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Photo by Pat Hendrick |
Born to teach
By Diane Sirois
Arrgghh! No ink in the field!” It’s
a raw, rainy, late-fall afternoon in the northern Adirondacks, and
Dr. Celia Evans, assistant professor of ecology at Paul Smith’s
College, has just shared what might be the day’s key insight
into scientific research methods for the 12 students out here with
her: Pens stop working in weather like this. Leave them at home.
Bring pencils instead.
“OK! Someone tell me what we’re doing today,”
Evans asks the group assembled in the drizzly damp outside the state’s
Visitor Interpretive Center just down the road from campus. Her
live-wire energy is a touch muffled by her parka and knit cap, and
she’s bouncing ever so slightly from hiking boot to hiking
boot, not to keep warm, but to soothe her year-old daughter, Willa,
who’s bundled into a fleecy cocoon and secured in a front-facing
child carrier on her mom’s chest. Evans adjusts its straps
while the students blow on their chilled fingers and fiddle with
their dodgy pens.
“Salamanders,” somebody volunteers.
“Yes!” Evans shoots back, pleased. “We’re
looking at the effects of timber-harvesting techniques on domestic
salamanders, and the use of artificial covers in surveying them.
But why salamanders?” Evans presses.
“They’re abundant,” comes the reply.
“Right!” Evans exclaims, then shares the rather sophisticated
science behind today’s fieldwork and her plans for tackling
it. Her instructions are brisk, clear and economical. She expects
her students to take this work as seriously as she does. The kids
break into four groups of three. Equipped with rulers and thermometers,
they will fan out into the woods to search for and measure any salamanders
they find,
It’s late enough in the season that the salamanders have begun
heading underground into hibernation, but Evans is hopeful that
each group will strike paydirt. The students will also record the
ground temperature and leaf-litter depth. To minimize salamander
trauma, snout-to-cloaca measurements of the tiny, lizardlike amphibians
will be taken while the creatures rest on damp sponges sitting in
plastic cases that held videocassettes in a previous lifetime. “I
love cheap-science stuff,” Evans says, leading her students
into the woods while answering their questions and skillfully guiding
a baby bottle into Willa’s mouth. “Once you get a routine,
you guys can whip through this really fast,” she assures them.
“OK! Go! And don’t get lost!”
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Martha Pickard and
Celia Evans finished second in their class in last year’s
90-miler, a three-day canoe race from Old Forge to Saranac
Lake. |
Photo courtesy of Celia
Evans |
By all accounts, Evans is not only a resourceful educator but a
great multitasker as well. In the space of seven days last September,
she returned from Guatemala after completing Willa’s adoption,
paddled in a 90-mile canoe race and departed on an exchange program
to Siberia.
“Celia has lots of passion for what she does—it really
comes through, and you can see it in the field and in her lectures,”
says Aletha Burns, an adjunct professor who handled some of Evans’
classroom duties while she was on a short leave last autumn. Evans
is also advising Burns in the art, science and politics of applying
to graduate programs. “I’m learning a lot from her,”
Burns says. “Actually, I’d love to be Celia one day!”
Last year, Evans won the college’s Distinguished Faculty Award,
which was presented to her at graduation ceremonies in May by juniors
Lauren Toth and Jerome Madson. Evans was surprised by the award.
“There are a lot of teachers here who reach students in different
ways at Paul Smith’s,” she said, “so I’m
grateful and really proud of the award.”
She sees her own teaching role as that of a “facilitator.”
“The most important thing I can do for students is not just
stand up there and impart knowledge to them but show them how they
can find the answers themselves,” says Celia. “That’s
especially true in my upper division courses where I have a collegial
relationship with students. There’s a sense that we’re
working together to come up with whatever answers there may be.
In science it’s essential for students to learn where to go—to
access the published literature—to support their work. My
job is to point them in the right direction. In other words, help
them learn how to learn. The most gratifying moments come when someone
discovers a new way of looking at things.”
