TEACHING GEOARCHAEOLOGY TO THE ILL-PREPARED NEOPHYTE: EXPERIENCING IN TRAINING NYC HIGHSCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE ROBERT F. KENNEDY SCIENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Having finished Grades 10 or 11 before beginning research with the RFK Science Research Institute, NYC highschool students have an extremely rudimentary knowledge of math, but no calculus and little algebra, some basic chemistry, possibly some basic physics, some rudimentary Earth science if they can remember it from Grade 8, and the archaeology and human paleontology covered in Social Studies or biology (i.e., almost none). At the RFK Institute, the students learn to use ESR dating to determine absolute ages for Pleistocene and late Pliocene archaeological and paleontological sites in an intensive program that lasts eight weeks in the summer and 20-30 weekends in winter. Teaching them to grasp the rudiments of site stratigraphy, the finer details and idiosyncracies of Pleistocene correlation and geochronology, paleoclimatology as applied to archaeological sites, faunal analyses, human paleontology, and Paleolithic archaeology, not to mention the geochemistry underlying ESR dating and fossil diagenesis challenges us to develop ways to either fill the gaps in basic knowledge or find ways to make the graduate level detail accessible to these students. Some of the biggest challenges involve the students' poor understanding of the large amount of the technical terminology and the assumed knowledge base for each discipline. We have found the best solution to be give the important details at least four times in somewhat different formats or presentations, and the less important background information at least twice. "Vital knowledge triage" is necessary to decide what is the essential "meat" and what is less important "icing", sweet but too filling on an empty mind.