I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.
I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.
My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.
Then summer arrives. I have big plans.
Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.
Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.
Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.
Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFAJoin us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.
It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.