About Will
Will Parish is a credentialed public high school science educator with a 30-year record of innovative accomplishments in the environmental and educational fields. He taught Environmental Science at Gateway High School in San Francisco, and now serves on the board. He served on the California State Board of Education’s Curriculum Commission and then founded Ten Strands as a nonprofit organization to support California’s efforts to bring environmental literacy to all K–12 students in the state.
Learning is a life-long activity, and we want to instill that drive in all students. If you can engage students by making learning relevant and fun—as environment-based learning does—then they will not only perform better in school, but they will want to become learners for their whole life. In thinking about this holiday season, I […]
Recently, Ten Strands hosted its first event at the Brower Center in Berkeley—a great venue for networking, building community and viewing a documentary, where our special guest David Gelber introduced his Emmy Award winning series Years of Living Dangerously. Photos from the event can be viewed on the Ten Strands Facebook Page. People involved in […]
Catching up on emails recently, I came across a link titled “How Wolves Change Rivers”. I thought, “Come on. How could a wolf change a river?” Well, it turns out that the video unveiled a phenomenon called “trophic cascade.” Think avalanche. It’s an ecological process of destruction that starts by getting rid of the top trophic […]
Listening to a recent broadcast of KCRW’s Left, Right and Center, co-host Rich Lowry (author and editor of the National Review) put forth a few things that concerned, or perhaps more accurately, disturbed me. He questioned how we can be certain that human activity contributes to climate change in light of evidence that while the […]
Riding the Capitol Corridor train on my most recent trip to Sacramento, I was struck by just how much I miss teaching. While it was hard to leave the high school classroom, I am happy to be involved with contributing input on the revision of the Science Framework for California Public Schools. The reason for […]
With everything that cycles through my mind day after day, water has been cropping up at increasingly frequent intervals. More specifically, the dearth of rainfall here in the Bay Area as California enters its third consecutive dry winter. San Francisco, which started recording rainfall 164 years ago, has had only 5.59 inches of rain since […]
I recently attended the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) conference in Sacramento, CA and was impressed with the pace of educational change. I was especially encouraged that several sessions on STEM and NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) demonstrated an interest in incorporating Environmental Education into the frameworks and standards.