Taking a quick break from Summer School posts to share something that happened on campus today: the school hosted about 450 elementary-aged students from the Roberts Family Development Center, a CDF Freedom School. Departments from all across campus set up hands-on activities, the Rohnert Park Fire Department and Police Department came out to say, “Hi,” and it seemed as though a good time was had by all!
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I know I keep saying this, but THIS IS ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE DAYS OF THE SEMESTER! Today was pretty much fun from start to finish. In the morning, lecture on the diversity of plants, including the various adaptations that allowed plants to make the transition from the ocean onto land. After the lecture, I’d arranged for us to have a tour of the Tropical Greenhouse on campus. The greenhouse is across campus from the science building, so along the way I gave them a little walking tour of some of my favorite plants on campus, including a few Ginkgo trees, a Cycad (my all time fave), several ferns, redwood trees, and the Butterfly Garden. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures along the campus tour, but I have loads of pics from our greenhouse tour! We were welcomed to the greenhouse by Kandis, who provides instructional support for the Biology Department, and she is an exceptionally gracious hostess!
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Today, it was time to leave microevolution behind, and talk about how new species form. Now that they understand how adaptations and natural selection cause populations to change, it’s an easy step to understanding how this can lead to speciation. To drive that concept home, I put together a speciation activity based on this cool online natural selection simulation: http://sepuplhs.org/high/sgi/teachers/evolution_act11_sim.html. We also took an on-campus field trip to collect pond water, and see what we could find under the microscope.
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Today we covered sort of a hodge-podge of things, but there was a common thread – ways in which we can see evidence of evolution, both on long time scales, as well as short ones.
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I’ve written about Evernote before (Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote), and it’s time for an update. I’d been feeling as though my organizational system wasn’t quite working as efficiently as I want it to – I can’t always find things easily when I want them – so I went looking to see how other people are using the program. After being inspired by some Evernote gurus (particularly Michael Hyatt and Thomas Honeyman), I decided to make a HUGE leap, away from notebooks, and to using tags as my primary tool for organizing my notes. With more than 16,000 notes in my system, it’s somewhat daunting to think about making this change, but I’m going to take the plunge anyway.
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Started out the day by picking up where I left off on my Darwin lecture, and then moved on to adaptations, and the principles of natural selection. I frame most of this discussion around the Oldfield Mice experiment, partly because it’s a perfect example of a scientific study that demonstrates the effects of selection on populations, but also because the mice are so cute! I end up using these mice as an example all the way through evolution and speciation, so I have a bunch of slides I’ve animated showing all sorts of things happening to the mice. (Selective forces, like being caught by a hawk when the fur doesn’t match the substrate; and, later, random forces, like severe weather).
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This is always one of the favorite topics of the semester – Mendelian genetics, and inheritance. We cover a bunch of really interesting stuff, including questions like:
We started out the day with our first exam. Well, really, we started out with a game of Pictionary before the exam, as a way of reviewing the material. Then, after the exam, we talked about organ systems, and other aspects of physiology, including nutrition and human reproduction.
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Today: Energy for Life (aka Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration).
Overall, my Summer school strategy is to break up the days as much as possible, alternating lectures with hands-on activities. The schedule is a bit brutal – 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday, with an hour break for lunch. I try to never lecture for more than an hour and 15 minutes at a time, and usually a bit less. (Not that my lectures aren’t RIVETING hahahaha, but still . . . ). 😉 It helps keep everyone awake and engaged if I can mix things up a bit.
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