Middle Schooled

Hi everybody!

    My name is Isaac Strodtbeck. I am a senior at Western Michigan University, and I currently plan to graduate next spring with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. My minor is Music, and that is primarily what I studied at Jackson College for two years before transferring to Western. I am from Spring Arbor, Michigan, which is about ten minutes from the city of Jackson. Later in life, I hope to study ethnomusicology, which would involve researching how different cultures develop, notate, and perform music. It may be a bit obvious, but cultural anthropology is my favorite type of anthropology, though archaeology is a close second. This is my first experience being enrolled in any kind of field school, and when I heard about the program, I was eager to sign up. So far, it has been a valuable learning experience for me, and I think other students in the program would agree. What made week 3 interesting was that we were no longer the only students digging on the site.

     We were joined for the week by an archaeology day camp comprised of middle schoolers. They visited us in the afternoon during lunch from Tuesday to Thursday, then stayed with us all day on Friday. The general expectation I held was that we would be supervising the students while teaching them how to perform certain archaeological techniques around the site. Skimming dirt with a trowel and washing artifacts at the wet-screens were the primary focus for the middle schoolers. My expectations were blown away, however. As it turns out, there were some students among them who have been into archaeology longer than I have, and it showed.

    There were a couple of middle-schoolers who had discovered lead seals in the wet-screens, which still remain some of the most exciting and significant artifacts discovered this year. Other middle-schoolers I had worked with were way more proficient with using trowels than me. Every day, I had always felt like I was learning more from them, which was a pleasant surprise.    

    Week 4 is when we will be visited by a camp of high-schoolers. If I have already learned this much from middle-schoolers, then I cannot wait to see what the following week brings!

With regards,

Isaac Strodtbeck