Science department chair Emily Lisy, a well-rounded Marine, Environmental, and Health Science teacher, has always wanted students to leave her class inspired and capable of learning. With a master’s degree, a minor, and an in-progress PhD, she has a lot to share with students here at Morgan.
Since the beginning, Mrs. Lisy has “…always loved the outdoors and environmental science and exploring tide pools and the marine environment” around her. “It’s always been a part of who I am.” At first, she planned on going into a field that involved doing things that involved marine science, wildlife, fishery science or working at a nature center. “I originally thought of pursuing education that way.”
During her time at Penn State, she would go on to “work at lots of conferences, where she would learn even more about the environment.” She enjoyed the fact that “along with the students, there were adults that we were learning from and teaching.”
Inspired by her love of teaching at summer camps and conferences when she was younger, and influences from her family, she decided that, “[Since] my mom was a teacher and my grandmother was a teacher, I thought that being a teacher would be more of a formal way to teach about things that I am passionate about.”
Mrs. Lisy went to school for her undergraduate career, and then later obtained her master’s degree at Penn State University in wildlife and fisheries science. Later, she obtained a minor in marine science and is now currently part-time working on obtaining a PhD at the University of Connecticut.
Currently, Mrs. Lisy has been teaching for a total of 21 years, and before she came to Morgan, she taught in Stamford. Over the years, she has “taught many kinds of science classes like biology, but right now, she teaches UCONN ECE Anatomy and Allied Health, and every other year she teaches UCONN ECE Marine Science and UCONN ECE Environmental Science.”
Along with the classes she teaches, she also helps run the school environmental club. In the environmental club, she helps facilitate planting activities, beach cleanups, and environmental photography contests, just to name a few of their activities.
Mrs. Lisy wants what she teaches to create an impact on students:“[I want them to leave class knowing] they can do science and that they have an understanding about the world around them and an appreciation for science. It isn’t necessarily that they have to go into something in science, but I want them to know more about the world around them and be aware of things that are happening and kind of question that and feel like they’re not scared to question or to explore or to learn more about things in science, going out into the world,” said Lisy.
Knowing that the environmental field, and especially the marine field, has a lot to offer, she continued: “There’s a lot that we still don’t know and that there’s so many things that can still be explored in environmental science and in marine science, especially in marine where we hardly know that much even about the oceans.” She wants the students to learn and wonder for their own growth, so they can come out into the world more knowledgeable in whatever field they pursue about the planet they live on.
Students Nikky Zhou and Spencer Hoadley currently take Mrs. Lisy’s Marine Science class, and they enjoy the way she teaches: Hoadley stated that, “I like the experiments because she lets you do what you want to do compared to other science classes where you have to follow a set of instructions to a T.” Zhou is happy that “she is a really nice teacher and her slideshows are really informative,” and enjoys that “the labs that we do are helpful because when it comes to group work.”
