Tomorrow, I start teaching my first of two 6-day classes in Sri Lanka. Normally, I’ve been teaching these classes as 6-week-long classes, meeting once a week for an hour. As I work to bring the class into other schools, I frequently get asked if I can run a shorter course. School tends to be a very rigid, heavily scheduled affair, and the longer a course is, the harder is to wrangle into a heavily laden calendar. Personally, I don’t think this should be all that hard — science class already meets regularly in most grades everywhere in the world, and I feel like Wild Lives is conceptually right at the border of a natural history section of a science curriculum. The only difference is that students are figuring things out for themselves about their local ecosystem, rather than taking someone else’s word for it. Of course, it doesn’t really matter what I think — schools hear you say something like “a 6-week curriculum” and they get fidgety, but if you say, “a 1-week class”, then that sounds limited and doable. It’s just human nature to be skeptical of new things and to take small bites at first. Whaddayagonna do?
At any rate, this conference I’m at in Sri Lanka, Dinacon, only goes on for a month, so whatever the case, I had to shrink down my luxurious 6-week timeline into something that would fit in a short time. I decided to try to get it all into one week. The tricky thing, of course, is that Wild Lives is all about finding and exploring wild animals, and wild animals don’t know about class schedules. The great thing about having a week between classes is that it’s very tolerant of failures. Some nights, animals don’t show up, other nights they do. Sometimes, you see the same individual animal every day as it passes by, other times you just get one glimpse of a charismatic animal over the whole 6-week period. It’s a game of probabilities — each animal in your area has a certain chance of walking in front of your camera every day. You can up your probabilities by putting your camera in a place that animals are more likely to go, but it’s never a sure bet, especially if you’re not putting out food to attract animals, which I never do. You can think of the number of animals you get to see as following a simple formula: animal sightings during a class = number of animals in each area * probability each animal walks in front of the camera in a given day * number of days * number of cameras. I guess you’re actually summing individual probabilities for each individual animal, but I said this formula was simple, so I’m just going to move on and you can just take my point, or grab a pencil and come up with your own elaborate formula if you’re so inclined.
I don’t have a lot of variables under my control. I’m in Sri Lanka, which has lots of biodiversity, but I’m also working at a school in a city, so I don’t really know how many animals are out there. We can play with ways to increase our probability of seeing animals — tracking them and putting cameras on their runs, setting cameras to super duper high sensitivity, using things that might attract animals, but the easiest thing is to just increase the number of cameras. Usually I do 3-4 cameras per class, but I brought enough cameras to do 6-7 per class, so I that’s an easy way to boost my odds.
I also asked for a little more time for each class — an hour and a half instead of an hour. We have the luxury of working in an empty lot and a pasture right next to Dreamspace’s building, so it doesn’t take much classtime to get out to the study area. I’m also working with older, more capable students — one class is adults 18-25, and another is high school students 13-18. They’ll have more endurance and (maybe) more focus than my younger students. This lets me spend more time with them outside, understanding tracks and the environment, and I can ask them to be more discerning about where and how they place their cameras (with elementary school students, I’m pretty happy when they get the camera on a tree and pointed somewhere an animal might pass).
The rest of the class structure doesn’t change much. Same number of days, same material to cover. The real question, and what determines the success of this class, is how successful they’ll be at finding animals. All my instincts tell me that there are plenty of animals out here, and it’s just up to us to find them. We’ll revisit this prediction a week from today. For now, I’ve got a class to teach!