher when my 6th grader had him for 2nd grade. Mr. Rude still has a picture of that class all wearing their shirts, and I’ll take one this afternoon! Here’s how I do the tie dye with the kids now, cut apart a milk jug and you have the perfect bowl to hold a swirled tee!

So, I don’t usually blog about my day job – I’m a Senior Lecturer (just got promoted this week!) in the Biology department at the University of Redlands. Anyway, in May we teach one intensive course, which I’ve just finished! So as soon as Graduation is over, I’m free for SUMMER VACATION!!!! WooHoo!

The course I’ve just finished is called “Mother Earth Chemistry: The Science of Self Reliance”, which I describe in m syllabus thusly:

In the last 100-200 years, we have become systematically more detached from where our food/clothing/shelter comes from and how it is prepared. In this class, we will attempt to rectify this by studying the chemical/biochemical processes behind many simple processes that used to be performed at home, as part of the everyday work of feeding and clothing a family. These include activities such as the making of soap, beer, cheese, yogurt, tofu and dyeing.

This class touches 2 of the things I care deeply about – feeding our family with food made from the raw ingredients as much as possible, and creating beautify things with fabric. This years class was really detail oriented, so when it came time for tie dye day (after a lab that studied the effect of pH on how Procion MX dyes cotton), they wanted to get some pretty specific things, so we had a blast using all my different swatch books to created just the right colors. Here are some of the results, there’s a bunch more on my Flicker site. Yes, we had a great time…and yes they learned a lot too!

Have I mentioned…SUMMER VACATION!!!!!!!!!!!