With a laugh, Robyn Smith admits she’s had a couple dozen cow eyes and brains sitting in her room. When she told her parents what she planned to do with them, she’d expected them to tell her how proud they were of her.

Instead, they said it was disgusting.

But the specimens have been in her possession for a project she did with the upper elementary and middle school students at Covington’s Montessori School.

It was an idea she developed after having spent last summer working at specTRUM museum at the University of Montana in Missoula.

“While working there, I learned about brain and eyeball dissection, and taught children [who came to the museum] that,” she said. “Science is something I’ve always loved, but it’s a topic children are scared of, so I wanted to introduce [science] to them at a young age so they wouldn’t be afraid of it.”

When Smith contacted the Montessori School with a proposal to come do the dissections project with the students, “we responded with a resounding ‘yes’,” Laura McCanless, middle school lead teacher, said.

“It’s a wonderful experience for kids,” she said. “Some of them may not be exposed to this again unless they pursue the STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) fields. This may make a different in a child’s life — either to choose STEM and biology or not.”

Smith began the demonstration by dissecting a cow’s eye herself, answering questions as they came up.

Some of the students might have been a little squeamish at first, but their curiosity quickly replaced any reluctance. By the time each student had a scalpel, a pair of scissors and an eyeball, they were eager to learn more about the makeup of the eye and how it correlated to a human eye. Later, during the class, they learned about the brain by dissecting a sheep’s brain.

“We don’t have a big ‘ew’ factor,” she said. “In fact, the kids get very excited about a variety of experiences.”

Prior to Friday’s class, permission slips had been sent home with students, McCanless said, adding that the experience might not be appropriate for all the students. Parents were encouraged to discuss the project with their children at home.

All the permission slips came back. The hands-on project fit in well with the Montessori Method of teaching, McCanless said. “Montessori is very much about doing rather than reading about something. The more we can provide them hands-on experience, the better.”

Periodically, she said, Oxford students will come and work with the different classes on different projects. Smith, she said, impressed her as a student ambassador from Oxford.

A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Smith will move on to Emory University next year. She’s a psychology major and the founder and president of the Oxford Psychological Association (OPA), a preprofessional club for psychology majors.
“Originally, I wanted to go into clinical psychology and do therapy and counseling, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to leave it at the office,” she said. “Right now, I’m leaning towards industrial organization psychology and marketing.”

She said she proposed the dissection project to the Montessori School as a way to do something to enrich and help out the community. “I think we could do so much with all the schools around us.

“I hope [the dissection project] can grow into something more,” she said. “I’d like to make it a tradition so that it grow and develop.”