News

February 2, 2020 3 Comments

“The Reptile Overlord” Reflects

by Alli the reptile overlord, Athena’s Junior Instructor

Hi, current, former, and future Athena’s students and their parents! Alli the reptile overlord, herpetology Junior Instructor at Athena’s Advanced Academy here. As you may already know, I recently presented my work at Athena’s with my herpetology classes at the
World Congress of Herpetology in Dunedin, New Zealand, and was invited by Dr. Kirsten to write this article describing my experience. I could tell you about the other talks I attended, the really good food at snack breaks, or the wildlife I saw at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary. But I
won’t. Instead, I’m going to discuss not the where or who of the conference, who I met, who I heard speak, and where I went. I’m going to discuss the why and why this presentation was so important to me. Contrary to what you may think, I didn’t do it for the glory or to advertise my classes or for the trip, although those factors all played a role. Addressing the students, I did it for you.

Herpetology has been one of my passions for as long as I can remember. My mom has stories of me begging to see the snakes at the pet store from nearly the moment I could talk. But it hasn’t been easy for me to get to this point, and a lot of my success I can chalk up to my mom
knowing the right people, the undeniable power of cuteness, and luck. I’ve been underestimated, condescended, and rejected for my age and my interest in reptiles and amphibians and professional ambitions. (just ask the high school representative who repeatedly insisted to me that “playing with snakes” wasn’t a career) I don’t want any of that to happen to you.

If you’re a student planning to attend, or attending, one of my classes, I don’t know if you joined it because you’re passionate about reptiles and amphibians, because you’re new to Athena’s and wanted an interesting class to try out the system, or because your parents or teachers wanted to check off something on your transcript for science. But whether it relates to reptiles or not, I know you have a passion, maybe even something you’re planning to major in in college or base your career off of. If you don’t know that yet, that’s completely okay, I’m not sure I really know myself. But you should be able to enter the field of your passion, meet the professionals, build the connections, and learn as much about your topic of interest as possible. And that’s where my presentation comes in.

Students below high school, or in many cases college, level, are often overlooked in herpetology education for anything more robust than a museum display or having them two-finger touch a corn snake at their local nature center, and make sure to use hand sanitizer before and after and don’t go anywhere near the head or tail.

When I started out at Athena’s, got my first pet snake, and really started focusing on my passion, there weren’t resources out there. Children’s books about reptiles and amphibians tended to be inaccurate and sensationalized to make the animals sound scary or gross, professional texts didn’t convey the information in a way that I could really understand and embrace at that point, and Internet resources fell into the same problems. I ended up reading keeper’s guides on popular pet snakes just to find something accurate that I could fully understand and appreciate. What I needed at that point was an outlet and an approachable, knowledgeable peer who took me seriously. Or, forgive me for the egotistical implications here, I needed me.

That’s why I started a blog called My Little Python in 2014. It wasn’t very effective because I didn’t really understand how to write for and approach kids at that point, but it led me to where I am now. I teach the class that I wish existed when I was younger. I would have been thrilled to be able to talk to somebody about snakes and ask questions and watch videos of horned lizards shooting blood out of their eyes and have somebody listen and convey the information in an approachable, but accurate format. And even if you aren’t specifically interested in reptiles and amphibians, I hope my class has helped you to gain a better understanding and appreciation of all kinds of animals, made you more aware of the importance of conservation, or just gave you someone to talk to on Friday mornings, or that my enthusiasm and delivery encouraged you to pursue your passions with enthusiasm and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

Which is all awesome, but I can’t teach everyone. I honestly wish I could, but I have limited time and knowledge, and the online platform has limits. At least for now, writing this in 2020, I can’t project a live animal through the screen and have you hold it. And even if I could, it’d probably use too much bandwidth for the webinar. I can’t take you into a swamp and show you what needs to be conserved. And that’s why I chose to present my work at the World Congress. I had the opportunity to join an amazing group of educators working in a variety of circumstances and grade levels and to bring my story and successes to the world. And I did it in hopes that one of those educators or their colleagues could, and would, reach you.

There are many conclusions that they could draw from my talk, like that animated GIFs are an underrated educational tool, that Blackboard Ultra really needs more whiteboard colors, or that caecilians are a hit with students because they’re basically cute, tiny land sharks. But what I hope they heard, and what I hoped they learned from hearing about you is that younger kids matter, and that basically, you matter. You are some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met, and I’ve learned just as much, maybe even more, from you as you have from me. And I know that you can take that passion and your knowledge to great places and do amazing things for the world. And speaking for myself, and speaking for you, I urged the world’s most prominent herpetology educators to reach you because your passions can be turned towards the
conservation and study of the animals they love and create the next generation of herpetologists, conservationists, and passionate, smart, awesome people. And I hope I’ll be able to meet you, in all your passion, intelligence, and awesomeness in herpetology in an upcoming semester.

