Week Five: Volunteer Training

Insect Zoo:

Lately I’ve been able to get a really good start on my independent project. I’m creating an online training for volunteers who do tarantula feedings. It involves creating an outline of what should be included in a feeding, basic logistics, instructional videos, surveys, and a general fact sheet with information about tarantulas.

This week I sent out the initial survey to volunteers about how their tarantula feedings work now. Prior to this there has been no official training for doing tarantula feedings, and that was reflected in the survey results. The volunteers are wonderful and give excellent presentations, but there is a wide range, between individual volunteers of material presented and knowledge of tarantula behavior. There are also discrepancies in the length of presentations, which isn’t good. Most volunteers listed their feedings as lasting between 20 and 30 minutes. The museum states that feedings should last no more than 10 minutes.

With this information in hand, I was able to create an outline of what information should be included in a feeding and the logistics of the presentation. I then put this onto a website, with a separate page for tarantula information (which I will be putting together next) and some instructional videos.

Forensic Anthropology Lab:

I have had a few interesting encounters in the Forensic Anthropology Lab this week. In the Insect Zoo people come to see the bugs, usually as a novelty. They come and take their picture with a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach to put up on Facebook, but they don’t always show a great deal of interest in the insects. In the Forensic Lab, in part due to the popularity of the subject on television, visitors are much more engaged in the material. They ask questions and try to solve the case that’s laid out. They still occasionally just want to take pictures with the bones, but not as often.

Visitors also share more harrowing personal stories in the Forensic Lab. In the Insect Zoo I hear people complain about the tomato hornworms in their gardens and ask me how to get rid of them. In the Forensic Lab, one woman told me all about a car accident that fractured her leg and asked what her bones would look like because of that. Another told me about a healed fracture that had never been set properly, again asking what it would look like. Yet another asked about how her cancer would affect her skeleton. One day a man came up to me and confessed the trouble he was having reconciling his faith with the science he was seeing in the museum. He told me about things he’d seen in a creationist museum in Texas. I prepared to deliver the standard “Sir, the Smithsonian is an institution devoted to science and education, not faith. The information presented in this museum is all based on scientific research.” But he did not continue to attack, criticize, or question me about my beliefs or the information presented in the museum, as I have experienced in the past. Instead, he told me that he was trying to keep an open mind. He told me that he supported his son, a biology major, and that he understood that the science made sense, but he was just having such a hard time reconciling this with what he had been taught all of his life. He was clearly very torn and sad about the entire situation. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to him.

The most difficult interaction I have had thus far was with a thirteen-year-old girl. She was looking at a poster on the wall showing different types of burials. She asked me about them, and was curious about what the dead were wearing. We talked for a while and I explained that different cultures have lots of different burial practices and traditions. She then paused for a minute and said, “like in the United States, we’re buried in our favorite outfit. Like my best friend was buried in her prom dress.” It’s difficult to know what to say when things like that come up.