Work is heating up as it always does in the first few weeks of classes. Today and Friday I’m blitzing through a basic chemistry review in cell biology, because…biology is all chemistry. A very narrow and specific domain of chemistry, sure, but if you don’t understand how electrons flow you’re getting nowhere in cell biology. Yesterday was spent re-reading a lot of introductory chemistry stuff to remind me of how this all works, today I lay it all out for the students, who might be bored, but still a bunch of them will mess up on the easy chemistry questions in the first exam.
It always shocks incoming students who think biology is all frog dissections and memorizing organs. Nope, all chemistry, and in order to get the chemistry, you need to know the math. So all you high school kids thinking it would be neat to major in biology and play with spiders, buckle down and learn your basic algebra and pre-calc, at the least, and work through chemistry and physics.
Then I have some lab stuff to do. Today I’m going to focus on our Steatoda triangulosa. We’ve got a few young second generation juveniles coming up that I need to sort into larger quarters, and another egg sac that is full of baby spiders. The cool thing about S. triangulosa, besides the pretty pigment patterns, is that their egg sacs are fluffy, loosely woven silk and are semi-transparent, so you can see the eggs right through them, and right now I peek in and it’s a mass of writhing spider legs, so they’re about to emerge, I’m sure. The less cool thing about them is that they seem to be slower to develop, and for at least the one mama I’ve got in the lab, lay a smaller number of eggs. I might have to go hunt down some more adults so I have a larger sample before the frost hits.
Anyway, I’ll take pictures! I think I’ll post a purely S. triangulosa article later today.
But first, chemistry! That’s my day sorted.
The mildly deranged penguin is amazed your still using chemistry-infused biofrogolgy, it’s as-if you haven’t discovered slood. Next, you’ll probably be claiming peas are edible, and then it’s not so much down a slippery slope as over the edge of the universe…
Well, to be honest, it was the memorizing organs that killed my interest in introductory biology (and memorizing the citric acid cycle) (and memorizing everything else). Sorry, I was just a lazy student, and math is a lot easier because you can go a long way on a few key concepts. But I never got to the point where doing math would have paid off in the life sciences. It also wasn’t my field and I was taking it during a busy junior year.
I would do it all very differently now and am rather ashamed at my attitude back then. I actually have a pretty good memory when I apply it.
I feel for you on that, but really, it doesn’t matter how easy the questions are, it’s a guaranteed fact that at least a few will get them wrong. Back when I was teaching, I had one question at the end of the test that I told the students was supposed to be a gift mark, but was really there to see if they were reading their own test (multiple versions in the room, the person beside you has a different one). It was depressing how often I’d get a student who apparently had the student ID number “blue”, or was writing the test in ink with the colour “John Doe” (or whatever the name of the person beside them was…)
@3, would it be impolite to answer the gift question with “Phosphorus”? ;)