Bobbye Smith: Leading East Bay Students into the World of Marine Science
March 2022
Bobbye Smith joined the CRS Community in 2011. A former Marine Biologist and Ecotoxicologist, she worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before retiring in 2008. She currently volunteers teaching science at Cragmont Elementary School. We spoke with her to learn about why science in the classroom is important for her and the students she teaches.
How did you become familiar with Community Resources for Science?
When I started volunteering in my daughters’ classroom, she’s an elementary teacher, I was introduced to the incredible resources that CRS has to offer. One of the programs that we first engaged with was the Super Stars program. The idea was to help teachers integrate their ideas of projects in the school with the then-developing NGSS standards, providing resources and ideas for ways we can teach science in this new way.
Click to hear how Bobbye’s discovered CRS in her own words.
Who do you hope to inspire through your volunteer work?
My goal is to inspire the students with whom I work- in particular girls- to become scientists and engineers for the future. I want them to recognize that the place in which we live, this lovely Bay Area, is connected to the world, and they, as students, can affect the world. Whenever I speak with them, particularly around the impacts of global climate change and global warming on migratory animals, especially those that come through the San Francisco Bay that they are familiar with.
I give them a sense of agency. Show them that they can have an effect. And one of the things that’s so fantastic is that there are so many resources, we have such a luxury, such a group of scientists and engineers and of institutions, like CRS, that we can bring into the classroom.
One of the most fun, of course, is to be able to go down to the Berkeley Marina and collect organisms and bring them back to the classroom because the kids get so excited about being able to feel and touch and learn about real live animals. This brings the lived experience that they have in the classroom through their idea of What can I do to improve the world? They’re gonna help us do a better job in our relationship with the environment in which we live.
One of the advantages of living in the Bay Area, particularly for teachers, is to take advantage of all of the resources that we have here: the scientific institutions, the scientists that are around us, [people] like CRS who became a place where you can find the information to build the experience for your students. We have easy access to San Francisco Bay. We can bring those organisms into our classrooms, and students get so excited about seeing real live creatures.
They can begin to appreciate the fact that it’s not just the animals that they can see with their eyes. Put them under the microscope and show them the platonic organisms. And it’s just mind-opening! Then, when they draw their pictures… it’s not just whales, or the dolphins or the birds. They’re also thinking about the algae and the plankton that come in and out on the tides. We have the luxury of being here, so let’s take advantage of it.
I hope that in my role as a volunteer science teacher I can excite students, especially girls, to become scientists and engineers. Elementary school age children are natural scientists – their curiosity, enthusiasm, and openness to ideas make them ready to dream about what their own futures may hold. I hope that by being “just a grandma who loves science” in their classroom, we can overcome some of the societal messages that tell students “you can’t be a ….” The time to act to reduce Global Warming is so short. We need our students to help develop the future political, adaptive and technologic solutions to slow the pace of Climate Change and save our Earth.
Click to learn from Bobbye why volunteering is so important.
Why do you think it’s important for scientists to engage in science education?
Scientists sometimes get a bad rap but there are so many good communicators, they just need to be taught how to communicate properly. There’s no reason not to, it’s fun, it’s interesting, and scientists are always interested in talking about what they’re doing. If they just knew how to frame it. You can explain anything to kids!
I believe that elementary school students are natural scientists! They have so much enthusiasm, they have so much curiosity. They have ways of thinking about things that we just don’t have. My hope is that they will become the leaders in the future. The ones that will design the solutions to global warming and climate change. That will help us save our planet and help us be better stewards of our planet. And I know they can do it!
What led you to working with educators and elementary students? Did you have similar experiences in your previous career?
I’ve been volunteering in my daughter’s classroom in the Berkeley schools since 2011. I’ve always tried to do communication and outreach to community members. I thought that after I received my PhD at 42, achieving my lifelong goals of doing scientific diving and becoming a marine biologist, that I would teach at the college level. That wasn’t a viable option in the Bay Area at the time.
Instead, I was lucky enough to receive 1 of 10 national fellowships to work in Washington DC for the US EPA under the aegis of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. After that, I worked for the State of California first and then for the Environmental Protection Agency, and in that job, had the luxury of working with citizen scientists. As a group, we’re able to design cleanup programs for toxic waste sites in the Bay Area, in particular military sites.
