My genetics class is going ‘woke’!

I’ve been teaching the students all this basic transmission genetics all semester, and while it’s important and fundamental, it can have a bad effect on people’s brains. I cringe when I hear people talking about human traits using simple Mendelian terms like “dominant” and “recessive” because, while it works for many things, for others it misleads and is overly simplistic. I want my students to come away from the class knowing that genetics is complex and subtle and everything is polygenic and epistasis matters, and that’s hard to do when they’re trying to figure out the basics of doing a fly cross.

It’s also a problem because instilling only the basics of Mendel is a good way to make Nazis — it’s easy to distort simple concepts they barely understand into props for your biases. I’d like to forestall that. Also, I’m in Minnesota, and Minnesota has a smug white people problem.

“The racism you see in Minnesota is the type of racism where people say there is no racism. The only race is the human race,” Myers [not me, no relation] said. “How can we say the only race is the human race when all the people with dark skin are people with higher unemployment rates, dying from COVID, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be beaten by police and murdered? How does that happen when there’s no race?”

So I’m going to wake up all the smart students in my class. My strategy involves handing them a digital folder full of articles from science journals as well as newspapers, telling them to pick one, and present it to the class (I’m sure not going to just lecture on these things — I want students to think about them.) They’re getting the folder today, have to pick an article by Wednesday, and are going to prepare a ten minute summary and review for two weeks from today. It’s going to be fun, right?

Here’s a list of just the titles they have to choose from:

A framework for enhancing ethical genomic research with Indigenous communities (2018)
A review of the Hispanic paradox: time to spill the beans? (2014)
Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education (2022)
Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics? (2015)
Eugenics and scientific racism, (2023)
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011)
Genetic Evaluation for Hereditary Cancer Syndromes Among African Americans: A Critical Review (2022)
How to fight racism using science (2020).
Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine(2004)
National Academies calls for transforming use of racial and ethnic labels in genetics research (2023)
Population genetics, history, and health patterns in Native Americans (2004).
Race and Genetics: Somber History, Troubled Present (2020)
The apportionment of human diversity, (1972)
Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research (2023)
Women’s Brains, Gould (1980)

It’s an eclectic mix of sources, since I’m trying to capture a range of interests and abilities.

By the way, I do warn them that Lewontin’s “The apportionment of human diversity” is an important classic paper, but not for the faint of heart — it’ll be a challenge for even the most advanced students in the class. Some students love a challenge, though.

Disappointed, and relieved

This was supposed to be a heavy research morning — we’ve started a new experiment in the lab and spiders need to be assayed, and we were going to do some scanning of egg sacs with our confocal, and I was figuring I’d be neck deep in spider work until at least noon. But then my student called in sick, which was exactly the right thing to do (COVID is going around the student body again), and I had to postpone everything until Monday. I wouldn’t want to deprive her of the fun part of science!

Instead, I did the drudgery part of science, feeding all the animals. They didn’t really need it, they had mealworms earlier this week, and look like little brown beach balls right now. I wouldn’t want them to wake up feeling peckish and discover the larder was empty this weekend.

I found two new egg sacs. Two others look very close to emergence, so I sorted those out into new small containers. The confinement makes it easier to remove newly scampering spiderlings.

Now I’m staring at a stack of lab reports and exams and senior thesis drafts that I’m going to have to get done this weekend. I also have to compose a genetics exam to mail out this evening. First, though, I have to deliver another lecture to my other class. There will be no joy in Morris today.

This was supposed to be my light semester.

Stereotypical liberal college professor

Today I’m handing out the first exam of the semester in genetics, and some of the students are a bit anxious. I’ve been getting all these email questions about how to prepare for this exam, do I have to complete it in a set amount of time, am I allowed to talk to other people when I’m working on it, are there security things I have to do (man, high schools are warping students’ minds), etc., etc., etc. They seem discombobulated by the fact I don’t run the class like a drill sergeant, and that the exams are all open book, open notes, all this slackness you ought to expect from a liberal college professor.

So this morning I had to post a note to the class explaining that yes, it’s true, I have some rather loose and tolerant policies in my teaching. It’s OK if you work with other students on the exam, it’s not cheating, it’s called learning. What a weird thing to have to spell out!

[Read more…]

I am prepared!

Genetics class begins this week, and I am ready for the first week. Syllabus: done. This week’s lectures: done. This week’s lab: done. I can sit back and relax and maybe go for a walk today, that bit of stress is gone.

Now the lab for the second week…that’s another story. That week the students are supposed to start breeding flies, and I got my fly stocks all set up in December, and I was supposed to be at the stage of expanding the colony to have a surplus in time to hand them out. Some of the lines have been duds. Wild type flies are doing fine, the scarlet mutants are proliferating like gangbusters, but the white miniature forked mutants are barely getting by, and I’m down to a handful of brown flies, because they keep dying off. Fresh stocks have been ordered, but I’m going to be cutting it close — every step in these crosses has to be carefully timed in order to get results that don’t conflict with those stupid interruptions in our schedule, like spring break.

