Deans in pjs

Thought I would update you on my new teaching job.

1. The dean of my dept. lives in the same place as me - we've seen each other in pjs (and politely hurriedly passed each other in the hallway).
2. When I used a projector for teaching they had to turn on power to the entire building.
3. I can't tell what are the first and what are the last names of my students.
4. I can get dressed 15 minutes before class and run downstairs to teach.
5. At graduation many Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston songs were played.
6. I have to work with a fan sitting 1 ft away from my face (and sleep with 2 at night).
7. There seems to be only one chalk board eraser for the entire floor of classrooms.
8. Students wander in 40 minutes late.
9. They physically ousted the former academic dean a couple years ago (so I will be careful to not make too many waves).
10. I have difficulty understanding what they are saying.
11. Five thought ecology is the study of ground bark (and 2 changed their answer from the environment to ground bark).
12. They actually remembered what I taught them last week!

Teaching ecology - help!

Big news - I'm moving to Haiti for the fall to teach tropical ecology and bio labs at a small university.  Yikes!  I need help with what to teach - does anyone have a syllabus they can share?  Recommendations for text books?  The students can't afford books, but the dean said there are kindles for them to share and she'll buy me the text and kindle uploads.  Right now they copy the pertinent chapters from the books and share the copies.  I'll teach in exchange for room and board - no salary, so I'm trying to figure that part out.  Haiti's only botanical garden is there!  It's a coastal town!  They allow cats in the guest house!  I don't have to cook!  Check my facebook for the latest person I friended and you might be able to see her pics. I'll post more details on facebook when I get there (late Aug).

I join your ranks as anonymous poster of teaching conundrums.  All your posts will be a great resource as I figure this out!

Symbioses and Other Suggestions

I'm teaching Economically Important Plants this fall, and, needless to say, I want to make it the coolest class ever. Suggestions are welcome for activities, content, and readings that could help make it so.
I'm thinking of having one day (generally during the agriculture section) on soil and symbioses. I'll have them review nutrient cycles in advance (I think students really need to understand nitrogen in order to get fertilizer in order to understand any ag. issues) and we'll talk about nitrogen fixation (probably using either soybeans or peanuts for case study, possibly the cool bacteria (Anabaena?) that fixes nitrogen with the waterferns (azolla?) in rice paddies). I also want to talk about mycorrhizal associations and pollination.
At the moment, the very cool pollination associations I can think of (yucca and yucca moth, monarchs and milkweeds, bats and saguaros aren't heavy on economic importance. Honey bees are plenty important, but not as useful for cool co-evolution discussions.
Ideas? Vanilla orchids couldn't be cultivated elsewhere for lack of a very specific bee: buzz pollination and the solanaceae?
Any specific mycorrhizal associations that are interesting?
Other soil symbioses?

Newsflash!

If you did not earn over a 50% on any one of the 5 exams in class, you probably shouldn't expect to pass the class.
Your performance in other classes has no bearing on your grade in my class.*
If the state requires a life science class with lab for a degree, and you have demonstrated neither passing knowledge of non-majors biology, nor passing effort in lab and homework, you probably don't deserve to graduate, despite being a senior with only this class between you and your diploma.
Just saying.

*Whether you are a self-described "straight-A student" indignant that you could be performing at less than an A level, or a poor student about to lose financial aid, your grade in my class is based on points earned in my class (and, as it turns out, I've done the math and I know that it is not just my class that is killing your GPA. The low grades in the other classes, be they current or past classes, also contribute to your GPA). For that matter, I don't take into account how upset your parents will be or how bothered that your wife will be that you have to commute another semester to re-take lab, BUT, YOU should probably take these things into account BEFORE you decide not to study or seek help in the class you are failing.

Minor Gloat

My grades are in!

Dessert Time

Once again I ask students to look at a map of the world's biomes, pick 2, name them, tell me two characteristics of them and name an organism that lives there.
While this batch is not as funny as the frosted biome or the zebras of the tundra, we do have some new biomes this year, in addition to the ever popular desserts:
Forest, Africa, Terrestrial, Tropical, Temperate, North America (located on the tropical rain forest), South Africa, Egypt, Coniferous, Brazil, Temperate Broadleaf and my new favorite: "Freshwater" which is located on the savanna and has the characteristic of, "it has salty water".
Good times.

