THE CEMETERY EXERCISE–A VALUABLE, LOW-BUDGET, FIELD EXPERIENCE

With escalating costs of education and proportionally diminishing budgets, it is becoming increasingly difficult to offer field experiences to students at all levels of education, K-16. We have found a site to conduct low-cost, minimum time commitment field experiences utilizing a resource readily available to nearly every teaching professional. There is a cemetery within a reasonable distance of virtually every educational institution. The cemetery contains stone monuments that offer diverse opportunities for field study of rocks. These stone monuments offer both fresh and weathered surfaces, two- and three-dimensional examples of crystalline igneous and metamorphic rocks as well as other, more diverse, local materials. The cemetery activity provides students an opportunity to view samples nearer to outcrop size, as opposed to the much smaller handsamples they viewed in the laboratory. The cemetery field trip exercise is very easy to develop and includes a series of questions for each monument of interest and a sketch map so students can more easily locate the monuments. The questions cover a broad range of topics including mineralogy, lithology, mass wasting, weathering, and economics. This field excursion is extremely economical due to the close proximity of the cemetery and school. We include a cemetery field excursion in our introductory laboratory classes each semester and are able to carry it out during a regular laboratory period. This exercise is consistently rated as the favorite exercise of the semester.