Kathie John
Alice Deal Junior High School
Washington, DC
Dear National Science Foundation,
I would like to take this opportunity to express how grateful I am for the
tremendous experience your foundation provided me this summer. Without the
funding that your organization provided for the Research Experience for Teachers
(RET) Program, I would not have been able to work with some of the excellent
staff at the Smithsonian Institution. From Ms. Mary Sangrey, the coordinator
of the RET program at the Smithsonian Institution (SI) to Dr. John Brown,
entomologist at the SI and my research advisor, the research that I was a
part of allowed me to experience the world of moths and butterflies, the world
of insects.
My research began with me having to learn a statistical program, EstimateS
5, developed by Robert K. Colwell. EstimatesS 5 computes randomized species
accumulation curves, statistical estimators of true richness, and is a statistical
estimator of the true number of species shared between pairs of samples. Dr.
John Brown had collected and identified numerous samples of insects from the
Smoky Mountains and was interested in finding out about the species’
richness. Therefore, I began to study and learn because my job was to use
this statistic program to analyze Dr. Brown’s species collection.
As a mathematics teacher, I am always looking for new and interesting ways
to integrate mathematics with the other subject areas. When I get back into
my classroom, my students will learn how to enter data on a spreadsheet, using
Microsoft Excel, and to analyze this data using SPSS or EstimateS 5. Using
the data gathered by Dr. John Brown, my students will analyze this data and
graph the curves that represent the richness of species. My students will
also have the opportunity to do research on how important various species
are to our ecosystem, and then we as a class can discuss the implications
of their graphs and what it would mean to our ecosystem.
I hope that your organization will continue to fund this very important experience
for teachers at the Smithsonian Institution because I found the experience
to be invaluable. Thank you very much for helping to make me the best teacher
that I could be.
Sincerely,
Kathie John
Research Experience for Teachers, 2002