Off to a great start

We discussed major groups of biological molecules today. We had an in-class (ask all the questions you want) "quiz" that asked students to report a favorite breakfast and "name a carbohydrate (chemical, not the food) found in this breakfast."
How many named food items?
How many wrote "lipids" "proteins" or "nucleic acids"?
Okay, so it's not that many. 3 wrote food items (including 2, eggs and bacon, that have almost no carbs,) 5 wrote the names of the other groups of molecules, and one wrote "nitrogen." That means of attendees, 86% wrote "sucrose", "starch", "lactose" or something else that made sense.
While it angers me (although it doesn't surprise me) that I have three students blatently not reading the question, it's the "nucleic acid" or "lipids" part that really bothers me.
These are students who, in the immediately proceeding 40 minutes, just learned (strike that, use "heard"), "there are four types of biological molecules," "these types are 1) carbohydrates, 2) lipids . . . .," "we're going to talk about examples, functions and special properties of each group. Let's start with carbohydrates."
It could be just a basic not paying attention problem. But I see this often enough that I'm really beginning to worry about the level at which logic breaks down. There are (seemingly intelligent) college students who, if told "there are three states in our region," would think "Texas" is a logical answer to "Name a city in Oklahoma"*.
These are the same students who fail to understand that something can simulataneously be an insect, an animal and a eukaryote.
How does one teach that level of logic to adults?

*Bad example if there happens to be a Texas, Oklahoma, but I don't think there is.

News Little and Big

A) Classes here start Jan. 5 (12 hours from now) and I don't have an eight o'clock class (for the first time since I've started teaching) and I just moved to an office with windows. I may still be in the basement, but I have glare on my computer screen now. I am so excited.
B) If all goes well, Dianthus will have a sibling for his second birthday.
I'm telling my boss tomorrow, about which I am a little freaked out, so thought I should tell my friends first. From my limited sample size, I am concluding that queasiness and gross feelings are much worse the second (well, third) time around, which is allegedly not the norm.
Anyway, happy new year to all of you!
Check out Jennifer's new blog (linked below) and don't spurn me just because I'm not on facebook.

My grades are in

Woohoo! Woohoo!
Another semester survived.

That Exam Doesn't Sound So Good

At my current job we have an old scantron machine that makes loud (but rhythmic) clunks with every wrong answer-- something like an old typewriter with a loud background whirr. Failures tick with every wrong answer and perfect scores glide through with only a tap at the end as the score is printed.
Inexplicably, I love listening as other professors grade their exams. "Wow, that one doesn't sound so good."
In other grading news, I learned that the two characteristics of the rainfrost are "rain" and "frosted" perhaps if I hadn't just read about so many "dessert" biomes, the frosted wouldn't have made me giggle as much as it did.
Happy finals to those of you involved in academia and happy "I don't have to deal with finals" to those of you not.

"Please Do Not Throw Paper Towels and Trash on the Floor"

I feel like such a fuddy-duddy, but I find myself thinking, "What has society come to when we need signs like that in a college women's bathroom*?"
*that, incidentally, has obvious trash cans right next to the paper towel dispensers

Slimy Petals

On the 101 final, I ask for examples of defenses of the eaten ("physical defense in animal" "chemical defense in plant" and so forth) and a specific organism that displays that adapation. "Plants" "leaves" and "some trees" are all specific examples of plants.
One chemical defense of a plant is to squirt ink at attackers. Corals do this. Another is to have slimy petals. Mushrooms are the specific example of plants that has slimey petals.
I've also learned that arctic ermine can use their speed and superior fighting skills to take down polar bears. And we can help global warming by car pulling and food decreasion by not littering.
I actually am a good teacher, I swear.

6.8 Billion is reassuring

Despite the recent spate of babies among GBKs (and Norlosers, as it happens), global population is slowing down.
6,814,579,631 this morning
6,774,798,449 April 22 last year
6,663,013,026 April 22 2008
So, while one might think that adding almost 40 million people to the planet in a year* is despressing, it is truly making me giddy when I compare it to the 111.7 million that were added the year before.

*Actually 51 weeks. I am apparently doing this a week earlier. The 40 million new people are still more than 20 times the population of my state.

