Ecosystem Exploration

This week, I’m using some Virtual Field materials in one of my classes (Ecosystem Exploration: https://thevirtualfield.org/virtual…/ecosystem-exploration).

In addition to the questions provided with the videos, I’m going to ask them to do some additional field journaling, including sketches. Here are the two I drew as examples (based on the Mojave Desert video), to give them some inspiration. (They aren’t expected to render things as completely as the tortoise, but the level of detail in the plant illustration should be doable by everyone).

As an aside, I think that Gopherus agassizii was the first scientific name I ever learned. My parents had hand towels with these tortoises (along with the name). Wow. It’s not actually too surprising that I’m such a nerd.

Summer Vacation . . . Here I Come! (Sort of, haha)

I know it’s been slow on my blog for the past several weeks, mostly because of the typical end-of-semester madness that descends. Today, however, I can happily report that the Spring, 2017 semester has been put to bed. Papers and exams graded, final grades assigned and entered into the official system. It’s nice to be able to sit down and take a breath after one of the busiest semesters I’ve had yet. (I’ll be teaching a summer session starting next week, so I’m not really on vacation yet, but I’m enjoying the week of downtime I have between the two “semesters”).

Why was I so busy? On the one hand, it’s not too surprising, as I was involved with five courses (teaching three of them solo; the other two were team-taught), and I did a lot of extra curricular work with the Copeland Creek restoration on campus, but I didn’t have a new course prep, as I’ve had every other semester I’ve taught. For that reason alone, I thought this was going to be a pretty relaxed semester. Looking back, however, when I think about at the rosters for my courses, I realize that I had more than 350 students this semester, altogether. That’s a lot of students, and I spent one-on-one time with a fair number of them – for a good part of the semester, my office hours (three hours a week at the start, and four to five hours total per week throughout the last half of the semester) were like a subway station at rush hour some days. (I’ll describe how I dealt with that in a separate post).

So yes, it’s nice to have a bit of breathing room, but at the same time, I loved having the chance to work with such a diverse array of students – from brand new freshmen to graduating seniors, across a wide spectrum of majors. Some of my favorite moments:

  • The spectacular success of the Entomology service learning activity I facilitated, for the seven students who participated

Come at me bro
Come at me bro

  • A hilarious Yellowstone ecosystem food web created by one of my Global Environmental Issues students that used internet memes to represent the organisms (primarily wolves, deer, and plants)
  • Drawings on the final exam of the bones in a human hand compared to the bones in a fin of a whale, to demonstrate one of the student’s favorite concepts during the semester
  • Having students come to office hours just to have a place to hang out between classes
  • Seeing my students’ final posters at the Science Symposium (and seeing them all dressed up in their fancy clothes for the event)
  • Receiving an adorable fairy terrarium from one of my Intro Bio students
  • One of my intro biology students coming to a creek workday, and being SUPER excited to discover that I knew her by name (she literally jumped up and down)
  • A student asking to take a selfie with me after finishing her final exam
  • Seeing the amazing transformation along Copeland Creek, as a result of all the work we’ve done throughout the semester
  • Receiving emails with links to interesting science stories that my students thought would be of interest to me (mostly I love this because it means they’re on the internet reading about science)!

And possibly my favorite:

  • Hearing back from a grad student whose CV and cover letter I helped edit, to let me know that she’d been offered the job!!

This is a very abbreviated list of favorite moments, and I have loads more things to post from this past month or so – stories to tell that have been neglected due to the flurry of activity associated with the end of the semester. But now I have time to sit down and tell them, so expect to see some new posts in the very near future.

Evernote

One of the things I struggle with periodically (or perhaps I should say I “refine” periodically) is my organizational strategy for keeping track of things on my computer, particularly teaching materials. I’ve been using Evernote for several years (I adopted the system in November, 2010, and have been using it consistently ever since), and as soon as I started teaching, I set up a system for those materials. I thought I’d share a little bit about the ways it’s working for me, and not working.

Here’s an overview of the system:

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 9.01.31 PM

Basically, I’ve got a notebook stack for each course I teach, and within the stack are notebooks for organizing various materials – a notebook for lectures, one for exams, one for course materials like syllabi, and a notebook for each individual semester I’ve taught the course, where I can archive correspondence I’d like to keep, or materials that I’ve changed significantly since using them in that semester.

