I’ll tell you the way I really want to teach my classes. I want to go in cold into a class, to walk into a school I’ve never been to before, put up cameras with students on day 1, and be confident that we’re going to find animals. In practice, it’s always worked out exactly like that, but every time, some part of me still doubts that it’s going to work out.
So I do what every unprepared student does before a test — a couple days before my test, I cram. In the case of this class, I obsessively scout out the school to get an idea what’s out there before starting the class. Like skimming the textbook a day before teaching it, I want to have some understanding of what we’re going to see before we see it as a group. Intellectually, I know that wild animals are everywhere, even in the middle of dense human settlements, but I always want to see it for myself before taking a look with students. So I go out, and with the help of Lumen and some other friends, take a close look at what’s happening in the bit of land behind the school.
At the moment, I’m in Sri Lanka, in an Eastern coastal town called Batticaloa, and I’ll be running at least two classes over the next couple weeks. Batticaloa is a sizeable city of a couple hundred thousand people, made up of island, lagoons and peninsulas where several rivers feed into the sea. I’m working at Dreamspace, a wonderful local community organization in town. They have a building with about an acre of half-cleared land where I’ll run the classes.
I spent about four hours today at the site, walking around, tracking, talking to folks who work there and the neighbors, and putting up a few cameras to see who shows up. This is my first time in Sri Lanka, so I’m mostly tracking species that I’ve never seen before. Some of them are familiar — house cats, lots of stray dogs, mice, and others are less so — mongoose, civet cats, gerbils. My first attempt at tracking gets broad strokes — “a turtle walked through here last night, there was a ~1.5’ long snake heading this way, here’s a run of a cat-sized animal that’s not a cat, passing low to the ground through grass and underbrush”. I sketch the tracks I don’t know, come back, puzzle through a field guide, and make my guesses. I photograph and poke at lots of poop, bones, and animal bits that are lying around. Poop tells you more about who’s walking around and what they’ve eating. I put up several cameras along the trails to see who’s making them, and to see if any of my guesses are correct.
Scouting the area isn’t just cramming for a test, though. This first scouting helps me stay informed and makes the class better all-around, but it’s also the time when I get to explore and figure things out for myself. The rest of the class will be helping other people understand animals, but this first part is when I get to learn. I get to check the first traps in the morning, and I’m looking forward to learning about our nighttime visitors.