Not quite what I thought I signed up for

The short version just doesn't express the overall ridiculousness and fatigue involved in the situation.
Many books have gone missing from my 101 class.
The book store noticed that the same student sold back 4 books recently.
3 more books went missing in the middle of lab Thursday.
My lab instructor wants me to do something.
I have a student e-mailing me from the hospital where her grandmother is being tranferred and trying to find out how she can borrow a book since the woman she lent hers to apparently disappeared with it.
I have a student crying in my office about the state of her marriage.
I actually confront a student in the bathroom, search her book bag (she has only one book in it) and, in a scene straight from a bad movie, actually check the tampon disposals for books after she leaves.*
The rest of the lab is pissed off that I didn't nail her.
The campus security chief spontaneously contacts me. He somehow knows about book problems, but no student has come forth claiming his or her book has been stolen, so he has no victim, thus no crime and no investigation.
Two students who had given up their books as permanently loaned suddenly had them returned on Friday, although the actual books were not theirs.
I was sent a nasty e-mails for confronting a student in the bathroom when I knew she was going through a divorce.
I'm afraid the women's softball team is going to hurt the student "returning" of of their books to somebody else
I was sent a nice e-mail apologizing for the nasty e-mail when I was only trying to help.

That still doesn't convey all the ridiculousness.

*I was going to change the gender of the alleged thief, for the sake of anonymity, but that would make the bathroom scene actually more ridiculous that it actually was.

"Week ones get ait first"

Natural selection, according to one of my (very good conceptually, not so good with writing) students. One of those weak ones getting eaten in my 101 class, upset that he did poorly on a second exam, told me, "I studied my butt off for that one. I studied an hour and a half."
I'm not sure he appreciated it when I laughed at him, but I had to.
Next year I'll be with different students in a different state where I can at least fantasize nobody will get ait.

Sexual Selection book?

I need advice on a book. I'm planning on proposing a course for the Fall (yes I am crazy) on sexual selection and evolution. My current book choices are Olivia Judson's Dr. Tatiana's sex advice for all creation and most likely Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. I've been stuggling on what my other "reference" book should be for the course. These will all be non-majors and I'll be supplementing everything with some primary literature.

So - thoughts. I have Zuk's sexual selection book but haven't read it yet - although it's on my list for tonight.

Thanks!

Best Plant Ecology Topic?

If you were to teach a single class period on plant ecology (to bio majors who have had an ecology class but not a plant ecology class) in which you wanted to demonstrate both how very cool plant ecology is and what a great teacher you are, what would you teach?

Student e-mail of the day

Sent to one of my colleagues about lab* for my class: "Hi! I will not be attending class today. I will do the work in my dorm room. If we cover any thing in class today can you please write me back and let me know. I will be there next week!!"

There was not a subject line.
*It's a double lab because last week was interrupted because of a water line break.

Plant Photos and Ideas

I'm teaching a small Plant Anatomy and Morphology class in the spring. One activity I would like to have my students do is to tag plant photos so they have ample experience with the terminology before spring comes (I have dried plants and herbarium specimens as well, of course) the secondary purpose is, of course, to have a collection of tagged plant photos that I could use for future classes. Tags could range from ID to leaf shape to fruit type . . . depending on the plant and the photo.
Questions:
1) Any suggestions for how to do this-- set up a web page, flickr, blog, something else?
2) Have any photos to contribute (of course collection of tagged would be available to you as well)?

(simple, lobed, crenate)

Deciding Vote, Baby Classes and Student Success

My vote (or my vote and My Mister's vote) truly counted in my town's recent mayoral election. A former student running for mayor won 56 to 55 to 43 as a write-in candidate. While I'm glad I voted and think that it is pretty cool to have a vote that definitely mattered, it makes me feel uncomfortably responsible for the fate of my town over the next several years.
In other news, the Mister and I attended an all-day child birth class on Saturday. Two of the three other future mothers have been my students (and one of the dads), including the one I kicked out of class and who ate the poisonous plant in lab (and was well enough to play softball that night but not take my test the next morning). The Mister has had two of these students also and will likely have the other two in the future. Frankly it's weird to be practicing breast feeding positions in front of students, whether recent graduates or future students. It also made me very glad it was not a multi-week course (because it's not an insignificant drive to the hospital), which I had been sorta hoping for as a means of befriending other expectant parents. While I had figured that the it was much more likely that attendees would be my students' age, I didn't actually expect them to be my students.
Oh the "success" part is that even though the mayor-elect dropped my class, she is now mayor and even though the texting-poisonous plant eating student was a complete idiot in my class, she appears to be handling expectant pregnancy as a competent adult.