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My mom's side of the family has always been very nature oriented, and performance oriented. I am no exception.

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Summer time was outdoors time at Leech and Ham Lake in Northern Minnesota. I learned to want the feeling of being surrounded by nonhuman life, and to recognize what those beings were.

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My cousin (Left), brother, and I (Right) out in the snow probably in Fargo

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Winter time was outdoors time too. Minnesota seasons mean you can't be picky if you want to be in nature. I got a real sense of the dormancy of life in the winter, and the rhythm of reawakening.

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Capitol Hill was very well-suited to me and my family (academically focused and relatively privileged). My good relationships with almost all my teachers made the profession somewhat attractive even then. It is a magnet school for gifted and talented students, so I benefited a lot from that label. This also meant I was in a relatively homogeneous environment where the instruction was not very differentiated. That made teaching seem straightforward. I remember a 3rd grade project to study an animal and present on it. I chose the 3-toed sloth, and the freedom and depth of that project makes me still feel connected to sloths to this day.

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A good example of my early reading material

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I always wanted to read about animals. I remember going to the library with my mom and going straight to the children's science section to find a book about animals I hadn't read yet.

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I was desperate to get into the Nature Walk Program, where I was an interpreter at the zoo near my house. For the application interview, we were supposed to give a presentation about a lifeform. Wanting to be original, I chose stromatolites, which make up a lot of the earliest fossil record of life on Earth. I really just did it to get the job, but it also started to open up to me a concept of biology beyond just cool animals doing cool things.

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The deadline for applying to join Nature Walk in the summer of 2023 has passed. Check back early next year to apply for the summer of 2024.

The deadline for applying to join Nature Walk in the summer of 2023 has passed. Check back early next year to apply for the summer of 2024.
Nature Walk is a summer volunteer program that inspires youth to be stewards for wildlife. Youth will connect visitors to Como's animals and plants to encourage appreciation and preservation of the natural world. Additionally, the Nature Walk program provides youth with valuable work experience and job skills and creates a gateway for potential future opportunities at Como and other conservation institutions.

This program requires a significant commitment. Please carefully review all of the important information for Nature Walk , including the position description and key dates of the program.

Applicants and a parent or guardian must attend a virtual information session to become familiar with the program. Information sessions can be attended either before or after the application is submitted. E-mail comovolunteers@ci.stpaul.mn.us to sign-up for a virtual session. Applicants and parents can choose between two information session dates:

Wednesday, March 15th from 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Wednesday, April 12th from 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Nature Walk - Summer Teen Program - Como Zoo Conservatory

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The deadline for applying to join Nature Walk in the summer of 2023 has passed. Check back early next year to apply for the summer of 2024. The deadline for...

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Central High School's IB bio teacher Stacey Skinner

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I had a pretty great time in High School. The material in my bio classes was always the most interesting to me, maybe because I had already decided I would be pursuing science in some way. I continued to benefit from the early-applied gifted and talented track as I had no trouble getting into the advanced classes in High School.
Here, I began to differentiate between good and bad teachers, and start to learn that I had opinions on the best ways to teach people.
My favorite project I did in High School was a presentation on the layers of the rainforest. I wanted people to get a little more out of it than just a slideshow, so I made my classmates lie down on the dirty bio room floor and yelled at them about what you might find at this level if we were in the tropical rainforest. We progressively moved up until I had people standing on their chairs or tables (Mr. Skinner wasn't very happy about that) as I described the emergent layer above the canopy. I loved the emotion that I incited in people (not all positive), and have been trying to recapture it in all my teaching since then.

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Bio 001 mink dissection lab at Swarthmore College

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I went into Swarthmore confidently pursuing a Biology major. It took 3 years and two summers of research to figure out I did not want to be a research scientist. Two of my favorite classes were Intro to Education and Adolescence, and I felt like that might say something about where my more fundamental interests lie.

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Most of the Science Associates working hard

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Sophomore year of college, I worked as a Biology department tutor, called a Science Associate. I could never fit it into my schedule again after that, but relearning intro Bio along with students and helping them work through their review guides and homework was probably the only job I've ever had that I always wanted to show up to.

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My City Year team at Leataata Floyd Elementary

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I had a few temporary jobs in education after college. City Year, an AmeriCorps program I did in Sacramento, was my first venture into working in actual schools. I determined that elementary schoolers were not for me, but still, I would get so excited when the 4th graders in my class had their occasional science lesson. Up to this point, this was also the proudest I had been of the mission of my work, teaching and mentoring students that inequity had robbed of opportunity. I had a moment during this year that expresses my love of learning and teaching science. A dragonfly had landed on the wall of the building while students were out at recess. As soon as they saw it, they screamed and ran. I walked right up to it and started talking to whoever was closest about all the different parts of its body and what they were for. Within seconds, most of my students had come back over to look as closely as they could at the dragonfly. Just a little bit of curiosity and knowledge had turned a terrifying monster into a fascinating facet of the world. What if students learned to have that attitude with everything around them?

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Me doing the most interesting part of my MN GreenCorps job: taking pictures of every dumpster in the Saint Paul Public Schools district

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After determining elementary education was not my path, I tried another AmeriCorps program, this time an environmental one: MN GreenCorps. It would have been hard for me to love a job during COVID, so maybe it never really had a chance, but I did not enjoy the day-to-day of trying to make environmental change in a huge institution. It did have its moments, not least of which was meeting Story, but when it came time to find another job I knew I wanted to be educating again.

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A nature walk I led for CAIRO (it did not go great, as I recall)

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The job I found when I moved to Portland was as the first-ever STEAM Education Coordinator for the Center for African Immigrants and Refugees Organization (CAIRO). This meant I had to build a culturally-specific informal STEAM education program from essentially scratch. I learned a ton during the year and a half I was here, especially about my own lack of knowledge around cultural responsiveness. During the school year, I helped support students in their STEAM classes. I discovered that time and time again, we kept leaning on the classroom teachers to know how students were doing, academically and emotionally. They were the ones who had the most opportunity to build a relationship with the students, and it was in their classrooms that the most support could occur. I realized that my organizer, managerial level, was too out of touch for my tastes. I wanted to be building that relationship, coordinating with other adults in students' lives to help them learn knowledge and skills they might not get anywhere else.

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I want to be a teacher because I enjoy the experience of watching a student learn and learning alongside them. I want to be a science teacher because I find science wonderful.
The family tree in this image gives me so much comfort because it reminds me I am surrounded by my family, and only my family. I want students to take that same comfort and wonder from their learning (maybe from biology, maybe from something they care more about).