By Kevin Schultz From The Hour

NORWALK — The ship’s captain made his first sighting roughly 20 miles off the coast of a Mexican island.
One dorsal fin slowly rose and cut through the surface of the water. Then another. And another.
In minutes, handfuls of nearly 30-foot-long whale sharks surrounded the ship. That was the cue for Chris McGee, a sixth-grade math teacher at Nathan Hale Middle School, to dive into the water.
McGee, along with a partner, jumped off the ship and swam alongside the sharks, taking photos and observing their movements.
“It was just one of those ‘oh wow’ moments,” McGee said. “I just think they are a beautiful creatures.”
The unique experience checked an item off McGee’s personal bucket-list, but was at the same time a part of a larger project he was conducting for his work within Norwalk schools.
McGee sailed out to sea on a research vessel to collect data on the invasive lionfish in the Grand Cayman’s reef system and then learned about conservation through several dives and a swim with whale sharks off the coast of Mexico as a part of a two-week trip paid for by the Fund for Teachers, a national organization that supports educators’ efforts to develop skills, knowledge and confidence to increase student achievement.
His goals with the excursion were twofold: to collect data to give students a direct connection to the statistics unit in his math class and use his learning experience to start an after-school club focused on the conservation of marine life and the health of oceans.
The first leg of his trip, Aug. 3 to 10, found McGee collecting invasive lionfish species off of Grand Cayman — a British island in the Caribbean. McGee, and a group of others, would collect the fish out of the water, measure them, weigh them and find out what they were eating.
That information gave insights to scientists studying the animals and their effect on the reef and real-world content for McGee to bring back with him to the classroom.
McGee teaches a statistical analysis unit each year including terms such as mean, median and mode.
“Students know that I would go on diving trips,” McGee said. “They’d always ask to see pictures or videos to show. I thought it would be something I could get pictures of and bring my own data that I collected into the classroom for my students to use.”
Amy Jones, a social studies teacher at Nathan Hale who works alongside McGee, said having that real-world data can make learning easier or more enjoyable for students.
“Any time a teacher can make something more interesting to kids, especially from a valuable personal life experience, it becomes not just a textbook, but a story teachers can tell about themselves,” Jones said. “It’s a perfect way to reach our kids because they love him and so for a person that they know saying ‘here is math that I use that is all around us’ and making it personal is huge.”
The second leg of his trip, Aug. 12 to 19, found McGee diving at MUSA, an underwater museum off the coast of Mexico.
At Musa, McGee observed some of the over 500 underwater sculptures, part of the collection established to find a way to get people off the nearby reef system and to promote coral life.
“Even though as divers you try not to touch anything, occasionally your equipment does,” McGee said. “They wanted to find a way to get the number of people off their reefs. So people would go visit that instead.”
McGee also took a boat out to what he called the largest gathering of whale sharks in the world, where he learned more about conservation and ecotourism.
“It it was just really exciting,” McGee said about swimming with the sharks. “Just to see the sheer size … and being able to watch them feed.”
McGee said as a part of the excursion, humans aren’t allowed to touch the sharks and that the animals are no danger to humans.
“They aren’t aggressive and they aren’t really bothered by the humans,” he said. “They let you do your thing.”
The experiences led McGee to think about what he could do with a conservation club back home in Norwalk.
“One of the things that I’d like to do is find out what we can do for Long Island Sound,” McGee said.
He said it’s important to get students thinking about conservation efforts both locally, such as with the Sound, and globally, like the whale sharks.
“I show them videos of sharks swimming by. They say ‘aren’t you worried?’ And it’s just getting them to realize they (the sharks) play an important role in the marine ecosystem. They aren’t just out there eating anything and everything in sight.”
McGee said student interest in the club is high, but that trying to develop it can be logistically difficult. He said he is working on a proposal to create a club within an existing after-school program at the school and to expand, if possible, from there.
“My goal is to first start thinking about things we can do locally,” McGee said. “Even if everybody just does a little bit… it’s going to eventually add up to be quite a lot.”

IMAGES:
Chris McGee, a sixth-grade math teacher at Nathan Hale Middle School, during a dive off the coast of Mexico. The dive was part of his two-week trip to Grand Cayman and Mexico to study lionfish and learn about conservation. Photo: Contributed Photo / Contributed Photo / Norwalk Hour contributed
Photo: Contributed Photo / Contributed Photo
A whale shark seen by Chris McGee, a sixth-grade math teacher at Nathan Hale Middle School, during his two-week trip to Grand Cayman and Mexico to study lionfish and learn about conservation.

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