Mountain View High School starts very early in the morning (7:10AM) and is just a little bit further away from my house than I expected. I rode 40 minutes to the school in the dawn along foothill expressway, and arrived just as school began.
   I presented to 4 ninth-grade classes for teacher Teri Faught. Teri runs her own coral reef activism project, and was very excited about this project. The students, who were a bit tired this early morning and interested in talking about their recent homecoming football victory, still managed (I think) to absorb some of the climate change information I was sharing.

   I biked to Huddart Park today to talk to a group of students at the Riekes center. The students, who are all home schooled, meet once a week at the park for environmental learning.

   The park, which sits in the middle of an impressive redwood forest, is located on the side of the coastal mountains overlooking the bay area. The 13 students gathered under one of the kiosks, where I showed a powerpoint presentation from my laptop. The students, aged 13 to 17, were eager learners and I stayed for an hour and a half instead of the usual 50 minutes.
   Afterwards, the students made a pyramid, showing off how well thy can ‘work together.’ (If you click on that funny looking picture on the right, it will open a movie of the students building a pyramid. Yes, I just figured out how to upload movies.)

   Today I took the caltrain to San Jose and then biked 5 miles across the sprawling city to Independence High School in East San Jose.

I spoke with 7 classes of 9th-gradders, all in the school’s ‘planetarium.’ Many of the students family’s had emigrated from Mexico (whether this generation or earlier), and I received many excited shouts when I listed the cities that I will bike through south of the border. Also, so far these are the only classes to correctly name all of the countries in Central America.

   Today I visited Ms. Wu’s 9th grade accelerated biology class at Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

   I was supposed to talk for only half the period, but we ended up spending the entire time talking about climate change. The students were very enthused, especially when I asked them to pose for the left picture. One of the students in the second photo, however, ducked away when she saw the camera coming (far right).

   Today I visited a sixth grade class at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto.

   The class was small and enthusiastic. They have been studying early human history, and they especially liked the ‘population game,’ where I made them guess the population of the planet at any given time in history. It’s great to see their amazement at how much the population has grown in the past century as compared to the entirety of history (I do this for every class, thus showing the hugeness of human impact on the planet today as compared to past times).
   Their teacher, Sarah Shulman, is a good friend of mine and is competing in the ironwomen competition the following week. Yes, she is a stronger biker than I am.