Hinsdale Central class teaches kids how to be scientists

HINSDALE — A summer course at Hinsdale Central High School strives to modernize science class and put the fun back into the lab.

“The idea was to teach them how to be a scientist versus learning what scientists had done in the past,” said Mark Wollschlaeger, one of the teachers who helped start the class, Science Inquiry and Research.

SIR was first offered to students at Hinsdale Central and Hinsdale South in 2011. Instead of memorizing science facts and reading about other people’s research, students would conduct their own research and use the scientific method to investigate something they were interested in.

The honors-level class also required a bit of commitment from a student’s summer — five hours a day, five days a week for seven weeks.

“We had no idea if we would even get enough students for the class to run and we wound up with 26 students,” Wollschlaeger said. “We went from thinking, ‘Are we going to have enough to run the class?’ to ‘How are we going to manage 26 projects simultaneously?’”

There are two levels to the SIR class: SIR1 and SIR2. SIR1 first outlines the scientific method and students pitch their ideas. The rest of the time, they work on their own research. In SIR2, students spend time with a mentor from a university and work together on a project.

One of those students was 17-year-old Sally McNichols, who first took the class after her sophomore year.

“My first-year project, I tested the effects of light on E. coli growth,” the senior said. “The second year, I actually ended up working at a lab in a chemical company.”

In SIR1, Sally wanted to see if one could use a color spectrum that would interfere with the growth of bacteria simply by changing the bulbs in the room.

The experiment proved to be a failure, but it didn’t matter.

“The cool thing about this class is that you learn just as much when you fail,” said Peter Pintz, another teacher who helped start and run the class. “Despite things not working, (Sally) developed those skills so when she goes to a university she can say she has them.”

And working in the lab was one of her favorite things to do — a nice break from the typical classroom.

“You can read anything in a textbook, like when I add this solution to that solution this happens, but that’s just words so you don’t necessarily know what’s going on,” she said. “If you do it yourself, it’s really cool and you get more of the experience.”

Senior Emma Jerzyk, 17, said it’s “more realistic to the way science is outside of school because there aren’t really right answers.”

For her project, she worked with a PhD candidate in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and researched how the brain processes rhythm.

“I had people come in and they put on a set of headphones and listen to a certain rhythm, then I had them try to maintain a steady beat throughout that rhythm,” she said. “I found that certain types of rhythm threw them off more than others.”

Emma was able to determine this had to do with feedback between the ears and the brain because there are different types of neurons that function for rhythm and some function independently.

Luckily for future students, what started as an idea after attending a conference quickly turned into a popular summer school class.

SIR1 will now be offered in the regular curriculum next year, and both Emma and Sally will be graduating. Sally is studying to work in chemistry and computer science, while Emma hopes to one day be a surgeon.

Their teachers are confident their summer school experience can help jump-start their careers.

“If you look at the second-year kids and what they did, a lot of what they did really blows your mind,” Pintz said. “What some of these high school sophomores and juniors are doing, I was doing my sophomore and junior years of college.”