Category: Blog Post

Summer School – Day 3 – Energy for Life

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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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Summer School – Day 2 – Chemistry

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The theme for today? CHEMISTRY! The morning’s lecture covered the chemistry of water, as well as organic molecules, followed by the WEIRD WATER lab, which was super duper fun! In the afternoon, we had a detergent boat regatta, and then went on a whirlwind “Tour of the Cell,” before which I activate a shrink ray in the classroom. (I have to shrink the entire class at the start of the tour, so we’re small enough to take a submarine ride through a plant cell).

I couldn’t remember quite what we did during last year’s Weird Water lab (Derek and I co-taught the course last summer, and he came up with that activity), so I put together a bunch of new stuff. It was a rotation lab with six stations:

  1. The Structure of Water, where they built water molecules out of gum drops and toothpicks. I especially loved listening to them work out how the molecules should fit together. I had each group make two or three water molecules, and then link them up with those made by the previous groups.
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Summer School – Day 1 – The Process of Science

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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.

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“Live Blogging” Summer School

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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.

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

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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”).

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Art Gallery Visit

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Yesterday morning, we took the Science 120 students to this year’s BFA Exhibition in the university art gallery – a collection of works by students getting ready to graduate from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program. The motivation for this visit was to allow our students – who have spent the past semester designing, performing, and presenting scientific experiments – to get a feeling for the ways in which carrying out an art project may be different, or similar, to the process of science.

Our visit was graciously hosted by Art Department Chair Greg Roberts, along with three of the artists featured in the exhibition: Carley Herrera, Shannon Edwards, and Mindy Kral. The artists had agreed to speak with our students, to give them an overview of the creative process, from each of their individual perspectives.

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Field Trip!

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Lovely

Today, I took my Conservation Biology students on a spontaneous field trip, and it was wonderful!

We were talking about invasive species, fish in particular, and when a picture of a carp popped up in my powerpoint, I remembered that a few weeks ago, Director of Landscaping Sam Youney had mentioned to me that there are some huge koi living in the campus lakes. When I told the class that there are huge fish (2 – 3 feet long, at least) in the Art and Commencement Lakes, they were skeptical . . . so I decided that we’d go on an impromptu field trip, to see if we could find them. (We were hitting the point during lecture where I usually stop to give the class a stretch break anyway, so we just took a somewhat extended stretch break). 🙂

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2017 Science Symposium

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Jessi, Caroline, Jana, and Wendy
Science Symposium 2017
Science Symposium 2017

One of my favorite annual events happened today: the annual Science Symposium on campus, part of the campus-wide Symposium of Research and Creativity. I love it for so many reasons, but mostly to see my students – dressed up in their good clothes – standing with their posters and talking about the research they performed during the past year. There’s a great energy and excitement about the event . . . to be honest, I don’t even mind the last minute flurry of crises that inevitably appear as we’re all trying to get our posters ready to be printed in time for the symposium.

I’ve been involved with this event in some way from its very first year, in 2013, when it was created as a way for students in the Science 120 course (a freshman year experience for students interested in STEM fields) to showcase the independent projects they’d completed during the Spring semester. Back then, they all gave oral presentations, and the poster session was relatively small. Since then, however, the event has shifted away from being focused on Science 120, and opened up to the entire campus. Today, one of the ballrooms was opened up as large as possible, and the room was FILLED with student posters. (My Science 120 students no longer do oral presentations at the event . . . they presented posters in the main hall. We’ll be hosting a separate presentation event for them on the last day of the semester).

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Investiture of Dr. Judy Sakaki, Part 2

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So many things have happened this week, and I have several blog posts to write (mostly about Earth Week events). I thought I’d post this one first, since I already posted Part 1, here.

I’d never attended an investiture before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, other than the fact that included a ceremony to confer the “authority and symbols of high office” to the new president, in this case a medallion presented by CSU Chancellor Timothy White. It’s a tradition that’s been carried down from the middle ages, meant to signal the beginning of a new era for the university and campus community. I was certainly happy to see this taking place, as I’m really optimistic and excited about having Dr. Sakaki as our new president, especially after meeting her face-to-face, briefly, last semester. That’s a story that’s probably worth telling, especially today . . .

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