So far, this seems to be working pretty well in terms of being able to find things when I need them. The weakest link here is my own negligence about always tagging things and putting them promptly into the correct notebook. But once I do that, it’s pretty easy to navigate instantly to the file that I want.

Originally, when I set this up I also had notebooks for images, but that started to get unwieldy very quickly (in terms of the number of images I was collecting). If I save ALL the photos and diagrams I have pulled off of websites, it gets out of control (I may find hundreds and hundreds of images in a single semester). So instead I’m saving only those that I think might be difficult to find in the future. A photo of a red-tailed hawk? I will always be able to google a replacement. An excellent diagram showing the life cycle of a snail? That might be more difficult to find again, so that’s one I’ll choose to keep.

One thing I may try and play with in the future: right now, when I’m preparing a powerpoint lecture to be delivered, I download it from Evernote, and store it in a folder on my desktop. It would be a lot cleaner, though, if I kept the files in Evernote and worked with them there . . . I may see if I can adjust to this workflow, and see if it makes things easier for me to find. I’m a bit concerned that I might accidentally overwrite a file that I still need . . . then again, that happens sometimes now, with my folder system, and at least in Evernote I would have the benefit of going back through the note’s history and possibly retrieving things I accidentally copied over.

In addition to a stack for each individual course, I have a stack of general refernences – things not tied to a specific course (like general correpondence with the university, letters of recommendation I’ve written for students, things like that). Again, I don’t have too many issues with finding things when I want them.

One thing I would like to get a better handle on is materials that I’ve found (usually on the internet), and am interested in reviewing, but I haven’t made the time yet to do that. Right now, they’re stashed in a few different places (some in Evernote, some in other folders in various places on my hard drive). I think the next thing I tackle will be a reorganization of those.

Anyhow, that’s the system I’m using right now. If anyone else out there is using Evernote in a different way, and has some tips to pass along, I would love to hear them!

The Art of Possibility

I had the opportunity to attend a couple of fantastic events this week sponsored by ieSonoma (Innovate, Educate, Sonoma).

Screen Shot 2017-03-24 at 6.46.56 PMOn Tuesday night, I attended the keynote address: “The Art of Possibility” by Benjamin Zander. He is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and he’s also an inspirational speaker who encourages a great deal of participation from his audience. Right from the start, he got us involved by inviting anyone who chose to do so to come up and sit on the stage with him. It seemed like a good idea, so my friend, Kandis, and I both decided to take him up on his offer. (You’ll see me in some of the photos below . . . I’m wearing a purple shirt). These photos were grabbed from the SSU Department of Education’s Flickr:

Rather than trying to describe his talk, I’ll just point you in the direction of this video – this is some of the same material he shared with us, and I highly recommend giving it a watch:

There are a few things I took away with me that seem worthwhile to share. For example, the rationale behind asking people to come sit on the stage went something like this: when people enter a room, and decide where to sit, it’s an indication of how they “show up” in their lives, and that people who make the choice to sit in the very front row are open to being exposed, rather than “hiding” by sitting farther back. Hearing that did give me some added motivation to get up and sit on the stage, when he offered that option.

I also really liked what he had to say about how we can empower others by the way we are in our lives. I think what stuck most was the idea that we can know that we’re reaching other people when their eyes “shine.” I do like the thought of asking myself, “How am I being right now, if my students’ eyes aren’t shining?”

My very favorite part, though, was near the end, when he encouraged everyone present to sing the “Ode to Joy” movement from Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken.
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Now, I can honestly say that I have sung onstage in the Green Music Center! Haha!

A complete photo album from the evening is available on the SSU School of Education’s Flickr: “The Art of Possibility

 

Student Artwork

As the semester winds to an end, I thought I’d share some artwork . . . a couple of things I drew for my students during finals week:

Plus, some bonus artwork – a few things they drew for me (mostly on their final exam papers). I think it’s clear that pretty much all of my students will never again be able to see a Tyrannosaurus rex without thinking of me, haha.

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

IMG_2120
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:

IMG_2142.jpg

Whoa.

Just sent off both my final exams to be printed by the campus copy shop, and I’m totally caught up on grading (as much as I can be before a bunch of new stuff arrives on my desk next week). But as of right now, I am completely caught up. For the first time in several months. Feels good, but I’m not sure what to do with myself, really. (Except that it’s almost 3 a.m., so probably going to bed would be an A+++ plan). 😀

Strike Averted!

