This is one of those weeks

I’m teaching cell biology, but the first thing I have to do is hammer them over the head with…chemistry. They typically haven’t realized yet that biology isn’t all butterflies and cat dissections, it’s also all built on math and chemistry, and we have to get the students thinking quantitative. Today I’m lecturing on small molecules — ions in solution, pH, redox reactions, chemical bonds — and lab is all dilutions and concentrations and basic algebra.

It’s not fun for me, either, but we’ll never get to the fun stuff without it. I’ve been cramming general chemistry all weekend, because I have to know it all better than the students.

Another important matter this week is that I have to get a haircut after a long summer of flowing locks. I’m trying to decide if I should bring back an old style. Here’s what I looked like in the mid-1960s.*

back row: the second wave of cousins, Tim Smith, my brother Jim, Matt Sones.
Front row: first wave cousins, Don Smith, me, Kelly Sones.

That haircut was easy to maintain, and cheap to cut — my mom would just stroke her electric hair clippers over my head, and it would be done. I don’t think I look anything like me now, just a homely, shaggy old man.

I was no prize to begin with, and it’s not fair that I got homelier over time.

I think teaching chemistry over and over aged me. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

*P.S. Only Matt and I are still alive. I should be grateful I’m still here, no matter how ugly I get.

Survival: Day One

I made it! I got through the first day of classes without passing out or having my pants fall down! There are a few things I have to work on, though.

  • No one wanted to talk. I had multiple questions for them and invited them to express their ideas, and as usual, they were reluctant. They were probably afraid of my fierce attitude. After I tore the tape off their mouths and managed to refrain from thrusting my fingers into their eye sockets and ripping out their skull and vertebral column, they started warming up and I got some responsiveness out of them. There is a lot of promise there and I think I’ll get them contributing more soon. Or, you know, eye sockets, skulls, vertebral columns, etc.
  • I think most of them failed to read the paper I’d assigned in the syllabus! That fact may have accounted for their fear of speaking up, beyond just shyness. I gave them an incentive to look it over, though: I told them I know where I’m going to get a lot of questions for the quiz that they’ll get on Friday, which is even better than skull ripping at getting students to do the reading.

I did have a little problem I had last year — my voice starts to give out on me before the class is over. I managed to muscle through it and make my voice heard. I have to resume a habit I started last semester — having a cup of hot tea before class.

Oh no, last week of classes

It’s the perfect storm, and I have myself to blame. I gave the fourth exam of the semester yesterday, and many of the students bombed. This happens every year, and it’s because the fourth exam is the hardest of them all: everything accumulates in this course, and it’s the combination of lots of math and understanding the topology of weird chromosomes entangled and swapping bits around that breaks their brains. Couple the fact that these are generally smart, high-achieving students with the shock of getting a 40% on an exam, and it’s going to get ugly. I’m going over the answers with them this afternoon.

Also, we have a major lab report due next week, and an in-class presentation. It is a high stress situation.

Students are already emailing me with requests for a point here and there on back assignments and exams. I’m going to spend my weekend with spreadsheets recalculating all their old assignments and putting together a final assessment, which will inspire a further frenzy of grade-grubbing.

If I drank anymore, this would be the weekend I’d finish off a bottle of good whisky, but I don’t drink at all anymore. I’d rather talk about genetics than grades, but the system will not allow that.

Kudos to my 2026 Genetics students!

They have just completed the first half-semester experiment, a complementation test with two loci in flies, and we sat down in lab and did an analysis of the data. Perfect execution! We got the expected result (the genes complemented each other) and all of the students are now officially masters of basic fly breeding.

Then, just because the F1s from that cross were all heterozygotes at two loci, we went ahead and did another cross with them, your classic dihybrid cross, which should result in 4 phenotypes with a ratio of 9:3:3:1, according to that old guy Mendel. It did! It’s always thrilling to do these simple experiments that we all take for granted and see that, by god, Mendelian genetics actually does work under these specific conditions, and even a gang of undergraduates who’d never looked at Drosophila before can do it.

We’ve got another experiment in progress, a mapping cross that we started before spring break — we have to overlap experiments a little bit so we can get them all done in a single semester. I’m impressed with this bunch, though. They’ve got the potential to be fabulous geneticists. So hire them after they graduate!

(I don’t actually expect most of them to want to go on to careers in genetics, but they could. They have the potential.)

