SLOCHS Community Based Learning Weblog

I volunteered my last four hours today as a docent. It was only Leon and I today, but that’s cool because he and I had some interesting conversations. For the morning shift we had about 30 people come in. I learned from my second shift that the museum gets money from grants when they say how many people come in and such. I didn’t have to walk around taking notes anymore because I had already done everything during my second shift. Leon and I were talking about Alzheimer’s and I told him something I learned in my Nutrition class. A study done on women at a prestigious university (I forget the name, Carnegie Mellon perhaps?) showed that by drinking coffee for a good portion of their lives, Alzheimer’s can be pushed back 10 or 11 years. I suppose you gain some, you lose some — in this case gain caffeine, lose Alzheimer’s. Leon told me that he was a strong addict to coffee. Props to him. Hopefully, Alzheimer’s will not get to him even though it runs in his family and his wife’s. Currently I am not addicted to coffee, but maybe sometime later on in life I will be. There was also a couple that were on their way up to San Francisco. They came from Denmark and spoke English with a German accent. I know this because I took German for two years under an almost nazi-wannabe German teacher and also here at Poly for one quarter. I am really interested in going to Germany because of BMWs. They’re my favorite car and I cannot wait to drive a real BMW, not an American de-modified version of one (even though I do L-O-V-E the BMW I’m driving now..but still). Anyways back to my volunteering. I decided to bust out my German to them and tell them about some sites to see in San Francisco since I’m from there. Thank goodness they understood me haha!! It just really amazes me how people from different countries know about this museum and its history and I had no idea until I took ES 244. Well I would say my last shift at the Historical Society was very eventful and it definitely flew by. — Lisa Deng