Even in Kyoto

Every spring, I teach a freshman seminar course where the main goal of the course is to learn how to navigate the primary research literature. For the nuts and bolts of the course, I pick a theme, and then we read four primary research articles related to the theme.

Some themes are easier than others. Last year's theme was challenging: thermal biology. This might not sound like a challenging theme, but it was. I wanted to include papers on both vertebrates and invertebrates, ectotherms and homeotherms. There are a lot of papers with oodles of gene expression data in them, but those are can only be so interesting.

In any case, mulling over potential themes for this year, I decided it might be interesting to do The Biology of Sleep. Off the top of my head I recalled hearing about a study demonstrating that jumping spiders engage in REM sleep. How cool is that?

...several minutes later, I've found three other awesome papers as well. One on frigatebirds, who sleep while flying, one on strategic sleeping in honey bees, and one in fruit flies that explored flies who sleep a ton vs. flies who only sleep a little.

I think the students are going to really get into this topic. We shall see.

I might actually be treading water okay this semester?

Time will tell.

Regatta season is always hectic.

I am being very proactive with my General Biology students this fall. That means approximately a zillion emails flying through the ether, as I chase down students who aren't showing up for class and aren't saying anything about it, and respond to students who are sick and missing class and nervous about what they're missing. In the meantime, there's a really fun NYT article that just came out about a situation where a student petition/complaints got an Organic Chemistry professor fired for being "too hard." I saw a small snippet of the ensuing commentary over on the Tweet-machine, but only just read the article itself today.

Teaching philosophy matters in all of this. It sounds like the professor at hand could maybe have worked on his bedside manner, but there's also another part of me that comes back to the point that certain subjects and certain careers are more challenging and less forgiving of errors than others. Medicine is one such field. In the long run we don't do anyone any favors if we pass the buck on medical training. As I will say to students (en masse), I don't want to go to a doctor's office, see a former student walk into the room, and have to think to myself, "Good heavens, why did I let them pass???!!!"

In any case, I fully believe that it's possible to hold students to a high standard and encourage them to develop the skills needed to meet that high standard. I also do think things got really wonky on this front during the pandemic. More than anything, standards and expectations were lowered, and have subsequently been very uneven.

I am very curious, though, about how good the evidence is for the assertion that if you hold people to a higher standard, they will rise to meet that expectation. It's an idea trotted out frequently, but is it well tested? I can only think of anecdata.

Related to all this, while out in the wild* I recently bumped into a couple former students who are now in their first year of medical school. They were getting set up to study on a Saturday morning. Their chief remark was that the first year of med school was much harder than their studies as undergrads. They were both fairly good students, so it was useful to hear them say as much, because now I can also relay that point back to our current students to help them develop the appropriate mindset moving forward.



*wild = local coffeeshop

I repotted the purple passion plant and the prayer plant so they're ready for their glam shot:


Also pictured is a philodendron, to round out this photo of plants whose names begin with the letter "P." These clash mightily with the red poinsettia.

Here's my new Lithiops/succulent protection system:


And an update on the Little Jade that Could:


Looking good, little jade, looking good.

-

Meanwhile, in other lab/office news, last week was all a flurry because I'm always needing to order lab supplies and animals far enough in advance for them to arrive for lab, factoring in such things as, "We only collect and ship our cow's blood on Wednesdays," "This vendor doesn't accept tax-exempt forms," "This vendor has a minimum order amount of $70," and the occasional winter ice storm.

Anyway, the blood for next Tuesday's lab *did* show up, hopefully not too early, but there were questions about the arrival prospects for the horseshoe crabs, also for lab. We'll be comparing the oxygen saturation curves for the respiratory pigments in Limululs blood as compared to bovine blood (hemocyanin vs. hemoglobin).

Last year, I ordered medium horseshoe crabs. Here's our sole remaining survivor from last year. I tried to include my hand for a sense of scale, but I'm afraid with the angle you can't really tell; it's about the size of a small dinner plate:



So I thought, "Ehh, I probably don't need medium horseshoe crabs. I can probably get away with small ones instead."

So here's what showed up today:


I really don't think I can safely bleed these little cuties at this size.





