I really enjoy teaching at CC a lot especially
for the experiential education that it offers
so that we can meld these goals of the liberal
arts education of critical thinking and thinking
about things in a bigger picture perspective
at the same time with being outside
and getting students to have a lot of fun
in the outdoors. I've realized that as students
have a lot of fun when they're on these field
trips. We've ridden along in vans and having
a good time that as their positive attitudes
go up, their amount of learning also goes
up. A lot of times the way it works the
geo. classes will spend the first week or
so kind of around campus more. Kind of learning
some of the basics of the classroom and the
lab, a few other smaller fieldtrips and then
we'll go out into the field for a weeklong
field trip. The students at that point, it
starts to really gel in their heads "Oh wait,
this is what we're talking about, this is
what's going on." They'll all of a sudden
understand it, whereas if we had been in the
classroom the whole time they probably wouldn't
have gotten that big picture perspective.
Talking about the outdoor ed. program, we
have a new whitewater specialist and we were
talking together the last couple days about
how for next year we can plan an entirely
river based trip for the intro geology class
for the summer block. Students not
only would be getting an intro geology class out
of it, they will also be getting a bunch of
hands on skills of how to operate safely in
these white river settings. We have all these
amazing rocks exposed right at the surface;
just a playground for learning geology right
here in Colorado Springs and the whole western
U.S. That's something that's unique for our
school and the liberal arts world that a lot of
these other colleges don't have. We have all
these resources right here. It really makes
for a great program for the students to be
like, "Okay, here's the rocks, here they are,
we can see them right in town or we can see
them off on these big field trips into the
mountains."
