Here is a true and accurate description of a thesis defense. Just in case you’re contemplating grad school.
It is also true that the snakes are mostly toothless, but they can still kill you. Maybe.
It’s going to be a l o n g semester. 8am is rough; I provided hot water and tea, and we had a mid-class break so anybody could run out for coffee or just slap themselves awake. Then, to ease them in, we talked about an easy topic. We talked about Italy! I would love to visit Italy someday — it’s number one on my list of desirable travel destinations that haven’t visited yet. I also saw an opportunity to get all liberal artsy and talk history and philosophy and art, as well as science, because these are all related.
Here’s my cryptic whiteboard at the first half of the class. Can you guess what we talked about, and how it was at all relevant to developmental biology?
The students weren’t particularly responsive — I think they were regarding this as something like a dental appointment. But it is the first day, and I’m going to be hammering on them that they need to be alert and interactive and contribute, so they’ll warm to it eventually. Or they won’t, and it’ll be a really long semester.
I’m on my way to my ridiculously early class, on the first day of a new semester, and what do I see? Some students have written a message in a snowbank.
You kids. You still have something to be optimistic about? I have to try and remember what it’s like to be 19 again.
I just finalized the schedule for my third course this term (Biological Communications, an independent study/writing course) and contacted the four students taking it from me. I’m prepared for my first lecture at 8am tomorrow, mostly ready for my second, and I have the student assignments all laid out and ready to go. I think I know what I’m doing.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
I must be getting old and senile. There is something wrong with my brain. I have seen all of these movies in the past year, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what happened in them.
I know I attended them. I recall blurs of cgi, loud explosions, and chaotic stories in which the fate of the world hung in the balance, but I can’t remember, or care, about a danged thing that happened in them. It’s weird, but there are also little snippets of things associated with them that are surely false memories.
This is also an oddly spotty problem. I can recall everything about Mad Max: Fury Road, for instance.
Either I have to go in for a neurological check-up, or all of Hollywood does. The latter is highly unlikely, right?
I am haunted by a dream, a dream that is far too likely to be true, and wakes me up in the middle of the night. In this dream, my wife wakes up in the morning to find my body cold and still in the bed next to her. I feel no pain for myself — I’m dead — but I burn with the agony of loss that she feels, and the pain that wracks her when she calls our kids, and the reverberations of sadness that I will be responsible for causing. If you live life in the embrace of friends and family, you know what I’m talking about. Love and happiness exact a cost, every moment filling a pool of tears that grows deeper with our closeness, and as we grow older they well close to the surface, until…they inevitably break and fall in sorrow and grief.
I’ve been married for thirty-six years. Thirty six years of inseparable mutual devotion in which a lachrymal ocean has grown, that we work together to shore up and contain, because there will be a flood of grief when that dark shore is crossed. I can imagine some grim shadow of it. I can dread it.
And I can sympathize when the partner of long-time commenter Nerd of Redhead dies after 43 years of marriage. That is a rending I don’t want to contemplate…and yet it’s what haunts me, too.
io9 has compiled 10 most appropriate Pratchett quotes for those of us feeling a bit unhappy right now. Here’s two I really like..
Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase “The innocent have nothing to fear,” believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like “The innocent have nothing to fear.”
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carefully knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.
They left out the one I’m feeling right now.
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.
I bet some of you have a favorite Pratchett quote. Share.
Wow. I think I’m ready to go. I’ve put the Biol 4182 EcoDevo syllabus together, I’ve got the courseware (we use Moodle) site ready to go, and I’ve put together the notes for the first week’s lectures/discussions, and now I just have to upload that syllabus and make it available to all the students…and then watch the course withdrawals come flooding in.
No! They’re going to appreciate it! We’re going to learn so much together this term!
Classes start a week from today. I’m more prepared than usual.
I could not live in a warm climate — the constant low level discomfort would be intolerable. But today, after spending a half hour outside, I realized that at least I wouldn’t experience the intense, outright pain that one feels at -20°C. I guess it’s a choice between short periods of sharp physical pain vs. long periods of unpleasantness, and I choose pain over discomfort.
But I at least can sympathize a bit with people who choose otherwise. I can’t feel my hands right now, and my toes are whimpering at me.
Hola, amigos, it’s been a long time since I rapped at you, but I’ve been busy. I’ve been staring at calendars and juggling time in my head. I sort of had to gaze in horror at my spring semester schedule, and had to spend some time working on my other classes. Here’s what my weekly calendar looks like:
One thing is very nice: I’ve arranged to have Fridays wide open. That does not imply that I’ll spend every Friday in my PJs sipping Scotch — that’s when I’ll be catching up on grading and composing lectures for the coming week. But hey, it also means if anyone wants to invite me out to speak somewhere, I’ve got a 3-day weekend every week.
