Into the Wild

This story originally appeared in the 2006 issue of Vassar Views in celebration of URSI’s 20th anniversary.

How cool is this: you get to spend the summer on Assateague Island, Maryland, tracking and observing wild horses to investigate dominance behavior among mares.

“It was very cool,” said Stacey Greenberg ’88, now the AP biology teacher at Weston High School in Weston, Connecticut. “But it was also sometimes very frustrating, because living in a tent was really not my idea of a good time, especially at 3:00 a.m. when a thunderstorm came through and we [Greenberg, Jen Veech ’88, and the prof, Allen Rutberg] had to sleep in the jeep. At moments like that, you’re so tired that the beauty and wonder kind of escape you. And slogging through the irrigation canals that were supposed to cut down on the mosquito population—yeah, that was fun. I have a picture of me doing that, wading through water that’s about shoulder height. But it was an amazing experience. And I can use the paper I was second author on, published in the scientific journal Animal Behaviour, in my animal behavior class!”

Up until her senior year of high school, Greenberg had never considered going into science. “And then I took a course in animal behavior and AP biology my senior year, and I just fell in love with bio. That’s where I first thought, wow, I could do science!” But Greenberg could, and did, do a lot of things. And loved them, too. Took an art/religion class on the goddess—“fabulous class”—and a course in Russian literature, and did an independent study on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. “My students now will ask me about Vassar, because I’ll wear Vassar sweatshirts to work sometimes, and I’m like, it’s heaven on earth, people. It’s just such a wonderful place.”

The most exciting part of the URSI project, “the times that really fed the brain,” said Greenberg, were the sitting-around times at the end of the day “when we had accumulated enough data that we could begin to look at trends, and then start speculating about what was going on and why. That was the thing that really got me fired up, trying to interpret what was happening and figuring out what to do next.”

It got her sufficiently fired up that, after Vassar, she fully intended to pursue a career in scientific research and made a beeline for Brown University’s PhD program in ecology and evolution on a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. And just plain hated it. “One of the things that was missing from my grad school experience was the scientific camaraderie I experienced that summer on Assateague,” said Greenberg. “I was working completely on my own, and I wasn’t motivated to do the research, and I just didn’t feel that what I was doing was meaningful.”

So in the middle of her fourth semester, she left. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, just treaded water for a bit (which she learned how to do in those irrigation ditches on Assateague), and did temp work. “This is going to sound weird, but I adopted my first dog and had to go to dog training classes, and then they asked me to teach dog training classes, and I loved it. Loved teaching! So I thought, why not combine teaching and biology—what a new concept—because I still loved bio, I just didn’t want to do research.” She went back to school, got her master of arts in teaching, and has been teaching high school biology ever since. “I just got my students’ AP scores from this year and they did really really well,” she said recently. “23 kids—I had 21 fives and 2 fours. Hey—I’ve found my niche.”

There’s a Vassar thread that runs between her decision to leave the PhD program and the way she teaches science now. “I think a liberal arts background gives you a better ability to look at things from different perspectives, to think out of the box and come up with alternatives. I try to get the kids to understand that even if they’re never going to go into science, the important thing is not to lock yourself into one perspective or one way of thinking. If that doesn’t work, then what do you do? What do you fall back on? If I had totally locked myself into the idea that I was going to be a research scientist and I was going to get my PhD, I would have been absolutely miserable. I probably would have left the program anyway, but I would have had a harder time, and I would have felt like a failure instead of staying open, and reminding myself that there were other things I could do. I think Vassar gave me the freedom to find my own path. It’s just the way life there was, and is—you are encouraged to explore.”

So, for example, when she teaches animal behavior, she talks about the different ways you can structure the inquiry. “You can look at behavior as a mechanism. You can look at it from a physiological basis, a cellular basis, a biochemical basis. You can also look at it in an evolutionary context and ask how natural selection has shaped the behaviors in the wild. I seem to remember, before high school, science was all just facts. I don’t teach it that way. Yes, you have to learn the facts, but I’m always after the big picture.”

Also in this class, which is a standard-level semester-long course with a lot of kids who are not necessarily gung-ho about science, Greenberg assigns a semester-long “design a species” project. At the beginning of the semester, the students randomly pick a biome—tropical rainforest, or chaparral, or savannah—and they research that biome, climate, flora and fauna, etc. And then they physically design a unique type of animal that could live there. “Then, as we go through different units, we talk about instincts and learning, we talk about genetics, we talk about territorial behavior, mating behavior, habitat selection—and we ask, how did your species behave relative to all these different factors? And it has to fit together. So by the end of the semester, they have what is essentially a comprehensive study of this animal, how it lives, how evolution has impacted its behavior. They’re taking everything they’ve learned, including all the big-picture concepts of evolution and so on, and tying it all together.”

One of the key components of this project, according to Greenberg, is creativity. “When the kids come up from the middle school, they’re great at memorizing, but they’re not sure what to do if you ask them to be creative, and they have to learn that. That’s a really important skill, especially if you’re going to be a scientist. And it fires them up. They love those assignments. I look at that and say, wow, this is making a difference. A lightbulb is going on, they’re getting it. So every time I turn a student on to biology, I have my Vassar experiences to thank.”