Today my fourth-grade class took a field trip to the Seattle Science Foundation’s Kids in Medicine program, located on the Swedish Cherry Hill campus. The program recruits current and retired teachers to assist with hands-on science experiences like the one we had today: dissecting pig hearts!
The pig heart is much like the human heart in structure and size, and since we’ll be studying the human body in our last FOSS kit of the year, our principal thought we should take advantage of this program, for which the district obtained a grant to send interested classes.
Today’s agenda: a lesson about the function and anatomy of the heart, followed by dissection, then small-group discussion about what students had learned. A cardiologist led students (each pair had a heart to dissect) though the process, pointing out valves, chambers, and so on. A few students needed to step out—not because they misbehaving but because they felt sick. I stepped in for one student’s lab partner, holding the heart in my gloved hand as she cut through the heart tissue with surgical scissors. Afterward, students got to touch a real human heart and lungs and watch the lungs inflate with a balloon-like device. We were told the lungs had belonged to a smoker, evident from their blackened appearance.
The kids—even the ones who turned a little gray—loved it. And what I noticed, having planted myself at a table with two of the most rambunctious boys in class, is that everyone stayed on task. Even back at school—though not in as spectacular a fashion as this—I can see that science seems to keep kids engaged who would otherwise disengage. And on today’s field trip, they were fascinated. They followed directions. They didn’t goof around. They used the tools properly. They watched the monitors, and asked and answered questions.
Not every science lesson can involve dissection, of course. But my take away from this—other than that pig hearts smell like raw meat—is that science reaches kids in ways that other subjects don’t.
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