Archive for the 'Education'

It was the last day of classes for us. I brought donuts. Dammit, I just realized I missed a golden opportunity. I should have talked to them about Thrive and Pivar and Fleury and Andrulis. Crackpot fringe developmental biologists all seem to have a thing for donuts. Rats. Well, I’ll just send all my students an email and tell them they have to come back. They don’t even realize the importance of our little snack together.

After our disastrous chick lab — it turns out that getting fertilized chicken eggs shipped to remote Morris, Minnesota during a blizzard is a formula for generating dead embryos — the final developmental biology lab for the semester is an easy one. I lectured the students on structuralism and how there are more to cells then genes (there’s also cytoplasm and membranes and environment) earlier today. This afternnon I’ve given them recipes for soap bubble solution and told them to play. They’re supposedly making little model multicellular organisms by chaining soap bubbles together, and observing how the membranes follow rules of organization just like the ones we see in living tissue. In case you’re wondering what the recipe is so you can do it too, here’s my bubble soap formula: 5ml Dawn dishwashing soap 100ml DI water 1ml glycerine It gets better as it ages — there are perfumes and a small amount of alcohol solvent in the dishwashing liquid which evaporate off with time. The students are playing with concentrations, and if you’re making it up fresh and don’t want to wait until tomorrow, you can increase the concentrations of soap and glycerine. The more glycerine you add, the more long-lasting the bubbles are…and unfortunately, the heavier they are. If you want bubbles that will waft gently on the breeze, you’ll want less glycerine. It’s a very forgiving recipe, just play. I’ve also provided the students with a couple of books: the classic Soap Bubbles: Their Colors and Forces Which Mold Them by C.V. Boys, and The Science of Soap Films and Soap Bubbles by Cyril Isenberg. They’re more about math and physics, but they have some nice illustrations. These are projects you can do at home with cheap ingredients bought at the grocery store, so those of you with kids might try playing with it this summer. There are simple rules about the angles of intersection...
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Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn’t teach them, and gave them a reading list for the summer. (I know, there’s no way they’re going to take these to the beach, but maybe when they move on in their careers they’ll remember that little reference in their notes and look it up.) So here are the books I told them to go read. We’ve been all up in the evo-devo house this semester, so I urged them to read the antidote, just to get some perspective. This is the great big book all the grown-up developmental biologists read and admire and regard as gloriously wrong in many ways, but still an important reminder that physical and chemical properties of whole cells and organisms matter — it’s not all genes. And of course that legendary book is On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. I tell all my students that if ever they want to get serious about developmental biology, they must read Thompson. For the more modern gang who like computers and math and logic puzzles, I point them at At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity and The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart A. Kauffman. He’d really benefit from more time in a wet lab, but still, there’s some very provocative stuff in those books about how complexity can spontaneously arise. I also gave them a bit of an introduction to NK network theory. There is always a philosopher or two in the class, so for them I suggest that they read The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution by Susan Oyama. Developmental Systems Theory suffers for its lack of applicability — it really is a little too abstract for most scientists — but I love...
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This is not a very exciting video, but I might just inflict it on my cell biology students in the fall. We got a fair amount of flak from students last time around who were frustrated when labs didn’t work like a recipe from a cookbook — yet that’s how science usually proceeds, with lots of tinkering and frustration and repetition. I also like his point about how teaching is important for science (although the students won’t really care about that.) I don’t think I really got the breadth of my discipline until I had to master it in order to teach it — there’s nothing quite like the panic behind “I’ve got to lecture for an hour on vesicle transport tomorrow!” to focus the mind wonderfully on a subject you might have found of only passing interest previously. (via Sandwalk.)

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles’ Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ I’ve been terrible about updating everyone about my class the last few weeks — we’re coming up on the end of the semester, so I’ve been going a little bit mad. We’ve been focusing on vertebrate development lately, and right now we’ve got a few dozen fertilized chicken eggs sitting in an incubator and developing embryos. Maybe. It is always a real pain to get these things delivered to remote Morris, Minnesota — I delayed this part of the lab to the very end of the semester, hoping the sun would emerge and warm the hemisphere enough that when UPS took their sweet time getting them to me, they wouldn’t freeze in the back of the truck. As usual, though, next day delivery turned into two day delivery, and we haven’t seen Spring yet. So we’ll soon know whether they survived their harrowing journey through the frigid Northlands, and if they haven’t, I’ll have to throw up my hands and cry. Or I could torture my students to ease my frustration. Yeah, that’s the ticket. So it’s exam day. Developmental Biology Exam #3 This is a take-home exam. You are free and even encouraged to discuss these questions with your fellow students, but please write your answers independently — I want to hear your voice in your essays. Also note that you are UMM students, and so I have the highest expectations for the quality of your writing, and I will be grading you on grammar and spelling and clarity of expression as well as the content of your essays and your understanding of the concepts. Answer two of the following three questions,...
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