Keep being awesome,
Alli the reptile overlord

January 19, 2020 2 Comments

Meet Molly: Founder of MiniWorld Magic!

by Liza Kanne, Athena’s Student

Meet Molly, a friendly, enthusiastic Athena’s student who lives in Wisconsin. When she’s not working on MiniWorld or Athena’s courses, you can find her playing Magic: The Gathering, reading, or playing with her kittens. Recently, I had a chance to ask some questions about her roles in MiniWorld.

What is MiniWorld? MiniWorld is an imaginative online subset of the social forums. It contains MiniMusic, a place where students can find music to listen to while doing homework, Ministagram, where students can find adorable photos, and a business center, where students offer virtual products and services. The business center is the most active. There, students can post stores, resorts, restaurants, or anything else that comes to mind. Sometimes, these have a Magical twist. For example, one student has a bakery where the treats fit the diner’s tastes.

Molly runs three video series meant to help students engage in MiniWorld. The first one is MiniWorld Magic, where in each video, Molly discusses an important part of MiniWorld. MiniWorld Interviews is a branch of MiniWorld Magic, where Molly interviews a student about their business. Finally, in MiniWorld Spotlight, Molly talks about a student and their business and gives a screencast tour.

Responses may be edited for clarity.

Q. What Athena’s classes have you taken, and what ones are you taking now?

A. Well, currently, I will be in the next semester, taking a course on different types of elections which is going to be pretty fun. My most recent course that I’ve taken is about peacemakers throughout history, which was amazing.

Q. How long have you been at Athena’s?

A. For about four years, and they’ve been amazing years. I mean, every time I log on to MiniWorld it just blows me away how many new ideas there are. I’m so grateful for everything Athena’s has given me.

Q. How did you get started in MiniWorld?

A. Well, when I was just getting started on Athena’s, I was checking out the social forums and I thought, “Why not make a store?” My mom typed out the store for me. It was a magical talismans store. I had this successful pet resort, and then when Athena’s did its update I started posting even more. It’s just been an amazing journey.

Q. What made you decide to start MiniWorld Magic?

A. I got approached by Dr. Kirsten about it when I was a little younger. I was ecstatic about the idea. It was based on a successful pet resort that she had noticed. She decided it would be good for me to make a video series, and I jumped at that idea. I love talking about MiniWorld and educating people about it.

Q. Do you have a favorite video?

A. My favorite video so far is Surveys, Quizzes, and Polls, Oh My!. I just loved talking about those platforms. It’s a great way to gauge what people are thinking of your store and how you can improve. It also was the first video that I used screencasts on, and I just think screencasts are such a great tool.

Q. What video was the most challenging to make?

A. Probably my introduction video. I was just getting started, and wasn’t as good at editing or working with a team. I didn’t even know how to cut film!

Q. What do you enjoy most about MiniWorld?

A. I love the outlet for creativity. Everyone on there has such creative ideas and I love being a part of this community.

To find Molly’s MiniWorld Magic & MiniWorld Spotlight videos, current students at Athena’s can log into Social Forums – MiniWorld. We hope to see you there!

December 29, 2019 8 Comments

Athena’s Ten Year Anniversary Reflection

by Dr. Kirsten L. Stein, Athena’s Founder

January 2020 marks a milestone at Athena’s. Although Athena’s began before 2010, our first official Athena’s Advanced Academy online classes commenced in January of 2010. One of the reasons I started Athena’s was to help parents of gifted children educate their children.

Like many parents of gifted children, I found myself floundering when it came to educating my children–despite my educator training. I had taken time away from teaching to raise my children when they were young, and I had planned on them entering the United States school system when they reached school age. But those plans were changed when it became obvious that the traditional school model would not work for them.

When my children reached preschool and kindergarten ages, I enrolled them in school. Although years apart, my son and daughter made it only to Kindergarten before it was clear they were not being challenged. I had gone to great lengths to locate schools that could work with their gifts. However, none of my hand-picked schools fully challenged either of them. Through a series of events centered around these school experiences, I decided to homeschool.

Although homeschooling is not a prerequisite to attend Athena’s classes, it was through homeschooling my children that I discovered online learning. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to gather information and piece together curricula for them. At the time, I had not yet gotten my doctorate, but I did have my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, so I used that knowledge and experience to educate my children at home.

This worked very well—both children were learning and were enjoying the process. My family was able to tap into the local homeschooling community to find classes, co-ops, and companions. However, I found that this was not enough. They were missing a connection with like-minded peers who shared their passions and curiosities. So, I reached out to other parents of gifted children online.

As I connected with more parents in the gifted community, I became aware of the struggle that many of these parents were experiencing in educating and challenging their gifted children. I also realized that many families were also seeking a broader gifted community. Athena’s was my solution to both issues—educating students and connecting gifted students with each other.

The first order of business was to properly educate and challenge my students at Athena’s. As the only instructor at the time, I started with a handful of courses. As Athena’s grew, I watched our Athena’s community take shape in the Social Forums and during webinars.
Before long, Athena’s began attracting educators and parents who were interested in teaching through our program. This allowed us to expand to more subject areas, challenge more students, and strengthen our community.

I’m so proud of how far Athena’s has come in the last decade and I am looking forward to watching how our community grows and improves—both in the next decade and in decades to come.

Whether you’ve been here from the beginning or are just now becoming a part of our community,
thank you all for joining us on this journey!

December 22, 2019 Leave a Comment

New Nazca Lines Discovered!

by Campbell Starr, Athena’s Student

Have you ever flown in an airplane and looked out the window at the land below? It is really cool because you can see so many things from a different perspective. From an airplane I have already seen houses, rivers, and all sorts of things, but I really want to fly over Peru to see the Nazca lines.

I have wanted to do this ever since I took Dr. Kirsten’s Story of the World class at Athena’s where we learned about the Nazca lines. She explained that these geoglyphs were huge drawings on the earth created a very long time ago, some in the B.C.E. era! Some of the shapes the people created are over hundreds of meters long and can be best seen from the air, which is why I want to see them from an airplane!

As Dr. Kirsten said, we do not know everything there is to know about these lines and researchers are still working to uncover the meaning behind the Nazca lines. Scientists are still working on learning more about the lines and have used artificial intelligence (AI) to help to solve some of the mysteries. In doing so, researchers recently discovered 143 new Nazca line geoglyphs in Peru.

Photo Credit: Yamagata University, IBM Japan

In addition to all of the other geoglyphs that the researchers already knew about, they found some geoglyphs that look like humans, some that look like animals, and some that look like scenes. The scenes resemble ones you would usually see in Mayan artwork. My favorite is the “person” pictured in these two pictures. It was discovered using only AI!

Here you can see what the geoglyph looks like from the air and then how AI depicts it. It’s really cool how people can get a better picture of what the Nazca lines used to look like long ago by using AI.

My hope is to go to see the Nazca lines as soon as I can. I am looking forward to seeing all of the images from the air and then look at one from the ground. Until then, I will be looking on the Internet for more information on them!

Photo Credit: Yamagata University, IBM Japan

Dealing With Procrastination: A Student Guide

by Dylan Norman, Athena’s Student

Procrastination can be a terrible fiend, stealing away precious hours of your time. More importantly, it takes away time from what you need to do. For me, as a student athlete with the need to manage competing priorities, procrastination is something I need to get a handle on.
While working late to finish an assignment or occasionally forgetting a deadline might not seem too large an issue, it becomes serious behavior when your efficiency, happiness and self-esteem suffer as a result. Some students might think they have a severe case of procrastination, when they can actually have ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder. Procrastination is not to be confused with ADD.

According to Merriam Webster, procrastination is “To put off intentionally, the doing of something that should be done.” It’s kind of strange to hear such a large portion of my life taken down to a single sentence, but at the same time, it’s not just me. According to Doctor Piers Steel, procrastination effects 80 to 95 percent of college students who do coursework. A definition and a percentage might make us feel better, since it helps us realize that we are not alone when we procrastinate. Fellow procrastinators like me know that the general population generally consider procrastination to be something that you can just bypass, but if it were that easy, writing this article would have taken much less time! Procrastination isn’t as simple as just telling yourself to go focus on what you need to do, because it is all too easy just to ignore yourself, or to simply say “I’ll do this tomorrow.” For procrastinators, tomorrow never comes.

When I talk to people about my procrastination, the common response is for them to simply say, “Just do your work first,” or “stay focused and only do things you need to do first, then you can do what you want to do.” Sometimes I try to tell this to myself to, so what is going wrong? Why am I still procrastinating? Is procrastination just an inability to concentrate, a need for immediate gratification, or is it a form of avoidance? Or is it something else entirely? To really work on the problem of procrastination requires one to truly understand what it is. Often times procrastination is confused with laziness.

The_procrastinating_student_-_panoramio wikimedia commons — Image Credit: TumbleCow – Wikimedia Commons

I heard a quote recently from lifehacker.com, and it summed up my issues with procrastination quite well; “It’s not that you have a problem saying yes to the thing you’re supposed to be doing right now, the problem is you can’t say no to everything else.” This makes a lot of sense, especially when procrastination is not laziness. The definition of laziness is a disinterest in putting in the work. The difference between the two is that procrastination is choosing to do something else. That is, it’s a more active form of avoidance.

In my experience, however, there have been some techniques that have worked better than others. For instance, breaking down a task, called chunking, and then setting a clear deadline for each step to be done is useful. If you have a long-term project, giving yourself a chunk of it to do every day can help. If you plan out your work, you might see how little time you actually have for everything. Regularly reminding yourself about your limited time can help, especially when you have trouble saying no to everything else that invariably comes along during an already packed day. Yet what I find works best for me is setting a timer for a break at the end of a work period. It might sound like the opposite of what you should do if you deal with procrastination, but giving yourself clear breaks can help. Often times, if you procrastinate your breaks are not clearly defined. In other words, you might simply take a break whenever you feel like it. But if you give clear, time restricted breaks set to a timer, and make yourself work solidly for an hour, you might actually get more work done.

I think Psychology Today explained how massive an issue procrastination is. “Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. For them procrastination is a lifestyle, albeit a maladaptive one. And it cuts across all domains of their life. They don’t pay bills on time. They miss opportunities for buying tickets to concerts. They don’t cash gift certificates or checks. They file income tax returns late. They leave their Christmas shopping until Christmas eve.” Procrastination is maladaptive, and it can easily take over your life, but one of the most important things to remember is to not give it more power. In my experience, procrastination becomes an even harder foe to defeat when you start to believe that it has more power, more control, over your actions than you do.

Bibliography:

“Procrastinate,” Mirriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/procrastinate. Accessed November 18, 2019
Novotney, Amy, “Procrastination or Intentional Delay,” American Psychological Association, January 2010, Page 14, https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2010/01/procrastination. Accessed November 18, 2019
Ravenscraft, Eric, “You Don’t Have a Procrastination Problem: You Have an Impulsivity Problem,” Lifehacker AU, March 2, 2016, https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/03/you-dont-have-a-procrastination-problem-you-have-an-impulsivity-problem/. Accessed November 18, 2019
Estroff Marano, Hara, “Procrastination: Ten Things To Know,” Psychology Today, August 23, 2003, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200308/procrastination-ten-things-know. Accessed November 18, 2019

Photo Credit:

Attribution: TumbleCow – Wikimedia Commons

November 16, 2019 Leave a Comment

The Redesign of Athena’s Quill

by Marisa Katsianos, Athena’s Student

The Athena’s Quill, containing stories from the creative writing class students at Athena’s releases two issues per year. However, the Fall 2019 issue will be different than the rest, because the Athena’s Quill is being redesigned!

Prof. Suki, the teacher of creative writing classes at Athena’s, says that in the new Athena’s Quill, each student who is contributing to the Quill will be able to design their own pages of text. According to Professor Suki, “They have complete freedom to do whatever they’d like. For example, they could create a page of hand-drawn artwork with a poem hand-written on it. They could create a painting, take a photo of it, and include it in a document with the text of their story.” Prof Suki also says that the students will be able to create a page of text using whatever font they want. In other words, the students are free to be creative!

This new redesign to the Athena’s Quill will also impact the efficiency of organizing it for both teacher and students. The students will be able to use their imaginations to create a page that they would like to see with their story, and for Professor Suki, instead of having to lay out all the text and artwork for the journal will get to see all of the creative wonders that the students will post. The students will submit their pages, with their stories, and with their own personalized artwork, and Professor Suki will combine all the files into one downloadable document that will be posted into the Athena’s Quill Forum.

The aspect of the Quill that will remain the same is the logo. Professor Suki says that until a better one is designed, the logo will stay in the Quill.

The Quill’s Fall 2019 issue will be released as soon as webinars end. The direct link to the Athena’s Literary Journal Forum (where the Quill will be posted) can be found in the Social Forums.

Students of Athena’s: Make sure to check out this Fall’s Quill and the creative designs that will be posted!

“The Reptile Overlord” Reflects

by Alli the reptile overlord, Athena’s Junior Instructor