::A Geek in Korea::

Over the course of my formal education, I’ve taken a large number of geology classes for someone  that only has a passing interest in the subject. This occasionally has come in handy in class, but today I was struggling to remember some of the basics I learned long ago.

As a child, my dream job, when pushed, was to be a spelunker. I adored caving. I forced my family to take me to caves whenever possible. Sometime in elementary school, my father and I even spent the night in a cave for a scout retreat. I think I liked caves because it was technically in nature but it wasn’t hot and unpleasant. Since caves have constant temperatures, it was like “air conditioned nature”. The cave we stayed the night in even had a cafeteria and cola machine! Now that’s nature!

Sometime in high school, perhaps my freshmen year when I had to actually learn geology, I lost interest in caves. Perhaps it was learning all the different aspects of geology unrelated to caves that bored me. Perhaps it was my meat head geology teacher, who happened to be the football coach of the high school. He was more interested in recruiting fat guys from class than teaching about geology at 8 am.

Later though, that passing familiarity with geology and caving from my younger years came in handy. It turns out that it saved me in my senior year of college. I turned it into my “thematic sequence” in college. A “thematic sequence” is a series of courses not related to your major that you had to take anyway to graduate college. You could choose any three related courses and take them in order.

I had a series of requirements to fill that I had to do in a year that needed to built on each other. During my Junior year, I had taken a joke science class called, “Geography of US National Parks.” I took this with a friend. When arranging my classes senior year, I realized, “Crap! I need a thematic sequence!” Since I needed three classes that needed to be taken in order, I ended up taking two more geology classes. I took a “Water and Society” course, and something else that escapes my memory. As dull as those other two classes were, the third class must have been completely boring to have slipped my mind.

Today I had to muster up all my remaining geology know how to introduce “minerals” to my students. My students knew a surprising amount of vocabulary thanks to the Pokemon game naming scheme (They use Gems for versions). Who says video games don’t teach?

We had to make a list of different minerals and their properties. It was straight out of one of my old high school lessons, except we don’t have Bunsen burners in class threatening to burn your face off. We had a list of about twenty different minerals and rocks, and I think I explained metamorphic and sedimentary rock formation correctly.

The students seemed to understand, except for one girl that thought wood and cement were actually rocks. She also was sitting on the floor because her desk wasn’t where it usually was and she refused to sit next to a boy instead, so perhaps she’s just a bit “off”.