So now they're in the saltwater flow-through tank, and if we've actually managed to improve/perfect our husbandry methods, maybe in another year or two they'll be big enough for lab. The old survivor is the longest we've kept one alive here so far, and we've just made a couple critical changes to the flow-through tank that should be helpful. So we'll see.

So, new lab plan: oxygen binding curves for cow blood only. Sad trombone, because getting to do both pigment types was way more interesting.

What do you suppose is the best cure for a grading hangover?

When I have to grade student writing, I have to spend a lot of mental energy trying to picture how a student is thinking about a topic, and then try to think about how to articulate where they're being ineffective at communicating whatever it is they want to communicate / are supposed to communicate. It. I can feel it at night when my brain shuts off and can no longer engage in this effort; fighting this is like trying to win a footrace in molasses, so I generally just stop, go to sleep, and then try to get up early to resume efforts as soon as I can.

For papers for the current course, I also meet for an hour one-on-one with each student to review the feedback I'm giving them and help them plan out a roadmap for revising their writing. This also requires considerable attention and cognitive effort, and is thus also draining.

I think that's why I fell asleep at 8 pm last night. But then I woke up at 3:30, my brain trying to think about all the other things I haven't been thinking about while I've been thinking about student writing.

In any case, I should be through the worst of this now. Hopefully. There's still plenty to do, just not so much draft-grading. I do still feel like I'm going to just fall on the couch at the end of this semester and sleep for a couple of days, except I'd really like to be doing other things and the spring semester always starts up way too soon.

So how would you cure a grading hangover?

I don't remember if I've specifically mentioned this here or not, but this fall I am teaching a lab section of our General Biology I course. The past three falls, I have taught one or two lecture sections, but have never had a chance to teach the lab. That made it difficult for me to understand how the lecture and lab should fit together. So - now I get to start remedying that.

One thing that I learned last spring is that it is extremely helpful for students if I make a short introductory video for each lab that I teach, where I can demonstrate the correct technique for doing something or using a certain piece of instrumentation. I think these videos wind up being WAY more engaging than lecture videos where a person is trying to teach concepts; lecture videos are much harder to get right.

Anyway, General Biology here is one of those courses where there are a whole bunch of different lecture sections and a whole bunch of lab sections. So the teaching experience is much more similar to my teaching experiences as a graduate student where we were put in charge of labs but had some organizational oversight from a lab coordinator. Whether they know it or not, students here are very lucky to have professors teaching labs rather than graduate students (no knock against the graduate students - it just takes time to get the experience that makes teaching more effective!).

A lab to teach students the basics of microscopy is standard fare for most General Biology courses. When I taught it in Arizona, I was always a little frustrated by how the lab would go, because we'd do a few things to cover the basics, and then some weeks later when we came back to use microscopes again to look at some actual things, the students would all have amnesia and we'd have to show them how to use the scopes all over again.

Students here are set up better for success. For one thing, instead of looking at the letter "e" from newsprint, we're looking at real cells right away. For another thing, every student has their own scope. And for a third thing, we just got brand-new compound microscopes this year. And for a fourth thing, we have our very own Scanning Electron Microscope in an instrumentation center here and the students get to operate it during this lab!

So anyway, here's what I put together for the students in terms of a short video on how to use a compound microscope, for your edutainment since I don't actually think my students are going to watch it, because reasons (already shared on other social media):



And here are some fun photos of the things the students got to prepare slides for, look at, and learn how to measure. Whoever came up with the idea to task students with measuring cells of different sizes was a genius, because this activity forces students to actually learn how to use the scopes, AND it gives them direct experience with looking at and thinking about cells of different sizes.

It's also fun to take photos through the microscope ocular lens. So here we go.

Onion skin: Take a slice of onion, snap it so it's only connected by a single layer of skin, then peel off that skin and stick it on a slide. Best with red onions:




Euglena! These guys move around pretty quickly, so as one student put it, it's kind of like watching animated wallpaper:



I took this photo through the ocular lens that has the ocular micrometer in it - the tiny ruler that gets used to measure sizes of things.

The euglena are blurry at a higher magnification because they move too fast for the camera.



Here's a Blepharisma, in between the numbers 10 and 11 on the ocular micrometer:


Do you see it now? Also a swimmer. So twee!