So I’m fine this week except that I’m going to be panicking about next week. There’s always something to elevate my anxiety.

Oh no! Classes begin one week from today!

Also, candidate visits for our chemistry position start in one week.

My genetics class is fairly well organized except for one thing: the stocks of brown (bw) eyed flies have almost completely crapped out. That’s always been a sickly line, but this year they’ve been pathetic. I’m desperately trying to nurse a handful of flies into vigor, and if they don’t get it together real soon now, I’m going to flush them all and order fresh flies. I’ve got a backup plan to do a different cross to keep the students busy for 6 weeks or so, but it’s also more difficult experiment, and I prefer to do the bw x st cross as a warmup.

We also have the board of regents visiting in March, and they’re being invited to sit in on the lab. Our students aren’t very happy with the regents as it is, and if they use it as an opportunity to ask pointed questions, I’m going to allow it. I’ll probably encourage it.

Today and tomorrow are the local high school science fair. I’m one of the judges. That should be interesting, around here we get a mix of brilliant kids with creative ideas and kids who like an excuse to shoot things.

I’m feeling mildly distracted right now — and this stupid cold, while gradually abating, isn’t helping much.

Student Evaluation of Teaching

For you non-academics unfamiliar with life at the university, yesterday was the day I got my evaluations. Yes, it’s true, the students get to turn everything around and grade the faculty on their performance. I can’t actually fail — tenure, you know — but these things do matter when it’s time to determine raises and that sort of thing (which will be roughly in mid-March). The department gets a tiny pot of money that the chair will dole out to the good little boys and girls, and she will use student evals as part of the determination, which also includes research and service.

So yesterday I cracked the virtual envelope to get the results, and they were fine. On a scale of 0 to 6, I got all 5s and 6s, which might translate into a raise of a few tens of dollars in a few months. It probably isn’t worth it, because I have to bust my ass for a year to get biology across to the students.

What’s more interesting is the comments students write, which I take far more seriously than numbers punched into a Likert scale, and are far more likely to get me to change things in the course. I got a few criticisms that made me happy.

Students said, “wasted too much time on creationism” and “I want to learn more biology, not creationism.” For context, I give ONE(1) lecture out of 30 that addresses religious objections to evolutionary theory. One. And this audience of smart millennials is just completely over it. That makes me so happy.

OK, have it your way. I’m cutting that lecture out of next year’s curriculum, and replacing it with more straight-up unvarnished biology, with no regrets. I hope this class is representative of their generation, because it’s about time we could ignore that nonsense.

Frantically rewriting lectures

Aaargh, neglecting the blog again. My big distraction today: as always happens, I looked over last year’s notes and grumped at myself and said this will not do, this is totally inadequate, I need to rewrite the whole thing. The plan for tomorrow was to talk about the pentose phosphate pathway AKA the hexose monophosphate shunt AKA the phosphogluconate pathway because this stuff is important and, weirdly, our textbook doesn’t even mention it, so I can’t even punt and tell the students to go away, don’t bother me, just read Chapter X. As is common in cell bio, all we talk about is how we burn sugar to make ATP, and very little about essential anabolic reactions. And that bothers me.

The PPP is cool beans, too, so I rewrote the lecture from the ground up to cover more of the details, expanding what used to be a short aside into the whole dang talk, and I’m probably going to terrify them all with a peek into more advanced biochemistry (this is a class for 2nd year students, so it’s introductory level) and the way all of biochemistry is tangled and intertwined, but hey, they’re smart students. They can take it.

Unfortunately, it’s stuff that isn’t going to entertain a more general audience, unless you think filling in the details on this introductory slide would get you excited.

Man, I was so into biochemistry as an undergrad, and then I got distracted by neuroscience and development. I need to begin a second lifetime so I can catch up.

Now I have to finish grading, which is far less enthralling.

What do scientists do over summer break?

Well, today Mary and I scrubbed up the genetics lab all morning, I cleaned out a lot of fly bottles and emptied the incubator, and now those bottles are sitting in the autoclave getting a super-sauna. The lab is now mostly sparkling clean and ready for the next class in the Fall!

This is what I get paid to do, and what my degree qualified me for. Mary, unfortunately, doesn’t get paid, although she too has an advanced degree, and helped out so I wouldn’t have to spend all day in the nasty drudgery. So many dead flies and pupae!

This is exactly what it looked like, after we got done cleaning it.

No, I’m not done!

I got out of the house to celebrate the end of the semester yesterday, but it was slightly premature. Next week is finals week. I have to slap myself to attention and buckle down and write the genetics final and post it on Canvas.

It shouldn’t be too bad. I’m planning to take full advantage of the Canvas autograder, so I mainly have to invest time this morning in setting up the problems with discrete answers and plugging the answer key into the software, and then grading next week will mainly involve updating the grade sheet.

I slept in until 7am this morning! The stress is fading already!