News: Teacher stories

Scott Hoover brought corn into his chemistry class at Butler High School! After attending the Ohio Corn & Wheat-sponsored Feed the World workshop last summer, Hoover did several of the Energy and Ethanol lessons with his science students. Hoover said the students enjoyed both activities. He performed the corn mash and distillation as a demo and students conducted the corn fermentation in groups of two. Hoover said, “They enjoyed seeing …

Things won’t be “dull as dirt” anymore for the Ag, Food, and Natural Resources students in Jenna Meeks’s class at Southern High School. Meeks attended the Ohio Corn & Wheat-sponsored Feed the World two-day workshop and took great curriculum, activities, and supplies back to her classroom. Her objectives for the soil lesson were to help students identify soil-forming factors and explain how they produce variability in soils; and to collect, …

Courtney Bockbrader, a Feed the World alumni educator, used the FTW water quality lessons to help prepare her students for a northern Ohio water monitoring initiative. Her Wildlife and Natural Resources class at Anthony Wayne High School used ditch water for the chemical tests and set up a stream simulation for macro-invertebrate identification. Bockbrader said, “It was a great practice for the Student Watershed Watch next week at the stream …

Scott Logsdon of Bexley High School had great things to say about Ohio Corn & Wheat’s 2 day summer workshop. “What a great summer workshop this was! Definitely a highlight for me and I am excited to see what you will offer this coming summer.” The Lawn Chemicals activity fit well with the AP Biology class discussion on deadzones, eutrophication and runoff. Logsdon had students do a lake attenuation and temperature …

Jerry Swartz, an Agricultural Education Instructor and FFA Advisor, did the soil ribbon test and the pH test with his Eastwood High School sophomore Animal and Plant Science students. Swartz attended the two-day Ohio Corn & Wheat-sponsored Feed the World workshop last summer and learned about these and other curriculum. Swartz said, “They enjoyed the ribbon test. It gave them a chance to get dirty and learn the difference between …

Limited school budgets make it difficult for teachers to provide materials to cover all science topics. Thanks to Ohio Corn & Wheat, GlenOak High School teacher Dori Hess received a free GFP kit to use with her AP biology students. Green fluorescent protein, or GFP, is extremely hydrophobic compared to bacterial proteins. Unique characteristics of GFP enable it to be purified from bacterial cell proteins using HIC columns. When placed …

Feed the World recently provided Bio-Rad GFP kits to ten lucky teachers. Erin Molden is a Biotechnology Instructor at Miami Valley CTC. She shares about how she used the kit with her junior Biotech students: In the fall semester my students spent a quarter learning about microbiology, DNA, and how to combine the two through bacterial transformation. They were successful in transforming bacteria with the pGLO plasmid resulting in glowing …

Want to include some art in your science lessons? Springfield High School science teacher Terri Stewart used Feed the World lessons on water quality, then worked with art teacher Kathryn Higgins on a cross-curricular project. Stewart’s students did some testing of water samples from C.J. Brown Dam and Reservoir taken near the old International Harvester plant and Buck Creek near Snyder Park. Stewart said, “We talked about the industries …