Imagine spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a boat on the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.
Saint Ignatius College Prep teacher, Christopher Marks, did just that.
“Storms there are quite violent, and it’s isolating because you’re 150 miles off shore, and away from people,” says Marks.
His work involved collecting data to understand what species commercial fishing boats were catching. It’s experience he took to graduate school for marine biology, and that’s where he had an epiphany.
“I got to teach classes. It was a scary moment realizing I wanted to teach it, instead of do it,” says Marks, “I took my knowledge and turned it into a teaching career.”
His path brought Marks here, to Saint Ignatius College Prep where he shares his love of marine biology, born in ocean snorkeling adventures, with his students.
He describes those students as “very intelligent.”
“I sometimes get questions I don’t know the answer to so we learn it together. If it’s an interesting question, we go and explore,” says Marks.
He hopes to give his students a deep appreciation of the biological world. One way he does that is through an aquatic sciences class he developed with Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.
"There’s some really cool stuff out there,” says Marks, who makes it his mission to spread that good word in the classroom.