By Shawn Nowlin shawn.nowlin@ourvalley.org
As the age-old adage goes, “give a person a fish, they’ll eat tomorrow, teach a person how to fish, you’ll feed them for a lifetime.”
On March 10, Andrew Lewis Middle School (ALMS) students got an opportunity to learn how to tie fly lures, handle different types of fish and better understand steam etiquette from the staff at the Big Lick Fly Fishing Store in Salem.
Fittingly, several ALMS students asked questions to instructors Christian Miles and Scott Souther. After one teen broached the topic of which bait should they use, another asked about the proper stance technique.
“When you hold the lip at an angle and it’s pulling their jaws down, that can actually rip their muscles. They won’t die from that but if they can’t feed, they will eventually die,” Miles told them. “When you catch a bass, it’s okay to hook them, but only a certain way. I don’t ever like to grab a fish by their jaw.”
It was ALMS Technology Engineering Teacher Sarah Gerrol and Geography Teacher Judith Painter who co-authored the National Geographic Grant titled “Beyond the Walls.” Afterward, Gerrol went to the Big Lick Fly Fishing Store and asked about opportunities for the students to support the grant.
“The students need to understand that everything they do relates. Every subject they learn relates to each other in the real world,” she said. “In this one trip, the students learned about nature, science, geography, engineering, technology, entrepreneurship, patience and time management, just to name a few.”
Born in Germany but raised in Salem, growing up Painter and her father used to go fishing every summer. “My dad used to take me fishing up on the Cowpasture River and on lakes when we were traveling,” she said. “I remember hooking a huge rock fish from the top of a houseboat on a TVA lake near Knoxville. Good thing it snapped the line, or it may have pulled me in also.”
She added, “The more opportunities that we can give our students to experience the world, the more involved and active citizens they will be in our community. We can teach technology or geography, but when we have the students experience that same technology and geography in the real world, it has significantly meaning.”
When the students returned to class from the trip, they were given an assignment of describing their experience in five words. Said Delaney Crotts, “Fun, cool, educational, inspiring and informative.” Expressed Alexander Foster, “Fun, educational, fishing, art and entomology.” Dorothy Myers wrote, “Interactive, informative, cool, enjoyable and unique.”
For many of the students, last week was their first experience with fly fishing. “Most are interested in a second field trip to actually go fishing (regular or fly) later in the spring. I found it fascinating how interested the students were in the types of flies,” Painter said.
