Stress = Silence

I suppose that there are people for whom blogging would be a form of stress release and therefore blog even more when stressed. I'm of the opposite variety - when the demands of work become overwhelming, the blog falls way down on my priorities list.

So it has been a couple of weeks. I have a lot of stored materials ready to go when the time comes, but there are also gaps to be filled, and that's what I've been doing lately. Already the workload of 120 students - setting up computer gradebook, arranging seating assignments, checking on materials, collecting contact information, sending out progress reports to parents, posting assignments on the website, collecting labs and homeworks and journals - I'm drowning!

But much of this work is "front-loading" and will get easier. I look closely at labs and homeworks in the beginning, but after this I will do honor policy ("raise your hand if you don't have homework") plus spot check ("the following 5 randomly chosen students please turn in your homework for grading"). Ditto with the labs. Then the only thing I need to concentrate on is projects & journals.

I decided on a different lab this year for natural selection. I pretty much took Kim Foglia's lab and copied into my standard format, changed some of the text to reflect my own way of presenting the topic to reduce confusion, cut out some of the more detailed analytical questions (too confusing for my students) and voila. Here it is:

Natural Selection Game

First Day 2007

Here's a first day activity based on Dan Collea's suggestion on the Bioforum Listserv and modified for my own circumstances and comfort levels. It brings biology to "life" from Day 1 by introducing an interesting creature - my hissing cockroaches - for students to observe. At the end of the period on I will distribute my course packet for students to read as homework.

I'm calling it a lab, a "getting to know you" activity where I gather info about them, they gather info about the cockroaches and later they also gather info about me and the course. The lab folds in a discussion of the scientific method - observe, formulate hypotheses, test hypotheses - It may evolve into more elaborate investigations, but for now I'm keeping it rather simple, with a limited initial duration but open-ended possibilities for further explorations. The last section asks students to imagine the cockroaches can talk - what kinds of questions would you ask? Some of these questions may then lead to follow up investigations. I will revise as it unfolds.

Getting to Know You.