We also had some strained yogurt that contained both Lactobacillus (rod-shaped) and Streptococcus (spherical). This photo is at the highest-possible magnification with these scopes, 400x:



If you're having a hard time understanding this photo, know that students also had a hard time finding these microbes and measuring them, because they are so TINY, even at the highest magnification. There's also hardly any Lactobacillus in the image above. Very different to view them through a scope vs. just glancing at photographs.

For working the SEM, the students looked at fern spores, Drosophila, and Daphnia. To get them thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of different microscope types, we also set up compound microscopes where they could view the same specimens. I don't have any of the SEM images, but here are those three things under the compound scope:









The Daphnia are pretty darned cute, and were fun because they were very active, too.

I don't have the exact time but it wasn't later than 8:31 or 8:32 because I got all of the exams handed out by 8:35, and gave the students until 10:35, which only seems fair.

Because our administration decided to omit the usual Reading Day between the end of classes and start of finals, I decided to make the exam open-note. It will be interesting to grade it and observe the outcomes.

But I think I will wait until Monday to work on grading it. At this point I am just hoping to have enough personal time this afternoon to go to the hardware store. Before I can do that I need to clean the cricket colonies. Ordinarily I do that on Fridays but I had to spend yesterday finishing exam-writing and getting caught up on cleaning the cricket bins because I failed to get that project done earlier in the week.

A friend who is a NP just posted about how they have only been able to shift out of "go" mode as of about a week ago, and about realizing that the emotional process of unpacking everything is not going to happen on any kind of tidy timetable.

A different friend commented on an Inside Higher Ed Article about reclaiming summer break to note that we can't just take a couple of days off and expect to bounce back.

I keep thinking about that "It's a marathon, not a sprint" idea for how one must approach the path to tenure in academia. Okay, sure, but what if there's a sudden thunderstorm that pops up at mile 8, with thunder, lightning, and hail? You're going to have to keep moving to stay warm.

And when you work with living animals, the clock never stops.

Tuesdays always feel like they're rearing up and smacking me across the forehead.

Especially when the lab prep is finicky and something goes wrong and I don't know what it is.

I might have these labs figured out after about 10 years of doing them. We shall see.

One of the problems is that today's lab involves studying ion transport across frog skin, but the anaesthetic I'm required to use is a (voltage-dependent) ion channel blocker. I don't know whether it interferes with the ion channels found in frog skin, but from the morning lab's data it seems like there's a good chance it does.

Another problem is that it's impossible to ever wake up early enough before these labs to get ready for them.

For instance, when I got to campus this morning, I discovered that the ice machine was out, with a note taped to it.

It's a little hard to just come up with ice on the spot.

I have been observing a troubling number of mental lapses I've been making this spring - the salinity miscalculation being just one such example. On another occasion, I made a mistake on the order of events during the heart cycle (atrial filling before atrial systole!). And then there was the muddling of the definitions for endothermy and homeothermy, and a recent lecture where I started out talking about caribou but then couldn't remember the extent to which "caribou" is synonymous with "reindeer." (Finally looking it up just now, that was fine. Whew. Still, troubling!!)

I have to hold myself to high standards on these matters because I'm holding my students to high standards. I expect them to be very sensitive to discrepancies between how material is presented and taught to them and the meticulousness expected of them on assessments. That would be true for you, too, right? Stupid teachers asking demanding and meticulous questions tend to come across as malicious.

I think the origin of these issues has to do with demand hardening. (I'm still so grateful to the book A Great Aridness (DeBuys) for introducing me to the concept.) The problem is that I am still too good at filling my schedule too full, leaving me with an inadequate amount of flexibility to rest and attend to the niggling details that are easy to put off. But the world NEEDS things like the bicycling class and rowing program. So.

A lot of the lecture slip-ups are also because I'm not immersed in the lecture material in the same way this year as last year or the year prior. I'll get better at those parts over time, but I'm not there yet. And in certain ways, recording the material as lecture videos last year messed things up, too: the delivery of course content through lecture videos is very different from the delivery via live lectures, so I'm reverting back to materials from 2019 as much as from 2020.

I haven't tried to go back and provide students with the lecture videos this semester. My sense is that they wouldn't help, because my general sense is that students aren't learning a ton from lecture videos (though they might think that they do in many cases). When I have more breathing room I'm hoping to learn more about whether I'm right in thinking that it can work for a student to have maybe 1 or 2 classes taught in a "flipped" format at most. This thinking is tied to what I've observed for the rise and fall of the MOOCs.

