‘CSI’ comes to Classical: School offers new forensic lab course

This is an excel­lent idea. Not only pro­vid­ing a foren­sic sci­ence class to high school stu­dents, but mak­ing it a hands-on lab based expe­ri­ence. I’ve given pre­sen­ta­tions at local high schools, but almost all the ones I’ve been to have been more lec­ture based, as opposed to lab sci­ence based.

I encour­age teach­ers to explore this pos­si­bil­ity in their own schools.

Original arti­cle posted here.

‘CSI’ comes to Classical: School offers new foren­sic lab course

By Dan Baer / The Daily Item
LYNN — Classical High School social stud­ies teacher Lyle Henkenmeier is prob­a­bly not mak­ing any friends with school cus­to­di­ans this year.

With all of the fin­ger print dust, piles of dirt and rem­nants of plas­ter coat­ing his class­room after his daily foren­sics lab, the nightly clean­ing work tends to get out of hand — some­thing he said he has offered to clean up him­self, to no avail.

Despite the messy after­math, the first-year foren­sics lab has been a suc­cess to say the least as word of mouth around the school has quickly made it one of the most sought-after courses on campus.

Henkenmeier teaches the basics of foren­sics in his crim­i­nal law course, but through a Hardscrabble Grant, was able to come up with the resources needed to break the sub­ject off into its own half-year elective.

The hands-on class is entirely lab-based, there are no text­books and there are no tests. Instead, stu­dents learn how to extract clues from a crime scene by lift­ing fin­ger­prints, study­ing dirt sam­ples or exam­in­ing blood spat­ter on a wall.

The course dif­fers from a sci­ence offer­ing in that stu­dents study the phys­i­cal and social aspects of crime, rather than the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion of the evi­dence.
*
“The course is more hands-on than last year when we took the street law class,” said senior Jessica Tannian, as she stud­ied a small pile of dirt with class­mate Bunmi Atewologun. “Here you have to look for things like color, tex­ture and con­trast. The darker dirt is more moist.”

Henkenmeier has pro­vided many of the resources for the class on his own, includ­ing the dirt, of which he has sam­ples from all 50 states, sev­eral for­eign coun­tries and var­i­ous areas around the city.

He said he has vis­ited 38 states him­self, but it was his mother who donated the rest, which she accu­mu­lated from friends who would travel abroad.

“Growing up in Illinois we were poor, and we would never travel any­where,” he said. “So my mother started ask­ing her friends who would travel to bring her back some dirt from each place. Eventually she had peo­ple she didn’t even know say­ing, ‘I’m going to Greece, here is some dirt.’”

The stu­dents will study hair fol­li­cles from both ani­mals and peo­ple dur­ing the course of the year, along with real crime scene pho­tos that show how com­pli­cated gath­er­ing evi­dence can be.

Henkenmeier built a small machine that cre­ates blood spat­ter on the wall, and stu­dents even donated old shoes so that they could make plas­ter imprints of the soles to study.

Students said some of the most dif­fi­cult work has been lift­ing fin­ger­prints and describ­ing a sus­pect for a police sketch. Henkenmeier chal­lenged the group to describe Classical Assistant Principal Gene Constantino, some­one who is famil­iar to all of them, and used a com­puter pro­gram to gen­er­ate his photo based on the description.

“We had a full period (to do the fin­ger­prints),” said senior Wade Barber. “It has to be per­fect so you can dis­tin­guish the dif­fer­ences. Lifting off the tape was def­i­nitely the hard­est part.

“Describing the image was hard, too. Imagine being a vic­tim that has to do that from mem­ory,” added senior Jenny Mastrogiannakou. “Describing peo­ple from mem­ory was dif­fi­cult, I even got a pass to the bath­room so I could go see what he looked like.”

Henkenmeier admits he had no idea how the class would go, but says he has been pleas­antly sur­prised by the inter­est and enthu­si­asm of the students.

In the future, he hopes to join forces with the sci­ence depart­ment for the chem­i­cal side of the course, and hopes to have mem­bers of the Lynn Police visit his class­room and talk to the students.

“I always say if I can get them to think for them­selves and not just believe what they see and hear on TV, than it is a suc­cess­ful course,” he said. “If I can get them to think for them­selves, I did a good job. Those (TV foren­sics shows) are fun to watch, but real­is­ti­cally for an aver­age police depart­ment it isn’t even close. You have to be really, really care­ful with that sort of thing because most of them are pretty outrageous.”