I’ve written about Evernote before (Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote), and it’s time for an update. I’d been feeling as though my organizational system wasn’t quite working as efficiently as I want it to – I can’t always find things easily when I want them – so I went looking to see how other people are using the program. After being inspired by some Evernote gurus (particularly Michael Hyatt and Thomas Honeyman), I decided to make a HUGE leap, away from notebooks, and to using tags as my primary tool for organizing my notes. With more than 16,000 notes in my system, it’s somewhat daunting to think about making this change, but I’m going to take the plunge anyway.
Read moreSummer School – Day 7 – Darwin and Natural Selection
Started out the day by picking up where I left off on my Darwin lecture, and then moved on to adaptations, and the principles of natural selection. I frame most of this discussion around the Oldfield Mice experiment, partly because it’s a perfect example of a scientific study that demonstrates the effects of selection on populations, but also because the mice are so cute! I end up using these mice as an example all the way through evolution and speciation, so I have a bunch of slides I’ve animated showing all sorts of things happening to the mice. (Selective forces, like being caught by a hawk when the fur doesn’t match the substrate; and, later, random forces, like severe weather).
Oh! I almost forgot to mention that this is the lecture where I reveal probably the single most important biology fact of all . . . the secret connection between Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. It’s common knowledge that they were born on the exact same day (February 12, 1809), but I’ve uncovered a surprising bit of information that is much less well known . . . the image below should make it obvious what I’m talking about (all photos were found on the internet, so obviously they must be completely legit).
Read moreSummer School – Day 6 – Inheritance
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.
Read moreSummer School – Day 5 – Cell Division
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
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)
Read moreSummer School – Day 3 – Energy for Life
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
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
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.
Read more“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.
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”).
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