Where It All Started...

    Every year, in the five years I have been working at my school, I have brought fertilized eggs into the classroom to incubate. However, bringing this experience to the classroom for the first time was not my first incubation rodeo! Back when I was in eighth grade, I told my science teacher that one of my ducks at home had created a nest in my neighbor’s yard right beside their deck (my neighbors have always been very good sports). The nest was tucked away deep inside a bush covered in thorns. For days, I had watched the mother duck go back and forth to her nest. When she left the nest to go drink some water, I would check on the eggs to see how many she had laid. Each day there were more and more eggs and each day I became more and more excited because this was the first mother duck we had that was a really good momma and tended to her nest properly.

    Then tragically one morning, I went outside to find that the nest had been raided, the mother duck was gone, and remnants of eggs were sprawled across the neighbors’ yard. The situation had ‘fox’ written all over it. I was devastated to say the least. I investigated the scene and was able to discover that the nest was deeper than I thought and many eggs were still in the bottom of the nest. So my little eighth-grade self, about an hour before I had to go to school, got down on my hands and knees and climbed through the thorny branches of the bush to salvage whatever was left of the batch of eggs the mother had laid. I gathered them into a pail and then tried to figure out what I was supposed to do next.

    I ended up leaving the pail on my porch in a safe place and decided the first person I was going to see when I got to school was my animal-loving science teacher Mrs. C to ask her for advice. Mrs. C was the perfect person to ask because before I could even finish my story, she was hurrying me down the hallway to the storage closet to find her styrofoam incubator. We plugged the incubator in to warm it up, filled the water wells, and prepared the incubator for the eggs that she instructed me to bring to school the following day. 

    From that day on we waited and hoped for a miracle that we could save the once mother duck’s eggs. I recovered ten eggs from the nest that day and after days and days of turning the eggs, maintaining the proper humidity levels, and monitoring the temperature between each of my classes throughout the day, I got to experience the absolutely astonishing miracle of SEVEN of the ten eggs hatching before my eyes and leaving us with the cutest, fuzziest little bundles of joy you could imagine! In June of 2011, I was awarded Science Student of the Year by my unforgettable science teacher Mrs. C for the work I did in saving those seven lives and sharing and teaching about my experience to my classmates along the way.

Above is a photo from the Student of the Year ceremony circa 2011 with the guy who convinced me that I was put on this earth to become a teacher. Thanks, Dad!