Page 23 - 2017 Year End Summary

STUDENT EXPERIENCES

Currently a freshman in college, I look back at my eight or more years of taking classes at
Quest as one of the most formative and valuable experiences of my life. Quest has changed a
great deal from the time my family became involved with it, and I am thankful to have had access
to the many opportunities provided by this one-of-a-kind organization. Particularly, my intensive
chemistry instruction with Dr. Rebecca Thai has given me the desire to pursue a chemistry major
at Arizona State University. After taking college science classes, I have come to realize that the
teaching provided by Quest is fundamentally different from that provided by most other learning
institutions. Quest science classes are guided by the scientific method, using critical thinking and
research to ask questions, make educated guesses, test the question and then evaluate and come
to a conclusion. This is an essential skill that, sadly, is not emphasized enough even in college,
where lab procedures were often given to me to be followed step by step. In contrast, I can
remember as early as in my eighth grade College-Bound Physics class at Quest being taught a
concept, given materials, and then instructed to craft a question related to that topic that could
be tested using quantitative, repeatable tests. In order to perform research (which is virtually
required even for undergraduate degrees at many institutions) it is imperative that the student be
able to think outside the textbook and the lab package and be able to formulate his or her own
questions in order to progress scientifically. This is what Quest does in its science classes
beginning at the high school and even middle school levels and.
Another area in which Quest excels is giving students the “why” behind the facts and not
just the “what”. It is not enough in college simply to know the rules for balancing oxidation-
reduction reactions; knowing the rationale behind the process is essential in being able to solve
complex problems, especially on tests. I noticed that my organic chemistry instructor was
particularly adept at crafting multi-conceptual, multi-step questions that forced us to apply
different pieces of knowledge to the same problem, rather than questions that could be answered
simply by memorizing a step-by-step formula. I am afraid that science in most high schools is
taught at this latter level, and that students rarely go beyond rote memorization and never get to
experience the joy of understanding the complexities behind the beautiful concepts of science. I
could tell that most students struggled with this more complex way of thinking, while the
preparation I received from Quest allowed me to enjoy trying to understand the new and
challenging concepts I was learning.
No recollection of my Quest experiences would be complete without mentioning the
mentorship Dr. Thai afforded when she let me student teach a middle school physics class while
I was in my junior year of high school. I had long wanted to be a science teacher and this
opportunity only strengthened that desire. I relished the time spent with my twelve wonderful
students and found that I ended up learning much more than they did, not only about physics, but
about their learning styles and my teaching methods. One of the hallmarks of Quest classes is
an emphasis on making students understand through hands-on examples. I found my students
were much more interested in launching rockets and building Rube Goldberg machines than
listening to me discourse on Newtonian principles of action and reaction. At Quest the concepts