Other days are mostly gutted by my genetics and genetics lab courses, which will take up the bulk of my time. Those lectures are mostly already planned out and done, as I’ve taught this course every year for almost two decades now. There’s still a lot of work required there, and I have to keep that in mind when budgeting time for this course, Ecological Developmental Biology. Right away, you might spot the fresh horror involved in that class: it’s a 100 minute lecture course, twice a week, at 8am. Ack. I’ve got to be ready to go first thing those mornings, and I have to have a larger than normal block of material. Double ack: students have to be awake and alert.
So right away, I’ve decided that that’s too much for early morning attention spans. Each class is going to be broken in two, with a break in between. I’m going to bring in my tea kettle to class, and it’ll be enough time that if they want to run over to the next building and grab coffee, that’s going to be fine. Let’s be civilized about all this.
I’m also going to mix up my teaching style. I plan to give a lecture-style general overview of a topic from the textbook in the first half, recess briefly for coffee and tea, and then meet again for a more detailed, interactive discussion, using a paper from the primary literature as a nucleus for the conversation. That also sounds pleasant and civilized. There will be some exceptions to that, though.
This is the only course in developmental biology these students will have taken, so I feel some obligation to bring them up with the basics of the field. The first two weeks will be a crash course in development, hitting some key processes that they ought to understand before we dive deeper. So on my calendar I’ve blocked out the first two weeks to include short lectures in the history and philosophy of development, polarity, gastrulation, limb development, and craniofacial development. Again, brief overviews of those topics suited to early morning undergraduates, with time for discussion and interaction. Fortunately, Scott Gilbert’s Developmental Biology text is available for free on NCBI, so I can assign supplemental readings from that.
What about assessment? First day I’m going to give them 3 assignments.
Read Lewontin’s The Triple Helix. This is the philosophical backbone of the course, and we’ll be discussing it in class in the third week. This discussion will be driven by questions I will ask (I’m not giving answers), and I will put individuals on the spot to answer them. This will be a preview of the oral exam they’ll be taking at the midterm.
Each student will be assigned a week in human development, or a key organ system, and will give a 5 minute summary presentation in the third week. I’ll make available Langman’s Medical Embryology, which is the only source they’ll use. Again, this will be a warm up to a longer presentation they’ll give at the end of the term.
They’re going to be warned that they’ll be given half the class period in the last weeks of the semester to individually present and discuss a topic and at least one primary research paper. Start thinking and planning!
There, I’ve already wiped out a big chunk of the semester. First two weeks, a crash course in developmental biology. Third week, a group in-class oral exam on the topic of The Triple Helix, and a series of very short presentations by the students to summarize human embryology. And then I’ve blocked off the last month of the course for in-depth student presentations.
Other assessment-related assignments: in the 6th week, they’re to give me a proposal for their presentation, with a short annotated bibliography. In the 8th week, I’ll expect an outline of their presentation. There’s no time to waste, so it all starts early, and I’m going to be mean about deadlines. I know how students can procrastinate over semester long projects.
The 8th week is also set aside for one-on-one oral exams, a half-hour per student. There will be some general questions, and I’ll also give each student some customized questions, based on their project proposal. There will also be a few pointed nudges about their progress on their presentation research.
The preliminaries and assessment are covered. What about the meat of the course, structured around Gilbert’s Ecological Developmental Biology? I’ve had to make some hard choices here. I can’t teach the whole text — as it is, I’m hitting the students with a lot of reading, and I’m already expecting that I might have to cut back on a few of my plans. I also don’t want to just teach what’s in the textbook, but will be providing papers that they’ll have to read and understand and discuss in class. What that means is that I’m doing something heretical: I’m not using the lovely material on evolution and development at the end of the book, chapters 9-11. I had to cut somewhere, and I figure enough of that will seep through in my general attitude in the course. I’m also holding it in reserve: it always happens that a student or two drops the course, especially since they’ll get early feedback on their grades, and I might just be able to fit in a little at the end, if student presentations don’t eat up the whole month. I may also steer a few of those students towards the evolution material.
I can tell them in the syllabus that the assigned readings and topics will be:
Week 1: The Triple Helix
Week 4: Chapter 1, Plasticity.
Week 5: Chapter 2, Environmental Epigenetics.
Week 6: Chapter 3, Developmental Symbiosis.
Week 7: Chapter 4, Developmental Physiology.
Week 8 will be the oral exam week.
Week 9: Chapters 5 and 6, Teratogenesis and Endocrine Disruptors.
Week 10: Chapters 7 and 8, Aging and Adult diseases, and Cancer.
Then a long block of student presentations on topics that interest them.
Week 15: if students haven’t eaten up all the time in the course, Chapter 10, Developmental Regulatory Genes.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Intense, maybe, but you can’t learn without a little pain and effort.
