I’m in a fog today, so I decided to do mindless things for a day. Would you believe I got the syllabi done for Spring term classes all done? I was in the right state of mind to work through a calendar and update my schedule. I even submitted it all to the division secretary! I hope she survives the shock, she usually has to nag me to get it done.
I also got my schedule all mapped out. I’m going to have Fridays free of all classes, and you know what that means: Friday will be SpiderDay!
Monday and Wednesday won’t be bad, either. Although, realistically, a lot of that blank space will get chewed up with committees and other work.
Yesterday I caught a bus to town. Then I caught a bus back again. What is it about English and plurals?
But keep enjoying your aranchnids. or even arachnidae, and that’s from an arthropophobe.
Hi PZ– If your genetics class and lab syllabi aren’t set in stone, you might think about incorporating this in the curriculum: http://sim.fpscgenetics.org/. Called GameteMaker, it’s an anatomically correct gene mapping sim, freely available, that uses pics of alternative phenotypic outcomes that result from segregation within F2 plant populations of variant (Mendelian) alleles, images of actual PCR-based molecular marker assay results as would be observed in agarose gels, and challenges your students to infer the genetic linkage relationship between markers at known genetic and physical map positions to the causative locus at hitherto unknown location within the Brassica rapa (think fast plants but self-compatible and highly inbred, and so a better model system for genetics education in the age of genomics.
Yeah, it’s my creation and I am perhaps overly proud of it, but it seems to work very well to help students to make the conceptual link between observed phenotype and underlying, DNA sequence-based, genotype.