Comments Evaluating the CLEAN Program

From teachers:

I have been teaching for 14 years, and I can honestly say this was the best field trip my students have ever had. I was especially impressed that Shane had learned all the students’ names within the first half hour.

The information I learned not only gave me a good, broad overview of river ecology, but also renewed my enthusiasm for teaching environmental science.

Of course they loved fishing and handling the bugs.  The identification and identification keys for macroinvertebrates was also beneficial because several of these students had never used one of those keys before in their biology classes.

As a teacher I have had the opportunity to attend many educational field trips with numerous students, but this is the first time I can honestly say the field trip met all of my goals and was successful in meeting the academic needs of my class.

This trip for older kids in canoes makes them aware of how everything upstream ends up in a river.  They need high adventure to use as a vehicle for getting into their heads…this trip was perfect for that.

I think the Cahaba River trips are a wonderful experience and a super value.  The students learn so much and I know they come back to the school with a new appreciation for protecting our water supply.

I found the teaching style to be very effective.  I liked the “hands-on” approach, and found the map reading exercise on watersheds to be very informative.

The program was well run and professional.  This was an excellent trip.

Students learned so much about diversity that they didn’t realize.  They really enjoyed finding and classifying macro-organisms.

The friendly attitude towards the students is a big plus.  They like the way you interact with them.

The kids were interested the entire time.  There was almost no down time.  It was a fun and educational experience for all of them. 

And from Students:

Fishing was my favorite thing because we got to get soaking wet and catch fish in a really cool way.

The part (where) I learned the most was the bugs because we learned about their sensitivity to pollution and that the river could sustain the most sensitive bugs.

Each activity built on the previous one and I learned something from each of them.  I enjoyed see(ing) how diverse our river was.  It was neat to see how many different organisms shared the same community and the role each one played in the ecosystem.