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Published: April 28th 2008
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The Bridge to the Island School
This is over the mangrove swamp between CEI and the IS. The building in the foreground is the faculty housing (some live in deep creek) and the building with the solar panels is the girls dorm and the classrooms (on the bottom level). I had the most amazing week. First and foremost, I used my passport for the first time ever! Pretty spectacular. I had a job interview at the
the Island School for the whole week of April 13th to April 19th and it was a very positive experience and I am pretty sure there is no other secondary education institute quite like it (if anyone thinks that there is please let me know).
The Location and Getting There
The school is located on the lower part of Eleuthera about five miles south of the settlement Deep Creek (Google Earth will show you the coordinates 24.835 Latitude and 76.325 Longitude). It is a hour flight from Nassau on Bahama's Air, but getting to Nassau from Bozeman, well that is an adventure in and of itself! Some of you know how difficult and expensive it can be to fly out of Bozeman (hell all of Montana and Wyoming for that matter) so come to find out my flight down to the Bahamas took me a little over 25 hours. I had a eight hour stay in Salt Lake City and a six hour stay in Atlanta with a poultry couple of hours in Nassau! But
when I landed in Eleuthera I was blown away. The people were friendly the weather was warm (some Bahamians thought it was cool, but I was coming from a snow covered Montana) and the ocean was so turquoise and clear it was surreal! I was greeted at the Airport by one of the Math Instructors, who believe it or not, is also from Maine (by Gardiner). We hoped into the bio-diesel truck and started driving back to the Island School Campus -on the left hand side of the road. That was weird, it took me a while to get used to oncoming traffic being on the other side of the road, but by the end of the week I was alright with it!
The School Week
The school week at the Island School is intense to say the least. Students have school Monday through Saturday, with class work ranging from your traditional subjects (Literature, History, Science, Math, and Art) to the not so traditional (Legacy Projects, Research, SCUBA, etc). The students (and myself) were up at 6:30 AM (Faculty are at a daily meeting at 6:15am) to gather around the Flag of the Bahamas and to sing the Bahamian
Lizard in a Conch
I just saw this little guy chilling in the shell. national anthem and make announcements pertaining to the day. Once that is complete, they start their morning exercises for an hour. There are two types of exercises running and swimming, with the end result of the 14 week semester being either a half marathon or to swim four miles in the ocean! I opted to do running exercises...in my Chacos, got some blisters from that, but it was all fun and good. Once exercises are done the students do chores to clean up the campus (dorms, dining hall, check the cistern levels, etc). The student who is in charge for the day, called the Kah-seek (don't know how to spell it so there it is phonetically), goes around and checks the cistern level's and the energy production. OH, Did I forget to mention the fact that this campus is pretty damn self sufficient?! They gather all the rain water from the roofs of their buildings and collect them in huge cisterns (during hurricane season there is a lot of rain), collect energy from solar panels on the roofs of the buildings and through wind power; and they heat all their water through solar water heaters as well! Most of the
The view from the Math Office.
I'm not joking. That is really the view from the math office! food (fruits/vegetables/talapia/pigs) are all grown on campus, it is an amazing testament to sustainability and I would like to see more of that modeled here state side! After the chores are done, the students get to eat breakfast and start their school day, which goes up until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. They have some free time and dinner is at 6pm, after dinner there is study hall from 7-10pm and then they call it a day! Quite the week for both Faculty and Students!
The Research
As I mentioned the students do research on campus. They research in some really cool areas that pertain to the Bahamas and do it in conjunction with
Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI), the research institute that is right next door (and that is where I stayed)! The research that is going on at this compound of school and research institute ranges from Aquaculture (they have a closed circuit where
talapia fertilize the Romaine Lettuce and Basil, while the plants filter and feed the water for the talapia), to the interaction between
bonefish and sharks (the bonefish is a sports fish that when caught and released somehow attracts sharks to it, they think that it is
The farm
This is only a little piece of the farm. The large bush on the right is a passion fruit bush! SAH-WEET! a stress hormone that the bonefish produces, but they aren't sure, hence the research). If you noticed the Wiki article on bonefish is very small, not much is known about it and CEI is studying them currently!
My Stay
I had a very busy week of touring the facilities (from the farm, to CEI, to the classrooms, Dining Hall -I helped the Island Schools Research Manager make cookies), sitting in on classes, and going out to do research (not to mention the morning exercises)! I got to sit in on a very unique math class, Celestial Navigation! It is a brilliant solution to a the problem of having students only come for a semester and entering at different mathematical skill levels. Take the students and introduce them to math that they have never seen before so that they are all on the same page with an emphasis on problem solving! While I was there, the students were working on solving the
Longitude problem (a tough problem that requires an accurate way to keep time and measure the angle of things in the sky) and on how to use a
sextant! Later that week we got to go out on a
boat and take as many readings of the angle of the sun as possible to find local apparent noon and calculate where on the planet earth we were! After that, it was time to cool off and I took a nice dip in the ocean (it was as warm as bath water)! I also got to go out on a research project and snorkel among a coral reef looking for
Diadema which help promote coral growth by eating macro algae that makes it difficult for the coral to grow! I got the opportunity to teach a research statistics class which focused on testing of two parameters using a t-test and gave a good example of hypothesis testing with a loaded dice and a fair dice. The week ended with me giving a lecture on Circadian Rhythms in fruit flies and using some new methods in Systems Biology to model it. There weren't many equations, but a lot of pictures and a qualitative review of how the whole thing works. At the end I tied in some of the Systems Biology diagrams with some research they are doing on the island and even on the dynamics of how their energy system
Sand, Seaweed, and Foam
Another Artsy Picture for you all! works at the school! Basically I took the Mathematical Ferrari of Dynamics and took them for a joy ride without showing them the inside of the engine! I had a blast there and it is a fascinating academic/research community. I left on Saturday and believe it or not played postman for the school. It has no postal service and the mail goes out with people who leave the island! Luckily for me I had sent some homework back to Bozeman from the Atlanta airport and knew where the mailbox was and dropped off a couple of pounds of letters in the post for the school! The flight back was again an all day affair and to top it off, when I landed in Bozeman it was snowing!
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emile
non-member comment
which continent now?
Unless you were in Jolpa, Rajasthan India, I think you want 24.835 Latitude and -76.325 Longitude