Classroom Close-Up: Mr. Szukaitis, NHS

We are starting a new video segment called Classroom Close-Up where we will take a behind the scenes look into different classrooms around the district to see what a lesson looks like. For our first Classroom Close-Up we tagged along with Mr. Szukaitis, Science teacher at Northville High School, and his Environmental Science class as they collected water samples at the Rouge River.

Show Transcript

Hello, I'm Mr. Szukaitis, I teach environmental science at the high school and today my students are doing water sampling at the Rouge River. We're at Waterford Bend Park and welcome to my classroom today. The students are testing for organics in the water. They are looking at nitrate, nitrite levels, phosphates, pH water temperature, ultimately we're looking to see how clean the water is and then they're searching for different organisms that we will spend the next couple class periods in the classroom identifying. So the class is AP environmental science and today we basically are at the river and we're basically, with some nets we're trying to go through and find live organisms so we can work on trying to identify them based on their different like characteristics. We found some crayfish, some fish, and some snails and we found a bunch of micro-organisms too and then next class we're going to start to identify them based on...based on color, size, and different identifying characteristics. So I say we do a lot of Hands-On stuff like we've already gone on an overnight trip where we like looked at different forests and I feel like it just it allows you to have a different type of learning and I think that's very beneficial, especially Hands-On and it's a lot less of like paper and pencil like studying and it's like real-world experiences.