Summer School – Day 6 – Inheritance

July 5, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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:

“Can two brown-haired people have a blond baby?”
“Why do I have green eyes and my sister has blue eyes?”
“Do twins have the exact same DNA?”
“What are the genes that determine how you look?”
“Can you choose which traits your child will have?”

We also talk about pedigree analysis, and inherited diseases, and Punnett squares (okay, they don’t usually love Punnett squares haha). But still, loads of cool stuff! My lectures on the topic are pretty well set, but I needed to figure out some lab activities. The one activity I use with my lecture-only course is designed as a homework activity, but it was pretty simple to restructure it into a rotation lab. I also found a few additional things for them to do, and explore the subject of inheritance.

Summer School – Day 5 – Cell Division

July 4, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

Today? The wonders of cell division! In lecture, I framed mitosis in the context of cancer: in order to understand unregulated cell growth, we need to understand how cells operate the rest of the time. As for meiosis, that’s the gateway to understanding reproduction. (Or maybe reproduction is the gateway to understanding meiosis? Either way, they’re intimately connected). This is a pretty important concept in biology, and while I don’t think they’ll need to be able to remember all the little details on into the future, I did want them to have a really clear understanding of what happens during cell division, so we attacked it in a variety of different ways.

First: A draw-along. I interrupted lecture, and asked them all to pull out a piece of paper. Then, using Skitch on my computer, I drew out the phases of mitosis, and had them draw along with me.

Summer School – Day 4 – Anatomy and Physiology

July 3, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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. Here are the Pictionary terms we used:

ATP and ADP	Bacterial Cell	Carbohydrates	Correlation vs causation
Experimental control	Golgi Apparatus	Independent variable	Inputs of Cellular Respiration
Inputs of Photosynthesis	Mitochondria	Osmosis	Phospholipid bilayer
Plant Cell	Polarity	Potential vs kinetic energy	Ribosomes

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember to take pictures of their drawings, but I’ve reconstructed a few of them below. Can you figure out which of the terms up above are represented here? (Answers at the bottom of the post)

Summer School – Day 3 – Energy for Life

June 29, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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.

Summer School – Day 2 – Chemistry

June 28, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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:

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.

Summer School – Day 1 – The Process of Science

June 27, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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.

“Live Blogging” Summer School

June 25, 2017June 27, 2017 - Wendy Leave a comment

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)

May 25, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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”).

Art Gallery Visit

May 6, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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.

Field Trip!

May 4, 2017June 27, 2024 - Wendy Leave a comment

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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