Thursday, July 31, 2008

What they learned in kindergarden

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I had breakfast with a kindergarden teacher, and we discovered some similarities in our jobs. In both kindergarden and first-year universit...
Sunday, July 27, 2008

Teaching Philosophy, Take Two

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(Yes, this is a completely different organization that I tried in Take One) Why I chose to teach first-year students:  Most faculty prefer t...
Friday, July 25, 2008

Teaching philosophy

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It's time to write a new 'Teaching Philosophy' section for my CV, so I though I'd work on it here. I think there should be f...
Thursday, July 17, 2008

I should be doing more of this

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An article  by Martha Kinney in today's Inside Higher Education explains how the military's training methods can be applied in the ...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 29, 2008

Showmanship for teachers?

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A post on BoingBoing a few months ago prompted me to order Magic and Showmanship: a handbook for conjurers , by Henning Nelms.  This book i...
1 comment:
Friday, June 06, 2008

Learning to think/write like a scientist

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Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague in the English Department. Her research concerns the interactions between ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Problems with Blackboard Vista

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In previous years my courses used versions of the WebCT course software, but this year they were 'upgraded' to the Vista platform; W...
1 comment:
Friday, May 02, 2008

Homework project progress

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Grades are in (and so far have generated remarkably little student angst), so now the homework project shifts from teaching to research. I...
1 comment:
Thursday, May 01, 2008

3491 questions about Biology

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One innovation this year was intended to build students' abilities to ask questions. Before each week's lectures the students had to...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Still here...

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How ironic that teaching diverted the attention I was going to put into my teaching blog. Classes are over and my final exam is on Saturday...
Saturday, January 26, 2008

What we did in school today (well, yesterday)

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Friday's BIOL 121 class wasn't a lecture at all.  Instead I took advantage of the personal response system (PRS, clickers) to have s...
Saturday, January 19, 2008

Paper chromosomes

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It's late on Saturday, and I just snuck down to the administration area, pilfered some sheets of coloured paper from the Microbiology D...
Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Frustrations...

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The university bookstore has run out of our textbook, as has the nearby discount textbooks store. This may be because they know that a new ...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 06, 2008

Why is it so hard to clearly explain what 'chromosome' means?

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I'm polishing up some of the material I'll present in classes #4 and #5 of my intro biology course. I think class #4 is OK. It int...
1 comment:

HapMap for beginners?

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This year I'm going to use the human polymorphism map (the HapMap ) as part of the framework for thinking about genetics and evolution i...
Friday, January 04, 2008

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My recent provocative post on Why biology is harder than physics has been discussed by both Philip Johnson on Biocurious (critically) and ...
4 comments:
Monday, December 31, 2007

How to teach Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium

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Over on the Gene Expression blog there's a discussion about how to explain Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Commentors are claiming that it...
2 comments:
Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Why biology is harder than physics

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Beginning university students in the sciences usually consider biology to be much easier than physics or chemistry. From their experience i...
40 comments:
Monday, November 12, 2007

Can we do a Genetics reading assignment?

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The New York Times is publishing a series of very good articles (11 so far) under the heading The DNA Age , about the social and personal im...
157 comments:

The first day of class

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I've been thinking about changing what I do on the first day of classes. In past years I've basically done a fast information-dump ...
1 comment: