Lorraine: From Goats to Keisha the Worm, an Excitement for all the World Around Us!

     Lorraine Mann spent her childhood on a farm, playing outdoors, climbing trees, helping her dad build structures, and raising animals. She considered being a veterinarian when she experienced nursing her goat back to health after she had been attacked by a pack of dogs, but realized that while it was quite the science experiment watching the work of the antibiotics that she had to squirt daily into the goat’s trachea, she had another calling in life. For fourteen years now, Lorraine has been teaching kids at Prescott Elementary School, bringing her enthusiastic do-it-yourself attitude to a new generation of students.

     Last year she opened an outdoor Science Nature Area in the kindergarten’s playground and has loved watching its effect on the kids. She has noticed that kids who often used to get in trouble in the playground have been particularly drawn to the area, which has offered an alternative, peaceful space allowing the students to forget everything else and focus entirely on scientific exploration.

     Learning is a part of all scientific endeavors and Lorraine remembers as a child that in one science lesson in which they all had candles, one fell over onto the paper beneath it, setting the whole thing in flames! In her own classroom she has learned that color mixing tempura paint with a large room of kindergartners is not the way to go. One lesson that she remembers particularly fondly though was the first year that her class studied worms. She recalls that the girls were so excited that they gave the worms individual names such as “Keisha” and believed they could tell them apart!

     In her spare time, Lorraine still enjoys actively engaging with the world around her. She is an active gardener and loves harvesting fruits and vegetables to make delicious meals with her son. She also enjoys the knitting techniques she learned from her grandmother and finds the practice to be a meditative experience that involves spatial reasoning, pattern, measurement, and geometry. One of her favorite classes that she took at UC Berkeley was the science class, Botany for Non-Majors. The teacher was committed and enthusiastic and this class taught her that science at any level can be magical and stimulating. Lorraine has truly brought this appreciation for life to her own students. She has noted that, “In [her] 14 years of teaching, science has always been the “hook” that gets [her] students excited about school!”