Evans, who is 42, came to Paul Smith’s College in January
2001. This is her first teaching job at the college level. All through
her adult life—and well before then, too—teaching has
been her passion. “I’ve just always done it; I used
to teach little kids to tie their shoes when I babysat them,”
she says.
She was born near Toronto; her family moved to the United States
when her dad’s job took him to Michigan, then California.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State College,
on northern California’s Redwood Coast, concentrating on the
school’s natural-resources curriculum. “We did a lot
of camping when I was a kid; that was probably when I was exposed
to the idea of teaching about the environment,” Evans says.
She thought the best way to do that would be to teach high school
biology, which she did for three years at Phillips Academy Andover
and Northfield Mount Hermon, a pair of prestigious prep schools
in Massachusetts. “I had to work dorm duty there, which was
tough for a young person, but the kids were really smart and the
teaching was great,” Evans says. “Still, at some point
I thought, ‘These are not my people.’”
So Evans turned to the past, and inward, for inspiration. Her grandparents
had a cottage well north of Toronto. “I remember my dad telling
me the lake there was dying from acid rain. That was my favorite
place in the world, and it broke my heart.” She decided to
do a master’s degree with instructors who studied acid rain
and ended up at the University of Toronto. She met and married her
husband, Larry, a forester, moved back to California to do environmental
consulting, relocated to Montana to work for the U.S. Forest Service
and eventually wound up at Dartmouth College, where she studied
issues relating to nitrogen in the environment and finished her
Ph.D. at age 37. “All I knew is that I wanted to teach,”
Evans says, circling back to a familiar theme. “Things just
happen when they happen. I got the job at Paul Smith’s because
I was waiting for a job at Paul Smith’s. I didn’t apply
anywhere else. I wanted to live here; this is my dream job.”
Although it seems that Evans spends every waking hour fulfilling
the in-and out-of-class responsibilities of her teaching position,
she has managed to pull time and energy from some mysterious reserve
to craft a life that’s even more varied and full than it first
appears. That week in September, for example. Evans returned home
to Onchiota from Guatemala with Willa on Sept. 4, got a scant two
hours’ sleep (she explains that her older daughter, Elsa,
who is 5, was so excited about the arrival of her new sister that
no one got a lot of rest that night), then put in at Old Forge the
next morning with her paddling partner, Martha Pickard, to start
the first leg of the 90-Miler, an annual three-day canoe race that
ends in Saranac Lake. (They finished strong, too—second in
their division with an overall time of 18:08:37).
On Sept. 10, Evans flew to Siberia as part of a six-person cultural
and environmental exchange team that spent the next two weeks visiting
parks, cities and a variety of other sites in the widespread watershed
of Lake Baikal—by volume, the world’s largest freshwater
lake. The ex-change was the third in five years to result from a
partnership forged by Dan Plumley’s Totem Peoples’ Preservation
Project and the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks.
“It was probably the most interesting thing I’ve ever
done,” she says. “Larry stayed home [with their daughters],
and it all worked out!” The visiting delegation consulted
on regional problems ranging from how to build sustainable tourism
operations to reintroducing native reindeer.
There’s another kind of cultural exchange that Evans is currently
involved in, but a more personal one: She recently released “Yellow
Balloon,” her first music CD (see below). Evans has been singing
for six or seven years—“since I got my nerve up”—and
writing songs since she was 18. “Some songs are about people,
some about running through the woods and how that makes me feel,
living in the Adirondacks. There’s a lot of nature imagery.”
Recorded in Lake Placid, it is guitar-based folk music of plainspoken
beauty, heartfelt and genuine, and clearly (and maybe unconsciously)
shaped by the sensibilities of Celia Evans, teacher. The first song,
“Into the Night,” begins with rhyming couplet that’s
also a science lesson: “Out where we live, skies at night
are black/There’s no light shining up, and there’s none
reflected back.”
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