A good maggoty morning to you, too

Even though it is officially Spring Break, I had to trudge through the snow (yeah, it snowed again) to the lab to take care of my students’ flies, since they’re away doing splendidly fun things and couldn’t be bothered to come into the lab and maintain their experiment themselves, and I had to do it all. Which wasn’t much…they set up their crosses last week, and I just had to come in and kill their parents before they had an opportunity to commit incest.

I am happy to report that their bottles were mostly full of maggots, some had entered the wandering stage and crawled up the sides of the bottles, but none had pupated yet. Our timing is perfect — I expect they’ll be eclosing this weekend, so the students will return to buzzing bottles full of purebred Drosophila adults for the next stage of the cross.

I’m sure they were all concerned so I just sent them all a note to read on their holiday, reminding them of what’s next.

Grading day

All of my students are above average, and handsome, too

The students have survived their first genetics exam, everyone passed, hooray! Now I have to figure out went wrong in the problems they missed, and shore up their weaknesses in the next week.

First thing I notice is that they are rock solid on simple Mendelian genetics, but that’s not a surprise. Mendelian genetics is dead easy, which is why I have to roll my eyes when I see racists and eugenicists babbling out terms from high school genetics — it’s all the later, more sophisticated stuff that trips them up every time. Getting cocky about the basics is a sure way to fail when reality makes its ugly appearance.

What I really have to work on are probability and statistics. Some of the students are unclear on what a p value implies, and they’re getting tripped up by simple things, like the binomial theorem. I had no idea when I got my biology degree that I’d end up having to teach math!

(Really simple math, too. High school teachers, make sure your students are aware that biology is not a math-free discipline!)

1/3 done

It’s been a heavy grading day, but at least I can say I’ve got one of my three classes done, and it was the largest one. Can I get the other two done tomorrow? Before I go to the local humane society fundraiser in the evening? Yes, I will. It shall be done.

A wall looms before me

I’m a little bit panicky — the semester is almost over. There’s three weeks left, but two of those are committed to an exam and student presentations, so I’ve only got ONE WEEK to cover mitochondrial inheritance and epigenetics. I’m resigned to the fact that I can only give an introduction to those topics, but otherwise, sure, would all the students like to sign up for another year of genetics so I can cover everything adequately? No? You plan to graduate instead? OK.

It hurts to shut up and stop lecturing for two weeks, but I consider it essential to give students a voice. I think this quote from a terrible movie about genetics to be relevant:

You were so preoccupied with the fact that you could that you never stopped to think if you should

So all my students are going to be discussing cool things that modern science can do with genetics, and answering the question of whether we should.

And then we stop. Last day of classes is 2 May. Then I’ve got the summer free to work in the lab, and big bonus, I get a fall sabbatical (to be spent working in the lab) and don’t come back to teaching until January 2026.

I have to get through these next few weeks, though.

Busy day of making the younguns happy

Think about how you can make young people happy: give them a puppy. I can’t afford to hand out puppies, but today is the day the students will come into my lab and I hand out fruit flies. Swarms of Drosophila! and I’ll tell them they have to feed them and take care of them and love them for the next three months. It will be a joyful afternoon for the student body.

I also have to explain sex to them, which I’m sure is going to be a total surprise to this group of 19-20 year olds.

It’s going to be an enlightening day, especially when all the men in the class look at their own elbows and realize they must be trans because they lack sex combs.

I just got back from setting up the lab in preparation for this big day. It’s like an icebox in there! Temperature regulation must be very complex in this building, because I can go from my office to the hallway to my research lab to the student lab, and the temperature can vary by 5°C in each transition. The student labs are just plain frigid — I’m going to have to send an email announcement to everyone in my class that they need to dress warm, wear a sweater, maybe bring those heating flasks you use when deer hunting or ice fishing, because jesus, at least the flies won’t try to escape their incubator.

It’s a wrap

Portrait of the Fall 2024 semester

The grades for all of my classes, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and History of Evolutionary Thought, and Cell Biology lab, and Biological Communication II, have been submitted. I am done. This was not my favorite semester of the 50-some semesters I’ve taught here.

Now I’m getting ready for spring semester — or rather, I have been getting ready. I set up fly stocks way back in early November, I have to do one more generation, and then I set up all the flies for our first lab. Bonus: next semester, I have no classes on Fridays. Three day weekends every week! That might make up for all the grading I’ll have to do in the writing class I’ll be teaching.