Category Archives: photos

the other half of the book

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I am going to reveal a little-known trade secret about the modern high school Biology class — we no longer do most of the things that defined the experience for last hundred years or so.

1. We only teach half of the textbook (more about this in a minute).

2. We don’t do dissection — no frogs, no grasshoppers, no earthworms. I blame the usual suspects — time, cost, delicate sensibilities. It’s too bad — we probably shouldn’t underestimate how many scientists and doctors were initially drawn to the macabre thrill of peering into the innards of various critters.

3. We don’t go on field trips. Again the usual suspects — time, cost, delicate sensibilities.

4. We don’t study zoology or botany. Really. This one is harder to parse — maybe it’s just a logistical issue (one needs lots of stuff to do this properly), but frankly, classroom management of students who never learned good habits of working in the lab also comes into play. I strongly suspect, but cannot prove, that today’s students who grew up in schools saturated with the dogma of “collaborative learning” (aka “group work”) work less effectively than students from previous eras who primarily learned to work by themselves, and then later had opportunities to work together in a lab setting.

This year, I’m determined to begin to walk my way back toward a more balanced approach. My Honors Biology classes are going to rediscover the second half of our biology textbook — the chapters dealing with prokaryote, protist, animal and plant characteristics. Without real plants and critters I’m going to have to find interesting pictures and videos to supplement our text. It won’t be anywhere near ideal, but I hope it begins a process of moving back toward biology as a living, breathing thing — the very thing that captivated me (and so many others) when I was a young student.

this school year’s Moleskine notebooks

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I love Moleskine notebooks — specifically, medium-sized, kraft paper covered, grid-ruled Moleskine notebooks. As an organizationally-challenged person, these notebooks have, over the last two years, been the only thing standing between me and the entropy abyss. So today I went to the bookstore and purchased this year’s supply. Since I had a lot of work to do, I obviously felt compelled to decorate my new notebooks instead. I opted for a homage to Mondrian, a cube optical illusion and a fibonacci spiral (it’s cool that Moleskine notebooks are almost a perfect golden rectangle). I thought they turned out pretty well and I didn’t have to do any work. Win, win.

desertification in the midwest

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This is what my yard looks like — completely brown (likely dead) grass covered with leaves from damaged, dying and dead trees — predominantly post oaks (Quercus stellata), one of the toughest trees on the planet. It makes me really sad to see these trees I grew up playing under dying before my eyes. I know, of course, that they aren’t immortal, but I sure expected them to be around a lot longer than me.