 

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Awkward selfie; cool t-shirt

One of the most pressing issues on campus this semester was the possibilty of a teacher’s strike, in response to a lack of pay increases for faculty in recent years. “I don’t want to strike, but I will” was our motto, and I was 100% prepared to go on strike, if it had come to that.

In order to minimize the impact on my students, I’d arranged the schedule during the proposed strike week so my students could watch a movie on their own one of the missed days, and take an exam online on the other. (Since my classes were only taught two days a week, the impact on each individual class was relatively small). Either way, I thought this was a good compromise – allowing them to access their education even on the days when I’d cancelled class.

At the 11th hour, we got the word that a tentative agreement was reached, and the strike was cancelled. I’ll admit that I breathed a sigh of relief about that (I genuinely did not want to strike), and I’m also pleased with the way it all played out. We got much of what we wanted out of this agreement, through the time-honored process of collective bargaining. I’m proud to be a card-carrying member of the California Faculty Association.

The story below, originally posted in the Sonoma State Star, gives some additional background. (Reproduced in its entirety, as the Star doesn’t keep articles online in perpetuity): 

Faculty strike canceled, classes to continue as normal

For months, Sonoma State University faculty, staff and students held their collective breath at the prospect of a strike that was scheduled to start on Wednesday and would include all 23 campuses in theCalifornia State University system. But thanks to a last-minute agreement announced on Friday, the strike has been called off and classes will be held as usual this week. The California Faculty Association and the CSU Chancellor’s Office have reached a tentative agreement for a faculty pay raise. Originally, faculty members were asking for a 5 percent increase. The new agreement calls for a 10.5 percent raise overthe next three years.

“I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve reached a tentative agreement with the [California Faculty Association],” said CSU Chancellor Timothy White. “This agreement is great for students in so many ways, first and foremost the fact that there will not be a strike and classes will return as normal during the academic term.”

The faculty strike would have taken place over a five-day period from April 13-15 and 18-19.  Those participating would have been on strike all day, according to the CFA website. They would not be providing classes or checking emails. The strike was rooted in a disagreement between faculty and CSU administrators over a pay increase. The faculty was offered a2 percent raise.

“The staff spoke up for the 5 percent and got it,” said CFA President Jennifer Eagen, “This might be the largest strike that didn’t actually happen.”

According to a fact-finding report published March 18, faculty salaries lagged behind market comparatives in salary. All CSU funds are accounted for and the university cannot spend money it does not have, according to the same report.

According to a dissent signed on March 26 by Bradley Wells, associate vice chancellor of business and finance for the CSU, the University Panel disagreed with the fact-finding report’s proposed 5 percent increase, reporting the cost of this kind of raise would require “more than three times the available funds.”

They did agree that “a multi-year solution is necessary to address the legitimate concern over faculty salaries.”

However, in the most recent tentative agreement, there will be a faculty increase for all existing CSU faculty.  According to the CFA, the agreement calls for a 5 percent general salary increase on June 30.  Then on July 1, the faculty will receive a 2 percent increase. And on July 1, 2017 faculty will receive another3.5 percent general salary increase. The tentative agreement also calls for 2.65 percent step increases for ‘eligible faculty’ in 2017-2018.

“I commend the individuals on both sides and that there was a team effort, I heard the voices of faculty and our students,” said White, “We are able to do this without any cuts; the innovative and creative solution that the CFA crafted is moving the times around when the salary increases actually occurs.”

President of the Sonoma State Chapter of the CFA Elaine Newman believes the organization of the faculty in preparation for the strike is what motivated the CSU to reach this agreement before any further actions were taken.

“Even though we didn’t have to strike, the fact that we were so organized and so prepared to strike meant we didn’t have to,” said Newman.

The CFA website explains that the CSU Net Operating budget is around $5 billion, about $3 billion comes from the state while around $2 billion comes from student tuition and fees. The CSU also manages a reserve of about $2 billion.

The CSU preliminary budget allocation for 2016-2017 lists that the budget allocations include but are not limited to health care, maintenance of facilities, retirement, grants, system wide initiatives, and employee compensation.

According to the Associated Press, the average salary for CSU faculty is a range anywhere between an average of $96,660 to $58,265 based on if they are full time, part time, assistant professors, and lecturers.

Faculty still have to vote on this initiative in order to receive the raise.