A Logan Park High School science teacher studying geology at the University of Otago is getting her head around that discipline's long time-scale.
"They flippantly talk about 10,000 years and for me it's kind of like '10,000 years, whoa, hang on','' Yvonne Caulfield said.
A biologist by training, Ms Caulfield said she tended to look at the "here and now'' but studying geology had given her a new perspective.
Ten thousand years seemed like a "massive amount of time'' but was actually very little time considering the earth was four and a-half billion years old, she said.
Ms Caulfield was selected for the Royal Society's science teaching leadership programme.
This is a national programme which places primary and secondary school teachers in a science organisation to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of science before applying it to their own school curricula.
It is funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
She is halfway through a 21-week programme at the university, during which she has taken leave from Logan Park.
After her return to the school, she will work to apply what she has learnt to changes in the science curriculum at Logan Park for 12 to 18 months.
Ms Caulfield is studying earth science, including seismic sediment and sea level in Dunedin.
An early highlight of her programme came when she went out on the University of Otago's research vessel Polaris.
That was "pretty amazing'' though it was not all smooth sailing for Ms Caulfield.
"I was a bit seasick.''
Ms Caulfield said science was a way of thinking and in the classroom she tried to explain to pupils that it was all around them.
She wanted to let pupils know that scientists came in lots of different shapes and sizes and it was not just about a white coat.
JOSHUA.RIDDIFORD @thestar.co.nz