It is going to be really interesting to see whether this group of students winds up giving me the same longer-term feedback as the students from the first year of teaching. One of the 2019 students in particular has commented on just how much they remembered from my course, which must therefore stand in contrast to how much they feel they remembered from their other coursework. This probably isn't just a product of my teaching approaches, although it's nice to think they might contribute. I do think that it has to do with the quiz/exam course structure and format forcing them to study every week.

But they might not give me that feedback for other reasons. We are all still coping with extra mental overhead due to the pandemic, and that really showed clearly in student performance on the first midterm exam. They just aren't all fully able to drill in and be as meticulous and precise as I'd like, and in informal conversation it's clear they are really struggling to remember what they're learning. I think this is also a direct consequence of trying to function at a heightened level of stress. Stress impairs memory formation. For acute stress, this is protective, but for chronic stress it's a problem.

To call this a hectic week wouldn't do it justice.

On Monday, packages arrived containing a whole bunch of takeaway containers, and four of those under-bed plastic storage bins.

A good thing, too, because we needed the takeaway containers for lab on Tuesday: it was the week for starting our project on nutrition and exercise in crickets, and the takeaway containers are housing for the crickets, as previously illustrated.

I had a set of takeaway containers from 2 years ago, but then made the mistake of loaning them to myself in another course, and so now I have a bunch of lids for takeaway containers that I'm never going to get back.

Oh well.

On Thursday morning, I somewhat frantically biked over to the Home Despot in the desperate hope that they would have an ample supply of terra cotta pots. Thankfully, they did, because later that day, another package arrived, containing two dozen live crayfish as well as a dozen live frogs.

Here's what it looks like when you get live crayfish shipped to you:


(well, after you've opened the box inside of the box)

I'm grateful for my time as a ceramicist, because that means that I know a lot about how to cut ceramics and I also own the appropriate diamond-bit tools for the job. Sometime later in the day on Thursday, I had a set of hiding spots for crayfish:



but avoided giving myself silicosis or other troubles related to cutting terra cotta:


Crayfish in one of their bins:


(I think I need to create some bin dividers, though, so they don't attack each other nonstop)

Crayfish bins in front, frog bins in back:


Opening up a box of a dozen frogs is...an experience. None of them escaped too far, at least.

On Friday I learned that crayfish can sometimes climb the "Hang on back" styles of filters:


I learned this because a colleague who teaches another class in the Animal Phys lab came up to me at the end of her lab on Friday with a crayfish in a makeshift container. It had apparently escaped overnight and was wandering around the lab where her students noticed it in the morning. They collected it up and named it "Nephron" because they were in the midst of learning about kidney function.

I still need to figure out the best kind of pump/filtration system for the crayfish in the bins. There were a bunch of sponge pump/filter things in the lab, but as best as I can tell they aren't really doing much for the crayfish. I am probably going to get rid of them soon because I think they're mostly just taking up space at this point.

Somewhat related: my Bicycling class this past Tuesday was a bicycling rodeo to have students check their bike handling skills. So the Thursday trip to the Home Despot was actually the second trip in a week - on Sunday I went searching for sidewalk chalk and struck out, so I decided to at least purchase a couple of traffic cones.

The traffic cones amuse me greatly, for a long list of reasons. My research lab space is pretty junky and full, but it makes me so happy to have traffic cones, a big roll of brown kraft paper, a GOOD Dremel, and the drill press in there, among no small number of other things.



There are three bicycles back there right now, and my good bike stand plus a cheapo crappy bike stand out of frame.

Eventually I'll probably move out more of the plant ecology supplies that I don't plan on using, at least.

I got a Fruit-tablet this spring to test out as an alternative tool for teaching and grading, under the theory that maybe the people claiming that it plus its electronic stylus actually are New and Improved Tools, are correct.

There are plenty of howto videos on the You-Boober for how to work such a setup, in case a person wants to waste hours of precious grading time on scrubbing through them.

So far I am failing to be impressed. If anything, the cumbersome interface is causing me to be much more terse than I am with the equivalent computer interface. And I don't have a way to position it ergonomically.

I guess I tried.