Summer School – Day 1 – The Process of Science

The first day of a new semester can be a bit nerve-wracking . . . wondering what the students will be like, how the group dynamic will develop. Wondering if they’ll laugh at my stupid jokes. After my introductory lecture, though, I had a really good feeling about this group. Just ten students, and all of them jumped in right from the start.

I started out the same way I always start out my introductory bio classes – a lecture on “What is Life?,” and then we walk through the process of science, using calico cats as the context for exploring the scientific method: “Why haven’t I ever seen a male calico cat? I hypothesize that there aren’t any.” (SPOILER: there are male calicos; just not very many of them. We’ll answer that mystery when we get to inheritance). We also do a root word exercise where students use a glossary of root words, prefixes, and suffixes to decipher biology words, and the scientific names of a couple of animals: Haliaeetus leucocephalus, and Phascolarctos cinereus .Can you figure out who they are? (The root word glossary I hand out to my students can be found here).This reinforces the importance and usefulness of learning root words, particularly when dealing with big “scary” science words. Plus, it’s fun.

That took us through until lunch, after which I gave my Good Science/Bad Science lecture, which focuses on recognizing the characteristics of legitimate scientific studies, and the red flags that suggest that a “scientific” claim might not be based in actual scientific evidence. The lecture was followed up by a trip to the library, where they did a quick research project investigation some advertising claim they’ve seen that struck them as being dodgy. (Almost always, they’re able to discover for themselves that there’s not any science backing up most of the crap we see advertised on TV).

This year, I decided that I wanted to include more naturalist skills in the curriculum, so to round up our day, I took them on a naturalist walk. I didn’t give them a lot of guidance this time around . . . I just took them walking through campus, with the instruction to make a list of any living organisms that they recognized, and could put a name to (we’ll revisit this on the last day of class). Then, over near the campus lakes, I asked them to sit quietly for 5 minutes, and just look and listen, and write down their observations. Usually, when I’ve asked an entire class of students to do something like this, at least a few of them blow it off, obviously not interested. But this time around, every single one of my students took it seriously. They also seemed to really enjoy it, and were interested about learning more.

It didn’t hurt that we saw some really cool things. Probably the most spectacular was this fungus that we saw in several places on campus – I’d never noticed it before, and it’s CRAZY WEIRD and cool! (I think it’s the latticed stinkhorn, Clathrus ruber).

 

Their lists were mostly what I expected – they know things like flowers and trees and grass, but not a lot of specifics. (I’ve included some of them below).

My mission for the next four weeks: to help them understand a lot more about the natural world around them than they know right now. I think we’re off to a really good start!

Selected Materials

List of Root Words
Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science
Good Science/Bad Science Worksheet

“Live Blogging” Summer School

I’ve just finished teaching a Summer session of Biological Inquiry – the general education biology course with a lab. I had a small class – just 10 students – and we met on 15 days over the course of 4 weeks. It’s a pretty intense schedule, but I had SO much fun! This was possibly the single best group of students I’ve ever had, in terms of their enthusiasm and engagement with the material.

I wanted to blog about our adventures together, but during the actual Summer term, I just don’t have time – the pace goes too fast during class, and I spend all my evenings preparing course activities. But now that it’s done, I have some free time, and can blog to my heart’s content. What I’m going to do is blog it as if it’s happening now – I’m going to make a blog post for each day of the term, on the same day of the week as it happened originally, with a play-by-play of our daily activities. So, it’ll be like live-blogging (well, sort of), only on a 4-week delay.

Look for the first post in a few minutes. I’ll also be going back to blog some activities from the Spring semester that never managed to get published.

Intro Bio Student Comments

This semester, one of the questions I asked on the final exam (to give them a freebie) was to ask them their favorite organism that we looked at during the course. I’m posting a few of my favorite responses here.

I found this one particularly touching:

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“Thank You. You’ve actually caught my interests in science, which I never felt smart enough for. You’re also one of the most understanding and empathetic professors I’ve had, which helped with my severe anxiety disorder.” 

