{"id":74,"date":"2022-07-03T23:42:16","date_gmt":"2022-07-03T23:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.io\/?p=74"},"modified":"2022-07-03T23:46:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-03T23:46:05","slug":"speeding-up-learning-about-wild-processes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/2022\/07\/03\/speeding-up-learning-about-wild-processes\/","title":{"rendered":"Speeding Up The Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow, I start teaching my first of two 6-day classes in Sri Lanka. \u00a0Normally, I\u2019ve been teaching these classes as 6-week-long classes, meeting once a week for an hour. \u00a0As I work to bring the class into other schools, I frequently get asked if I can run a shorter course. \u00a0School 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. \u00a0Personally, I don\u2019t think this should be all that hard \u2014 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. \u00a0The only difference is that students are figuring things out for themselves about their local ecosystem, rather than taking someone else\u2019s word for it. \u00a0Of course, it doesn\u2019t really matter what I think \u2014 schools hear you say something like \u201ca 6-week curriculum\u201d and they get fidgety, but if you say, \u201ca 1-week class\u201d, then that sounds limited and doable. \u00a0It\u2019s just human nature to be skeptical of new things and to take small bites at first. \u00a0Whaddayagonna do?<\/p>\n

\"\"
The study area for tomorrow’s class, right outside dreamspace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At any rate, this conference I\u2019m 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. \u00a0I decided to try to get it all into one week. \u00a0The tricky thing, of course, is that Wild Lives is all about finding and exploring wild animals, and wild animals don\u2019t know about class schedules. \u00a0The great thing about having a week between classes is that it\u2019s very tolerant of failures. \u00a0Some nights, animals don\u2019t show up, other nights they do. \u00a0Sometimes, 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. \u00a0It\u2019s a game of probabilities \u2014 each animal in your area has a certain chance of walking in front of your camera every day. \u00a0You can up your probabilities by putting your camera in a place that animals are more likely to go, but it\u2019s never a sure bet,\u00a0especially<\/em> if you\u2019re not putting out food to attract animals, which I never\u00a0<\/em>do. \u00a0You can think of the number of animals you get to see as following a simple formula: \u00a0animal 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. \u00a0I guess you\u2019re actually summing individual probabilities for each individual animal, but I said this formula was simple, so I\u2019m 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\u2019re so inclined.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a lot of variables under my control. \u00a0I\u2019m in Sri Lanka, which has lots of biodiversity, but I\u2019m also working at a school in a city, so I don\u2019t really know how many animals are out there. \u00a0We can play with ways to increase our probability of seeing animals \u2014 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. \u00a0Usually I do 3-4 cameras per class, but I brought enough cameras to do 6-7 per class, so I that\u2019s an easy way to boost my odds.<\/p>\n

I also asked for a little more time for each class \u2014 an hour and a half instead of an hour. \u00a0We have the luxury of working in an empty lot and a pasture right next to Dreamspace\u2019s building, so it doesn\u2019t take much classtime to get out to the study area. \u00a0I\u2019m also working with older, more capable students \u2014 one class is adults 18-25, and another is high school students 13-18. \u00a0They\u2019ll have more endurance and (maybe) more focus than my younger students. \u00a0This 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\u2019m pretty happy when they get the camera on a tree and pointed somewhere an animal might pass).<\/p>\n

The rest of the class structure doesn\u2019t change much. \u00a0Same number of days, same material to cover. \u00a0The real question, and what determines the success of this class, is how successful they\u2019ll be at finding animals. \u00a0All my instincts tell me that there are plenty of animals out here, and it\u2019s just up to us to find them. \u00a0We\u2019ll revisit this prediction a week from today. \u00a0For now, I\u2019ve got a class to teach!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow, I start teaching my first of two 6-day classes in Sri Lanka. \u00a0Normally, I\u2019ve been teaching these classes as 6-week-long classes, meeting once a week for an hour. \u00a0As I work to bring the class into other schools, I frequently get asked if I can run a shorter course. \u00a0School tends to be a… Continue reading Speeding Up The Class<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,9],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-classes","tag-design","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wildlives.world\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}