Sometimes, when you’re teaching simple Mendelian genetics you have to make up fictitious scenarios, because real genetics is significantly more complicated than introductory students can handle. It’s an approach with pitfalls, though, because you don’t want students to think they can use your toy examples to model reality. There’s also a history of bad genetics misapplied to imply that genetics is reducible to pairs of alleles with only dominant and recessive relationships. I’ve invented simple Mendelian models for my classes, but I usually do something like make a story problem with Martians to avoid any confusion with reality.
But then, some genetics teachers, like Alex Nguyen of Luther Burbank High School invent story problems with a) imaginary human traits, b) traits that correspond to racist stereotypes, and c) assign them to specific, named students in the school. That’s not only misleading, it’s unethical. It’s shamefully bad pedagogy.
Here are some sample questions he actually used in a genetics test. These questions were so bad that a student quickly reported it to the school administration, and within ten minutes the principal showed up to confiscate the exam. And Nguyen tried to continue the test by projecting the questions on an overhead projector! I guess he didn’t get the message.
In high school, there are individuals who are cross-eyed like (the name of a student) and (another name of a student), which is a dominant trait. We call those individuals ‘weirdoes.’ So, if you crossed two weirdoes (the two students named again), that are heterozygous for being cross-eyed, what is the offspring that would result?
Crossed eyes are not a strongly heritable trait, and calling students “weirdos”?
For some reason, the African American culture has influenced most of the student body. How? In African Americans, they have a gene for the pimp walk, which is dominant. What is the result if you cross (student name) homozygous dominant Latina with a homozygous recessive Hmong like (student name)?
“Pimp walk” is not a heritable trait, the Hmong don’t have an unusual walk, and why is he tying this to a Latina student?
Here at the wonderful school of LBHS, we have certain students who love to sleep in class,” the question said. “I even see students fall asleep during exams! Can you believe that?! I don’t like it when students sleep in class… it’s rude! So, WAKE THE #$%K UP! Well, through much study, I have concluded that the gene for falling asleep is dominant. Not only that some students sleep, they snore in class. This too is a dominant trait. What are the possible offspring if you cross a homozygous sleeping, heterozygous snoring student (student name) with a homozygous attentive, non-snoring (student name) student?
Oh god. Do I need to say it? These are not heritable traits.
Human heredity can be very complicated when dealing with SO many traits. Luckily for you, the most that we have dealt with are two trait combinations. Every person on earth has certain body and shapes and this includes their facial structure. Some people have an oval facial structure like (student name) and other people can have a round face like (student name) while others may exhibit a square facial structure like (student name). That is why we make so many different shapes and sizes of glasses. While focusing on facial struct, we also have to consider people’s heights. There are tall people like (student name), mediaum and short people. Determine all possible offspring when (student name) RrTt person is crossed with an (student name) rrTT person.
Well, good for him for introducing dihybrid traits, but things like the shape of the face are polygenic, and not reducible to a simple Mendelian allele, and height has a huge environmental component.
Alex Nguyen was swiftly placed on administrative leave, and replaced with a substitute the next day. The “investigation” continues, but I don’t see why — they’ve caught him red-handed, they’ve got the exam he distributed, they should just fire him for racism and incompetence. And he’s been teaching for over a decade? That tells me there is something deeply wrong about the teaching of genetics in public schools.
Is bad judgment and making a complete ass of oneself a heritable trait? If so, is it dominant or reccessive?
I know practically nothing about genetics, but even I would recognize these aren’t well constructed problems. And genetics aside, it doesn’t take a degree in education to know you don’t reference students by name as examples of traits and make disparaging remarks about them in the test. It’s difficult to believe he has been doing tests like that for 10 years, particularly given the rapid response of his students to this test. It’s almost like he was trying to get fired.
It’s a sad irony that this happened at a school named for Luther Burbank. He made many contributions to agriculture through selective breeding.
Wiki intro:
Notably, his ‘Russet Burbank’ potato hybrid was specifically developed in response to the Irish potato blight and resulting famine.
Sounds like he just was fishing to get fired. Either because he is completely burned out and angry at his students or he wants to be the next “victim of cancel culture” and get a job on some right wing media platform. Too bad he wants to slam some high school kids just to blow off steam (or worse get a new career as a professional public jerk).
He is also having students imagine and speculate about offspring named students might have together. Yet another terrible idea.
I do not recall anyone falling asleep in any class I had at school – in nursery and infants we did have time set aside for after lunch naps – I think Alex Nguyen should consider that the quality of his teaching might be responsible for students napping. It’s rude to force anyone to listen to an hour of boring, bad teaching.
The questions are so bad, and so inappropriate that it seems there must be something else going on, maybe like robro suggests he wanted to get fired.
Stephen Jay Gould in the essay “Does the Stoneless Plum Instruct the Thinking Reed” from “Dinosaur in a haystack” highlights Luther Burbank’s views on “liberal eugenics”, and how Burbank was a Lamarkian. A copy of the 1992 essay is at https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory190101unse/page/288/mode/2up?q=%22Instruct+the+thinking+reed%22 – immediately after a lengthy essay on global warming.
You couldn’t invent a teacher as bad as this!
But is Quayle-ish “potatoes-ing” words genetically tied to overt racism?
Ugh. Year after year you keep saying that or the equivalent. I wish you’d stop, you are actually smarter than that.
Burbank’s book The Training of the Human Plant
is available on Google Books. Originally published in 1907, it is a collection of lectures and essays that stress the importance of careful nurturing, nutrition, and environmental management to the development of vigorous plant selections, and then goes on to apply those principles to raising human beings.
