Help IB Biology students at Josiah Quincy Upper School to design and execute their big independent labs.
- Do one 45 min. session or more!
- In person or on the phone
Looking for help during these times:
Help with LAB Design: Feb 2nd to the 12th – Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays 1:15pm to 3pm or After School (m,t,t,f – 2:50-4 or less) (w – 11:30 – when you want to leave)
Help with Data Processing and Evaluation: Feb 22nd to March 4th – Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays 1:15pm to 3pm – or After School (m,t,t,f – 2:50-4 or less) (w – 11:30 – when you want to leave)
EMAIL WITH QUESTIONS OR AVAILABILITY: iwarner@bostonpublicschools.org
Background
Hello Tufts Volunteers!
Once again it is time for the IB Biology students at Josiah Quincy to design and execute their big independent labs. With your help last year’s students did a great job and scored higher than any class in our schools history (two earned college Bio credit as a result), and this year’s students are expected to do better still. But they need help in order to be on equal footing with the international students from around the world they will be compared against.
The majority of our students are on lunch assistance programs, which is a roundabout way of saying they come from homes that do not have much money. Very few of our students have family members who went to college or took any advanced science courses and as a result our students are very handicapped on a project where they compete against students who get a great deal of help at home.
The nature of this lab design and follow through is that the teacher cannot be guiding the students beyond a point. Since the rules say that help from outside sources (parents, etc) is not forbidden, and since we have the generous gift of support from an elite science research institution, this means that your help is legal and gives our students a tremendous boost. All levels of help are a huge boon to our student’s success: from helping them to come up with improvements to their experimental design, to proofreading their hypothesis statements, to helping them analyze confusing data, and making suggestions for follow-up experiments.
We are requesting for your assistance – either in person or by email/phone – at any level. Some volunteers last year came for one 45 minute period and some came multiple days in a row. Some worked with many students, and some mentored a single student. This year I am not steering the students into micro experiments as I got feedback from the IB program that too many of the Labs they audited were closely related. As a result there is a great deal of variety in the topics they have begun pursuing, but they need some help tightening up their plans, their variables, and their methods before they begin their experiments on the 22nd.
This is also a request for you to pass this search for volunteers onto your peers in the labs around you. If you know someone who might be interested in getting involved, even if just for a single class period, please forward this email to them and have them contact me if interested.
If you can commit to helping the seniors at JQUS sometime this month, please let me know. I have indicated the times below when we would welcome support in person, and will connect potential mentors who are not able to join us on campus with a student who is eager to get some personalized help via email. Get in touch and we can find a time that works well for you!
Thanks so much for considering how you might be able to help our Seniors!
Ian Warner
iwarner@bostonpublicschools.org
508-685-0950
