Growing up, Courtney Kiley did all of the normal things that kids her age did. She liked playing baseball, field hockey, basketball, soccer, and digging up animals that she had buried in the backyard to see what their bones looked like.

Ever since she was five and she dug up her dead hermit crab, Hermie, to see how he had decomposed, Kiley knew that her future lay in science. Now, as a science teacher at Community High School, it’s her job to inspire a curiosity for science in her students.

“[The] first thing I try to do right away in FOS I is to get kids interested in science and just being outside,” Kiley explained. During her class trips to Traver Creek, Kiley hopes that students will realize that there is a whole different world living in there and won’t disregard it as “just water.”  Kiley also teaches physics and tries to make sure that the class has hands-on experiences to instill an interest in her students about the world around them.

Kiley’s main aspiration is to get her students to love science. “Even if they don’t like chemistry…[my goal is to] get them to latch onto something about science….because I think it’s important,” Kiley said. “Science explains the world around us, and it explains what you see every day and there’s a lot of important uses for it.”

As for her dreams for the future scientists in her classroom, Kiley hopes that in ten years they will be helping the world solve its problems resulting from climate change, which is the big topic in science right now. “[They could help] in any indirect way….with climate change, there’s going to be more medical disasters, there’s going to be more people displaced from their homes, more diseases. I mean, there’s so many different ways that you can be involved in climate change and not even really realize it.”

When it comes right down to it, however, the most important thing for Kiley is for there to be laughter in her class. “We laugh all the time….every day. It’s one of our class rules that we came up with: to have fun every single day.”