Hi everyone! This is Mike and Pete from Sevenoaks School in Kent, England. We are seventeen years old and have known each other for as long as we can remember. We even live on the same street!
When Mike’s parents moved to Sevenoaks fifteen years ago, Pete’s mum was their realtor. Having toddlers of almost the same age and living so close to each other, both families quickly became friends. For Mike, who has four older sisters, Pete was like a brother he never had.
For all of you who wonder why we decided to create this Science news blog, here’s the story of how it all started.
In the last years of primary school, we both struggled with several subjects. While Math and Science were mainly Mike’s headache, dyslexic Pete had a hard time with English and, believe it or not, Science as well.
Our mums gave us an ultimatum: we either improved our grades, or they would ban us from what used to be our favorite free time activity back then, video games. We needed to make sure that wouldn’t happen, the video world was too precious to lose.
We had to come up with a plan. And we did. As it turns out, Pete’s cousin, Sam, was a science major and after some serious negotiation, he agreed to tutor us. It did cost us a few albums from our vinyl records collection, but hey, one’s got to do what one’s got to do, right?
Whether it was Sam’s amazing teaching skills and his passion for science, or our inner (and well-hidden) natural gift, but the truth is that after just a few sessions we discovered how fascinating Science can be.
From hindsight, what really did the trick for us, was having Sam relate all those seemingly dull and abstract facts to daily life situations. If we told you about all the crazy experiments we did, you wouldn’t believe it. My mum is probably still crossed with me about the explosion in our shed.
Unfortunately, Sam’s tutoring didn’t last too long. He had to start working on his thesis, which was about paleontology. This time it was him who asked us for a favor! We were to help him to hunt for fossil samples, which – as it turned out – were quite abundant along our county’s coastline. Folkestone was a real goldmine!
Watching Sam clean the samples, classify them, and then tell us about how their age is estimated and what those fossils say about the prehistoric world was truly enthralling. This was right then when the Science bug bit us for real.
Over the years we’ve clarified and defined our principal science interests. For Mike, it is mainly the animal and plant world – Biology, Paleontology, Zoology, and such. He is planning to study to be a vet and for the last 3 years, he’s been helping in the local animal shelter.
Pete, on the other hand, is a physics geek and is particularly into renewable energy sources. He’s also a walking geology encyclopedia and can talk for hours on end about tectonic movements, mountain formation, and types of soil.
This new blog is our joint project. Our goal is to help you in the same way Sam helped us back when we were kids. We will do our best to make you fall in love with science with the same passion we once did.
