HIGH RESOLUTION CLIMATE RECORDS INFORM FACULTY DEVELOPMENT AND ENRICH GENERAL EDUCATION

My 1970s doctoral mentorship under Roger Anderson with time-marking sediment traps continued years later on a sabbatical with him and two of his earlier Ph.D. mentees, Walter Dean and Platt Bradbury. With others, we studied the varves of Elk Lake, MN, which offered a high-resolution record of the climate of the recent 10,000 years. The traps deployed in the water column of Elk Lake recorded processes forming the sediment within the column at scales of seasons, and these records assisted in interpreting the long-term record of climate held within the accumulations on the lake bottom. The Elk Lake study appeared in 1993 as GSA SP 276 and provided an exquisite case study of change through time. It detailed the temporal qualities of age and the ordering of events emphasized in introductory geoscience texts, but also rates, frequencies, durations, and patterns (linear, cyclic, random, fractal) that such texts rarely explain, to the great deprivation of students' education. The temporal qualities revealed in such records offer lessons for understanding the temporal nature of almost any phenomenon, but especially in conceptualizing the changes through time that occur to us in the process of our becoming educated. This presentation is a story of unpredictable transferability and a bit of "the butterfly effect," a term coined after 1963 when Edward Lorenz broadened awareness of temporal chaotic events with: "... slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerably different states." Roger Anderson's UNM office door's faded paper nameplate sported two colorful butterfly stickers added by an anonymous person connecting Roger's delightful and nonthreatening way of being with these lovely creatures. The person could not know how fittingly these particular symbols might be recalled decades later. The sabbatical study of recent climate helped to generate fifty columns written on the theme "Educating in Fractal Patterns" for the National Teaching and Learning Forum, a Science Literacy Concept Inventory, five mathematical papers on conceptualizing the relationships of how accurately people self-assess their competence, and a disruption of twenty-five years of peer-reviewed literature that established psychology's consensus about the nature of self-assessment known as "the Dunning-Kruger effect."