NHS Student Makes Front Cover Of

Connecticut Journal Of Science Education

By Eliza Hallabeck

Last year, when CJ Spath was a junior writing a paper for his oceanography class with Newtown High School teacher Russ Weiss, he wanted to write about something different.

That paper, “Wandering Shorelines: The Ecosystem of the Niobrara Sea,” made the front cover of the Connecticut Journal of Science Education last month for the publication’s Fall–Winter 2008–2009 edition.

“We had to do something that related to oceanography first of all,” said CJ, and added, that the project was a long time ago, but he remembered that it had to be about eight to ten pages long.

CJ’s article focused on the inland sea, formed between the west and east coasts of North America 85 million years ago, and the “truly amazing ecosystem; in which various marine denizens thrived on the constantly moving sandbars,” reads the article in the Connecticut Journal of Science Education.

“Palentology and some of the fossils and stuff, just seemed interesting to me,” he said.

CJ said he intends to study geology in college, and the natural sciences, like astronomy and oceanography interest him.

“I had this really good book,” said CJ. He said he was into dinosaurs a lot when he was younger, and the book helped him find the right resources in the beginning. “The book kind of helped me make a model, like a starting point for me.”

He said Mr Weiss was his biggest help, “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

The article focused on different types of sea creatures that would have been alive during the Cretaceous period, like the Cretoxyrhina, a shark that “reached lengths of 20 feet and had long smooth teeth measuring over two inches.”

In studying and researching the subject, CJ said he started with the lowest creatures on the food chain, and he worked his way up. He said he could not include all of the animals in the article, so he selected one or two animals from each group, like turtles or sharks.

In researching the article, CJ said it was imperative to “get a lot of different resources, and then you have to choose the best information from all of them.”

He said he started a month before the paper was due, and he tried to write a page each day. Sometimes he would write a page every other day, and spreading the work around, he said, helped write a decent paper.

“Mr Weiss used to tell us how we never really do term papers in high school, and it is true, I never did a term paper in high school,” he said. “And this helped me, I would hope, prepare me for doing term papers in college. This is a much bigger essay than any other one I have done before.”

CJ said he particularly like the field of geology, because there are many different fields.

“I was surprised I got the front page,” said CJ about the publication.

Originally CJ was just looking for a topic that would be different for his oceanography paper.

“I thought it might be interesting to do, and so I did it,” he said.