By: Rebecca Roberts ’20
Monadnock Mushroomers Unlimited is the largest NH based mushroom group with roughly 1400 members. People post photos of mushrooms found on forays for further identification, neat mushroom videos, current field studies and general questions. One day, a home-school teacher posted that she wanted to bring someone in to guest speak about mushrooms for “Nature Week” at the school she teaches as. I commented on her post and said that I would love to, and would message her. I did, and she got back to me with a little more information.
“We are part of a home-school co op and I volunteered to teach Kindergarten to 2nd grade class and we are studying nature. One of my curriculum suggestions for one of the weeks was “fungus” and I have zero expertise in this area. Rather than skip it or flounder thru it, I thought I might be able to find a guest teacher for that week.”
I got back to her and told her a little bit of my expertise on the topic:
“That sounds really fun! I’ve worked on 2 gourmet mushroom farms in NH and OR, for a nutritionist and I’ve attended the Telluride Mushroom Festival in CO. This past year I got to volunteer! I’m studying Marketing for Integrative Health and “Food as Medicine” is really important to me – which is where mushrooms come into play! I think it’s a really wonderful thing to teach children because it teaches kids science in a fun and tangible way. The time frame would work well for me and I have Fridays off from class at Plymouth State (where I go to school)”
From then on, we kept in touch with smaller details up until I gave a talk this past Friday. What’s really wonderful to be about this experience is how tangible it was. As Plymouth Students we have more credibility than we give ourselves credit for and we can continue to be Plymouth Students outside of campus in the real world. We are fortunate to live in a society where we are interconnected through the internet in many more ways than have been possible in the past.
I hope this post encourages other students and other people to think creatively about where they can find opportunities in their field of interest. Many of us feel guilt for frequent social media usage – why? Society mostly tells us it’s bad. We’re shamed for using it in the classroom from a young age where most primary schools actually block it from browsers and are parents usually don’t feel much differently. Once people get older however, we lack the education that social media can actually be used constructively. Instead of feeling like we need to get off of social media, we should try to reconstruct our efforts and focus on using it to immerse ourselves deeper into career pursuits.
Now, I have a solid presentation I can bring to other schools, co-ops and groups. What’s even better is that I got to introduce the wonderful world of mushrooms to kids who showed genuine interest in their world of tiny attention spans and lots to be interested in.
Click here for link to this original article on Becca’s own ePort.
Becca Roberts is an Interdisciplinary Studies major and a CoLab Student Affiliate. Read more about Becca here.
