Aaron Reaven Makes Growing Food and Air Pressure Fun!
July 2012
Aaron Reaven is a former West Contra Costa Unified School District teacher who is passionate about educating everyone on topics including climate change as well as food knowledge to encourage healthy habits.
Most of Aaron’s science activity takes place in the classroom, which is a good thing because that means he can share his excitement with students. One of his favorite lessons to teach is a food burning experiment about the science of calories titled, “Growing Food.”
The activity gets across the relative energy content of different foods that are rich in fat, versus for example, complex or simple carbohydrates. The goal is for students to learn how to make healthier choices by better understanding how weight control works.
One of Aaron’s funniest classroom memories comes from a lesson designed to demonstrate the reality of air pressure.
The lesson involves a student climbing into a large plastic garbage bag that comes up to their shoulders, and then removing all the air out of the bag with a strong vacuum cleaner. “There was no moving on after that demonstration. The rest of the period was taken up with most of the class demanding a turn inside the plastic bag.”
In addition to helping kids grasp the concept of a calorie and how air pressure works, Aaron is also “obsessed” with understanding the threat of climate change and promoting solutions to it through political action, advocacy and education.
Though Aaron does not come from a background of hard science he says, “I have slowly come to realize that I care a lot about what counts as science, and why we need to teach science. For example, careful observation of nature helped our ancestors (of many diverse ethnicities) experiment, cultivate and develop the incredible variety of food species that are available to humans now.”
After teaching the program, “Healthy Person, Healthy Planet” at Dover Elementary School for nine years, Aaron now is teaching high school students in Marin County and is the head science instructor for the non-profit organization Kids Cooking for Life.