Portage Daily Register: Students who cut small holes into cardboard receptacles in Amanda Seichter’s second-period horticulture class Wednesday shared their understanding of how plants respond to light, finding answers that weren’t gleaned from a textbook.

“I knew they’d grow to the light, but I didn’t know different colors would influence them, like red and blue,” said Pardeeville High School sophomore Kayla Guenther.

“With even one thing wrong,” observed senior Drew Alfaro, “they can’t grow.”

“They need to see something, do something, feel something, in order to understand it better,” explained Seichter, in her first year at Pardeeville and ninth as an agriculture teacher.

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Portage Daily Register: Students in Molly Carlson’s advanced biology class at Pardeeville High School peered through their microscopes Wednesday visibly happier about their results compared to last week.

Using various chemicals, they tested the embryos of zebrafish — a species with a similar genome sequence to humans — and the students with their notes, beakers, pipettes and rubber gloves talked about their progress like scientists on the verge of breakthrough.

“We learned that glyphosate is not a very good chemical, and can cause very odd deformities,” senior Russell Bush said of his group’s second trial. Their first trial was “too heavy” and killed all the zebrafish, but on that day they could see how the glyphosate bent the tails of their living test subjects.

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