I know it’s Saturday, barely. I’m on break. Time is beginning to lose all meaning, except for the fact that I’m aware that classes start up again in ten more days — I’ve got a doomsday clock ticking down to my doom in front of me. I have recieved a note from the administration informing me that they want my syllabuses submitted now, which is a bit daunting, since one class doesn’t have one (it’s all independent study and writing), another is a totally stock course we’ve team-taught for years (mainly, it’s going to be a ton of grading for me), and the final course is a big one that is still coagulating in my head.
That one is going to scramble my brains and confuse all the students. It’s an eco-devo course and I’m going to make it radically interactive, with the students doing a lot of the work within a loose structure I provide. What students look for in a syllabus is “how many exams?” and “when are the exams?” and “is there a term paper?”, and I’m seriously considering answering those with “there are no exams” and “exams don’t exist at any time in this classroom” and “you’ll be too busy reading all the papers I throw at you to write”, and making the grade entirely dependent on participation. Show me that you can engage with the subject and ask good questions, and that’s how you’ll get an A.
Is this too weird? Am I being too creative for a stodgy old STEM class? Will I get in trouble if I write this down in a syllabus and let an administrator read it? In my defense, Socrates didn’t give midterms, so I’m simply returning to a conservative style of teaching. (Socrates was also poisoned by his critics, I know.)
Anyway, that’s been my source of anxiety lately, looming deadlines and course design. You don’t want to hear about that, you want spiders, and spiders I will deliver.
I got a link to this video on our discord server. I’m not too keen on the particularly morbid YouTube channel — it’s by a guy who travels around visiting the locations where celebrities died, a kind of post-mortem paparazzi, but in this case he’s visiting an abandoned mansion and swimming pool in Hollywood. He succeeds in making it creepy, of course, because he has to talk about all the starlets who were tricked into appearing topless by the icky owner of the place. But the one redeeming feature is the cool, semi-legendary spider painting that’s still there, and apparently appeared in a lot of old cheesecake photos from the 40s and 50s.
OK, bear with me, this next one is really, really gross. It features Laura Ingraham. Also she looks thoroughly disgusted throughout. It’s about immigrants, in particular, those immigrants “who almost always come from Asia.”
It’s about Joro spiders. Joro spiders are awesome.
One more, and fortunately, there’s absolutely nothing horrible about this one: no yucky ghouls, just one particularly glorious spider. This is a video lots of people have been sending me, about the largest funnel web spider found in Australia. It does dwell a bit too much on how dangerous it is, but that’s what we always get from the popular press.
I’ll just say if anyone wants to send me funnel web eggs or a Joro egg sac, I’d be thrilled and would raise them to cuddly adulthood.
Do not send me more Laura Ingraham, or Laura Ingraham videos. She’s revolting.
Quick reminder: yes, funnel webs are dangerous but they’re not interested in biting humans unless threatened. They have only caused 13 recorded deaths ever and none since the antivenom was produced.
Much like shark attacks, scary but still not as deadly as the average American automobile.
Every summer here in Japan joro spiders spin their yellowish webs on my balcony and in my yard. Because they’re so colorful, they were supposedly named after Edo-era prostitutes who painted their faces. If I thought it could make it through customs, I’d be happy to send you an egg sac, PZ.
It isn’t the average American automobile that’s the problem, its the oversized gargantuan SUV’s that are the most lethal things in the US. The average car hitting someone would break their legs, the SUV is so humongous that it hits torso and head.
As for Laura Ingraham, I did consider videos of her being fed to spiders, but I really didn’t want to see a video of spiders being poisoned.
Oh, one plus for the Joro is, while invasive, it also is the only spider currently in the US to eat those damnable invasive stink bugs. Maybe I’ll rent a spider moving truck for my state…
In your class with the readings, you might support them initially by giving them some discussion questions about methodologies or conclusions or what not to help them get going, and understand what the discussion should be about.
One good thing about Joro spiders is that in the US they’ve been observed eating invasive brown marmorated stink bugs, which no native predators in the US are known to consume.
Laura Ingraham being eaten by spiders?
submoron @ 7, why would we want to video spiders being poisoned?
The current plan is:
Mondays I lecture/discuss the current text readings, and feed them some questions
Wednesdays they answer the questions and ask their own
Fridays are journal club–we discuss a paper from the literature
Repeat 15 times.
I see no need to waste a day on exams.
@1 I think the last recorded death from a funnel web bite was 1979.
wrzd1 I thought spiders were tougher! Thanks for pointing out this.
What about sending PZ a Laura Ingram egg sac?
wzrd1, Sorry for another error.
…but I don’t know what recently hatched Laura Ingrams feed on. Venom?
Bile.
No exams? I’ve had many courses in the early 1960s graded on class participation and one with a single oral exam which explored topics closely related to our course. We also had a course by Hermann Simon in which he asked several questions, allowing us to collaborate with any source, including other students. And that was it.
What made this approach so interesting was that our university had just searched for the most inane and unsuccessful rules of conduct they could find and adopted them verbatim. Yep, they came from the Air Force Academy after large portions of the students had been kicked out three times in as many years for code violations. Technically, we should all have tattled on each other and gotten expelled.
At least Minnesota sounds like it doesn’t have quite as much insanity.
@9 PZ
Sounds like an excellent class to me.
The average American automobile…or any other nationality of automobile for that matter…isn’t nearly as deadly as the humans driving them…again, regardless of nationality.
“Show me that you can engage with the subject and ask good questions, and that’s how you’ll get an A.”
Love it. I did something similar decades ago, teaching junior high, er, middle school, though with a few caveats. I got a lot of criticism from “traditional” teachers for steering away from the percentage grading model. (I used rubrics for everything, including behavior). However, at the end of 8th grade, my students were better writers than most 12th graders (at least based on parents remarks to me).
Glad I’m not grading papers anymore. 180 essays every week wasn’t the most fun job I’ve had.
Anyway, the point is that you’re focusing on students’ LEARNING, and, it seems, doing a great job of it. KUDOS.
The unfortunate thing about the sensationalism about joro spiders, is that they look VERY similar to completely native golden orb weaver spiders.
Well, technically he poisoned himself but without much choice inthe matter so yeah.
I do like his quote to Apollodorus tho’..
” my dear Apollodorus would you rather see me die deservedly?”