Lamarckian vs Mendelian was controversial science to people who knew nothing about genes and DNA. If you read Burbank, he is actually describing epigenetic effects as observed in the course of his research into hybrids and selective breeding, which he ascribes to Lamarkian inheritance.
Michael @ 4
If I was trying to get fired, I would at least try to make it entertaining, such as going into the likely genetics of Santa’s flying reindeer.
.
Also, I would explain the ‘blood libel’ with Jews needing more blood due to inherited blood diseases.
The bad car driving abilities of people from a certain continent are obviously caused by alleles that make it hard to co-ordinate several tasks (maybe a virus-inserted gene from rice).
-There is no genetic reason behind all Scots being cheap, they are just assholes (especially if the boss is of Scottish heritage).
I guarantee the students would not be falling asleep.
There are medieval medical texts on sexual dysfunction which use the author’s fellow university masters as examples of each condition. A much better idea.
Tethys @ # 3: … his ‘Russet Burbank’ potato hybrid was specifically developed in response to the Irish potato blight and resulting famine.
Quite an accomplishment for a newborn.
xohjoh2n, regarding this:
Have you considered that PZ is intimating that the very act of investigating a slam-and-dunk case in the guise of going through formal procedures is pointlessly punctilious?
That’s how I read that, anyway.
I reckon at least part of that is the litigious nature of USAnian society.
Pierce
I know this is a joke, but obviously he didn’t breed a blight resistant potato from a mutant of his ‘Burbank Seedling’ until 1874. It does take time to breed, grow, backcross, grow, etc…
America owes Luther Burbank for McDonalds french fries, yet he got no patent or profit from his work in developing the Burbank Russet.
:)
[Very nice, Tethys; I predict Pierce will claim it was just drollery]
As a high school teacher myself, I can tell you that most of my students wouldn’t act as immaturely as this “teacher”. However, in schools there is a process for termination that must (regardless of circumstances) be followed. That’s no doubt what the district is doing. He’s been placed on administrative leave (i.e., they got him away from students immediately) and now they go through the rest of the process and then fire him. It may take a bit longer than our gut reaction wants it to, but it is as inevitable as tomorrows sunrise with evidence like this.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-12/mother-and-disabled-son-facing-homelessness/104089060
Dóh! Meant to put that in the Infinite thread, sorry. (Blushes.)
Kudos to the student who had the courage to immediately go to admin over this instead of just fuming and finishing the test.
“The Training of the Human Plant”, at https://archive.org/details/trainingofhumanp00burb/page/68/mode/2up, says that “criminal instinct” is hereditary and can appear even if a “child of criminal parents” is raised in a good environment, “but in succeeding generations the effect of constant higher environment will not fail to become fixed.”
Or I think more clearly, “acquired characters are transmitted and — even further — that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired, not necessarily at once in a dynamic or visible form, but as an increasing latent force ready to appear as a tangible character when by long-continued natural or artificial repetition any specific tendency has become inherent, inbred, or “fixed,” as we call it.”
Burbank refers to this “sum of the life forces” as “heredity.” https://archive.org/details/trainingofhumanp00burb/page/82/mode/2up?q=generations
Why is that not Lamarckism? How does epigenetics act over generations to give an inbred heritable change?
Given what we know now of epigenetics, what of Burbank’s successes had an important epigenetic influence and was not, as Gould argues, simply due to crossing and selection combined with a keen eye?
Andrew Dalke@24–
On current knowledge, the role of epigenetics is to switch genes off and on without affecting the gene sequence itself. As such, its potential for driving evolutionary change is limited. Not zero, though, as epigenetic changes can switch off DNA repair mechanisms thereby driving up mutation rates, and some bacteria such as M. tuberculosis have evolved the ability to switch off host immune genes via epigenetic manipulation. Both of these instances are indirect, however. Organisms are not acquiring advantageous somatic gene sequences and passing them down to offspring via epigenetics.
Having said that, we’re still in the very early stages of understanding epigenetics so there are probably many surprises awaiting us.
Agree with stwriley@19.
Michael@4 if he’s trying to get a job on the right wing grievance circuit he may have some problems, being of Vietnamese descent. Sure, the minor celeb Tila Tequila is Vietnamese, and has connections with the extreme right, but she’s an attractive woman who’s been a model, not a male high school teacher.
@ 26
Ah, but being Vietnamese gets him hereditary “‘Victim’ of COMMUNISM” status. All Nguyen has to do is whine that some relative of his got a ticket for littering after Hanoi fell and he’s set for life.
You could say the same thing about the Hmong kid he was trying to smear.
Unbelievable! 🤦🏾♀️When I was in high school back in the 60s , some Black male teens used have this one sided walk that they’d do. I wanted to use that for some choreography I was working on and I wanted to use my left side while my girlfriend used the right side . It was hard to do that and look right because it involved shifting your balance while moving your arm a certain way, iow it’s basically a subtle dance step done while you’re walking . This idiot thinks it’s hereditary in Black people 🤣 It’s just a silly fad! I don’t remember what they called during the 60s but they called something similar the gangster lean during the 70s
I mostly associate Luther Burbank with the Himalayan Blackberry: He introduced it to the western US in 1885 (per wikipedia), a hearty variety with large, abundant, delicious berries. Now classified in Washington state as a class C noxious weed: Highly invasive, almost impossible to contain or eradicate once established. It’s a constant battle to keep it from taking over my yard.