I’ve been teaching non-stop all day, and boy are my brains tired. I end this exhausting day by dumping today’s genetics lecture on the world.
I should probably go to bed soon.
I keep telling my students about what I call Fly Time — the idea that these genetic experiments we’re doing require that we carry out the steps on the fly’s schedule, which may sometimes be inconvenient for the human experimenter. We’ll be flexible, but the work does require doing things outside the formally scheduled class time. That’s about to bite me in the butt.
We had this minor fire yesterday that canceled labs for the day. But we’re on Fly Time! They don’t care about our lab schedule! I’ve got a big plan that requires starting on time, and if we don’t begin the experiment this week it won’t culminate before spring break. I can’t compel students to stay and do lab work over their break, so if it runs over…I’m the guy who has to do all the final fly counts in the experiment. The students need to start the cross this week!
To accommodate our students’ busy schedules, I get to spend today in the fly lab helping a string of students coming in on Student Time to learn fly husbandry. All day long. Parked in a lab as students dribble in. Except for the time I get to spend lecturing them in class. And then I come home and put the recording of the lecture together and upload it. I also have to assemble a new problem set and post it on Canvas. Maybe if there’s a gap in the stream of students I can do that during the day?
Ha ha. The flexibility I’m trying to build into the course is coming out of my hide. There better not be any more fires this semester.
I said I was going to optimize my classroom management for flexibility, but this is ridiculous. I’m supposed to be teaching a lab right now, but the science building caught fire.
It was more of a tiny smolder, but we did get a lot of smoke in the building. I heard that plumbers were soldering some pipes in the ceiling, and something caught fire, and now the fire department kicked everyone out of the building and are trying to make sure there is nothing else burning in that space before they let us back in. “A few more hours,” the fire person said. So I had to cancel lab.
Now the next few days are wrecked for me, because I’m trying to accommodate a lot of busy students and persuade them to come in at some other time so we can get this cross started. I’m going to have to provide supervised lab access all day tomorrow and Thursday.
I swear, this job is trying to break me, but honestly, I’m already broken.
I can see my future now, for at least the next four months. I have committed myself to record all of my lectures so the students have asynchronous access to the course content to maximize flexibility in case pandemic catastrophe strikes, so what I’ve got to do is:
There are always glitches. Last week, the audio recording of the lecture was unlistenable, so I had to re-record the whole thing. That was better (but far from perfect) today. Today, though, the in-class technology threw up a whole bunch of problems — nothing worked until I called in IT to fix it, so I lost over 10 minutes to annoying problems. I intensely dislike the way the university has configured the AV in our classrooms.
So anyway, here’s today’s lecture. It’s about chromosomes.
Another genetics class video — our first fly lab is this week, so they’re going to set up the parental stocks for a complementation assay.
Hooray for me! I got step #4 of my to-do list, and also step #3.
Tomorrow I’ll go back and get #2 (“Record a video summary of the fly culturing procedure”) done, and also #6 (“edit the fly culture video”), and then on to chromosomes, mitosis, and meiosis. I’m trying hard to build up slowly with a solid foundation before we get to the hard stuff.
There is a giant space rock hurtling towards Earth! It is predicted to miss, and usually I’d trust the math and physics, but given the Bayesian priors of our experiences the last few years, I would not be surprised if they forgot to carry the 3.
Anyway, the Virtual Telescope Project will be showing it live, in about an hour. You might want to watch it, just in case.
Unfortunately, the stupid asteroid scheduled its closest approach for when I’ll be in class. I guess I’ll have to watch it after the fact, I hope.
In about 5 hours, we’ll be gathering for a conversation about, oh boy, the pandemic. Expect different perspectives, but none of them crazy.
Speaking of perspectives, we also have a guest this month: Dr Tara Smith. She’ll be providing the extremely well informed perspective.
If you have no idea what Silkhenge is, here’s a video:
It’s a curious ring of spider silk, with silk fenceposts, and then in the center, an egg sac with a silk spike coming off the top. It’s just weird, especially since it’s such an elaborate structure to house only a handful of spider eggs. It’s a lot of effort for a small reward. All we know is what the babies look like, no adults, and no observations of how it is constructed. Clearly, More Research is Needed.
The same people went back a few years later and found more examples, still no adults.
They’ve also been seen in Peru.
Do I need an excuse to visit Ecuador again? Will this do? (All exotic travel is pending the resolution of the pandemic, of course.)
That is my sad face. I went into the lab yesterday to get a bunch of things done, when I learned that the water to the whole building was shut off. Our science building is only about 20 years, but every year we have a battery of problems that shake out — rooms are too hot or too cold, the roof leaks, and come the winter, we often get pipes freezing and all the problems that causes. So no water for three days while the maintenance crew fixes everything.
This would have been catastrophic when I was working with fish, and it’s still awkward when working with spiders. On my list was the need to set up more flies so they’d have food in two weeks, washing spider poop out of their containers, and most tragic of all, I had set hundreds of vials soaking in soapy water the day before, and I was going to scrub ’em up and rinse them out and dry them yesterday.
Look! I even got a brand new bottle brush! I was so excited to be doing dishes, and then…crashing disappointment. I’ll have to wait until Thursday.