So that experience was fun because I got to use my background; I could teach ecotoxicology, I could teach wetland ecology. Not only was it interesting for me, but it was so much fun! Community members even gave me a plaque for my years of service, of which I’m very, very proud. That was one of my most favored awards (because it is) from working with the community. I’ve always had a sense of wanting to do a good job for the environment, so that was one of the drivers for working for the US Environmental Protection Agency. I had the luxury of being able to go home and say, “I did something good for the environment today.”
Click to hear more of Bobbye’s STEM career journey in her own words.
Who or what inspired you along your career journey and why? Why was the inspiration significant to your chosen career path?
Growing up in Florida, I would swim in the tropical waters in Miami and I would imagine myself as being a mermaid or being a sea creature. I knew at 12 years old what I wanted to be when I grew up: a marine biologist.
It was hard during that time because there really weren’t many examples of female scientists, particularly marine scientists, with the possible exception of this amazing person called Dr. Sylvia Earle. I was so excited reading about the underwater experiments that Dr. Earle was doing off the coast of Florida.
When I was talking to my guidance counselor and trying to figure out where I might go to college to achieve my goal, I was told directly by my counselor in high school, “Girls can’t be scientists.” Not only did that make me mad but I knew that was wrong. And it reinforced my decision to become a marine biologist.
The irony is that I am the oldest PhD out of UC Berkeley in Marine Botany. I received my degree when I was 42. My kids were in high school; they were both very supportive. It was a wonderful experience. Even though I didn’t end up teaching marine biology at the college level, which was my original goal, I really was able to achieve a much broader goal by being able to work with the community.
Click to learn about Bobbye’s early role models in STEM in her own words.
Describe a unique or interesting or pivotal experience you’ve had in your volunteer work.
One of the things that happened during the Covid shut in, where we were all forced to go to distance learning. It gave me an opportunity to test a personal theory I had- that my way of teaching science was too old fashioned. It needed some gamifying, it needed some upgrades. So one of the things that I was able to do, with the tutelage of some incredible teachers, was to learn some new technology. I learned how to use Pear Deck, and I also learned how to make Youtube videos.
Well that turned out to be a boom! I learned so many things about how to present and how much more interesting it is sometimes for somebody else to do a demo instead of having to read it out of a book. I’ve now taken those lessons and I’ve now brought them into the classroom and I use those ideas and demonstrate. I use a lot of GIFs in my presentations, I use a lot of tools that I was able to learn.
Have you received feedback from students or families for your work in the classroom?
I must say that one of the things that’s been so rewarding and makes me feel really good is for kids to wave to me when they’re with their parents as they’re walking away from the school and they say “Hi Miss Bobbye! Hey Mom, that’s my science teacher!”
Sometimes the ones that feel the best are the parents of teacher’s whose kids who may be struggling a little bit. And they say, “My kid really likes your class.” A tiny moment I had yesterday with one of the girls – they’re reading about nonfiction now – and she asked me “Oh, Miss Bobbye, can I talk to you about FROGS?” And I was so excited because she was not the best reader in the world, but she was going through the book, pointing to the words, pronouncing the words and she was looking up and smiling because she was getting it!
I’m really hoping that people will take some of the excitement that I’m trying to project and remember to support your teachers, they need you, they will love to have you in their classrooms. And I hope teachers remember the CRS can help you get the integration happening.
Describe an interesting discovery, or something you learned/are learning, in your work as a volunteer.
One of the things that’s really going to be exciting is –I was participating in MBARI training and they gave us the opportunity to name sensors in our school, so we’re gonna have the ‘Cragmont Deep Sea Dragon.’ What’s exciting about this is that it’s going to enable the students to follow their sensor, as it takes the data from 1,000 meters and 2,000 meters below the surface. The data includes things like ocean temperature, carbon dioxide content, oxygen content and a bunch of different other kinds of other important chemical, analytical measurements from the oceans.
All that data will be put back into NOAA and the international community’s data for doing a better job of modeling ocean currents. This directly affects the models that we now have for climate and for predicting the impacts of climate change on oceans and ocean currents.
I’m hoping to really excite the students because they’re going to be able to see how their sensor fits into the world. And this data hasn’t been available [until] now. We need to improve our models so that we can do a better job of predicting the impacts of global warming and climate change on the environment in general and the Bay Area.