This is so important to me. Being able to touch people’s lives in a positive way . . . well, that’s why I’m doing this. It feels really good to know that, at least some of the time, I’m hitting the mark.

Asexual Plant

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I received this gift on the last day of class from one of my biology students. She’d grown it from a cutting . . . not only is the plant adorable, but it came with this (scientifically accurate!) caption:

“Asexual plants: only 1 parent required. Parent passes all its genes to offspring. Identical offspring, splits the contents of one cell into two.”

This makes me so happy. 🙂

 

 

Later, I found this comment at the bottom of her final exam:

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School Update

Heh. I just found an entry I started writing last Friday . . . and never managed to post. Mostly because school is keeping me busy. Busy in a good way, but I’m ending most days feeling mentally (and because of that, physically) exhausted.

Statistics is easy; Biology is mostly easy except for having to memorize the ^#*%^@ cell cycle. (Can’t I be a biologist without knowing about mitosis and meiosis? Okay, so I can’t. Whatever. *pouts*). Oh, and Thomas Hunt Morgan? Let’s dig him up out of his grave and beat him with a shovel (w+ . . . WHY????). Physics was insanely hard for me at first, not so much because of the physics, but because of the math needed to do the problems – my algebra skills were . . . rusty, to put it mildly. (Surprisingly, my trig skills are just fine, which is a relief). In the past week, though, I’ve put in a lot of time and effort (and a couple of sessions with a tutor), and I think I’m back where I need to be with the math. And the physics. We’ll see – I just got home from taking my first Physics exam, and I think I did fine. There weren’t any problems that made me think, “WTF?” and I’m pretty sure I did the one write-your-answer problem correctly (the rest of the test was multiple choice). Anyone want to have a go at it?

George and Alfred are brothers who drive race cars. (They’re also apparently not that smart, as you’ll see in a bit). George’s car accelerates at 3.00 m/s2, while Alfred’s is a bit slower: 1.50 m/s2. They set up their cars on a race track, 1.00 x 10^3 meters apart, facing one another, and from rest, drive towards one another. How long will it take them to crash into one another, and at what distance from George’s starting position will this crash occur?*

So, my brain has been tired lately, but I’m still feeling like I’m hanging in there as far as schoolwork is concerned. Plus, I have friends in Biology now (we have lunch together, and study together, and work out at the gym together, all of which is lovely), and I have people to chat with in both of my other classes. (I wouldn’t call any of them “friends” yet, but it’s still good).

Physics lab is fun – on Wednesday, we got to fire steel balls out of a little “cannon.” And in Biology lab, we got to mate drosophila flies on the computer like crazy (I deliberately did some pairings that I knew were LETHAL! Bwahahahahahah)! Okay, so it’s probably not quite as interesting as actually breeding the fruit flies themselves, and seeing what happens, but the computer model is much faster. 😀

My son, btw, was a bit scandalized by the fruit fly experiment. He said, “What did you do? Lock the flies together in a bedroom with a ‘do not disturb’ sign, and then wait for them to make kissy noises?” *facepalms* Of course, he was even more traumatized the previous week when we played with Mr. Potato Heads in bio lab. And yes, we made them have sex with one another, to see what would happen to the offspring. Mr. Potato Head Sex! W00t! (That really was the title of the lab). Genetics. Fun stuff. 😀

Nothing quite so interesting in Stats. We’re doing a project for which we had to collect data, and the group I’m in decided that we were going to poll students on their majors, and see the breakdown of male & female, and whether they were science majors, non-science majors, or undeclared. We stood outside the library asking people about their majors as they walked by, and it was really not fun. People are damned suspicious when you walk up and ask if they are willing to participate in a survey. Even though ours was only ONE question. (Then again, when I see people wanting to ask me survey questions, I run in the opposite direction, too, so I guess it’s only fair).