How To Tackle Plagiarism

I still dip into the Geoblogosphere, and really enjoy keeping up with what colleagues in academia and research are up to. Over a year ago, Evelyn wrote a post about the carbon cycle, from the carbon atom's point of view. It was an endearing and entertaining story written years ago by a 10-year-old Evelyn.

Today Evelyn received a comment from a biology teacher called Mrs Kim:

Please delete this post. I am a biology teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Two students were caught plagiarizing this article for a carbon cycle assignment. The issue has been resolved, but we need to guarantee this does not occur in the future. Thank you.

Understandably, many earth scientists and interested parties have responded. I felt I had rather more to say than could easily be put in a comment. There are a number of possibilities. Firstly, in the age of the internet troll, Mrs Kim could be a bored youngster. However, on the balance of probabilities, she is a genuine teacher at the school in question.

So, perhaps through being a little naive about technology and the internet (I'm really trying hard not to go for the alternative explanation that she's a moron), Mrs Kim has found the source of the students' plagiarism, and decided that the appropriate course of action is to ask the author of the original work to remove it.

If I asked for all the websites my students plagiarise to be taken down, then it's safe to say Wikipedia and About.com wouldn't be half the online monsters they are today. Just in the past two weeks I'd have had to demand the removal of every article on the kidney, nephron, ultrafiltration, the acid-base mechanism, cell structure, mitosis, DNA and protein synthesis. Even if it had at one time been the normal course of action to remove a book from the school library if it was notorious as a "plagiarisable" source, it is unsustainable with so much information online.

And, as is so rightly pointed out by a number of commenters, the burden is on the students and their teacher to prevent plagiarism, not the author of the original work. So, here are my methods for detecting, punishing and preventing plagiarism.

1. Put the fear of Flying Spaghetti Monster into them at the start of the year, and tell them exactly how much shit they'll be in when (not if) they plagiarise.
   
2. When they submit work, make sure they do so electronically. If your institution has been able to afford subscription to TurnItIn then use that. Otherwise, copy the text into the box at Article Checker. If all else fails, type a few phrases into Google.
   
3. Strike through every single plagiarised word and only mark text that is entirely original.
   
4. Hand the work back and tear student a new arsehole in private.
   
5. Issue a general "hairdryer treatment" bollocking to the entire class. Show them examples of academic dishonesty. Make it clear this is one of the most serious offences a scientist can commit within their field.
   
6. Promise the class that you will find and punish all subsequent instances of plagiarism with the full weight of whatever disciplinary system you have at your disposal.
   
7. Tell them that if they pull this kind of stunt at university they can be kicked out.

Alternatively, ensure every single piece of work set is one with a significant amount of reflective thinking - the sort of personal work that can't be easily copied and pasted off Wikipedia.

Steps Through Geological Time

The great curse of being a geologist is never being able to go anywhere near a landscape without wondering (or being asked) about the geology beneath the surface. The great curse of being a teacher is never being able to go anywhere without thinking about whether it could be a learning opportunity.

So Paul rolled his eyes when I pulled off the main road in Derbyshire to head to the National Stone Centre. It was a popular place for my parents to take me on the way to or from Dovedale (which, as it happens, is where we were off to). Now, it's probably about 20 years since I last went there, so I have no idea whether this is a long-standing feature, but I was rather struck by the Geosteps:


From Precambrian at the bottom to Palaeogene at the top, the stones represent half a billion years of British rocks. And of course I'm going to show you (ages are quoted from the literature at the NSC)...

   
Antrim basalt (58-62Ma) and Portland limestone (146Ma)

   
Sherwood sandstone (230-240Ma) and Magnesian limestone (256Ma)

   
Rough Rock gritstone (316Ma) and Bee Low limestone (330Ma)

   
Much Wenlock limestone (425Ma) and Caradoc granodiorite (463Ma)

   
Borrowdale Volcanics green slates (453Ma) and Strinds sandstone (550-560Ma)
The ultimate destination, however, was a more intimate encounter with the rocks, as we headed to Dovedale to climb Thorpe Cloud.


It's a cracking ascent up a Carboniferous reef knoll for a hot summer afternoon. But it was a straightforward hike, and Paul even pretended to give a damn when I stopped to show him some crinoid fossils in a lump of scree.

Summer Homework 5: An Exciting Discovery

What, for you, has been the most exciting scientific discovery of the past decade? How has it influenced your life or your studies? Why do you consider it to be so exciting?

In 1996, before I began my A-levels, I was set some summer homework, to collect relevant biology-related news articles. This was in the days before readily available internet, and so I had to read newspapers. Just under a month before I started sixth form, the world went crazy over Martian microbes.


SEM image of "microbe" structures in meteorite ALH84001, from NASA
Later, while on my ill-fated attempt at a PhD at Washington University in St Louis, fellow students and their professors were involved with the Mars Exploration Rovers. Our Head of Department was the deputy science PI. We were all herded into the large lecture theatre one Thursday afternoon to watch NASA's "30 Seconds To Mars" video of the landings (though it didn't have this soundtrack):


The objectives for the mission were largely geological and hydrogeological - confirming the existence of water on Mars. Spirit and Opportunity did not disappoint. Within a couple of months of landing, Opportunity identified minerals indicative of a watery past - minerals such as haematite and jarosite form in the presence of water. Not only that, jarosite forms in acidic water, similar to that found in Spain's Rio Tinto, which provides an analogue for the environment in that area of Mars. Spirit found goethite, which only forms in the presence of water.

Four years later, the Phoenix lander found ice at the poles. Over the past decade rocks have also been found with cross-bedding and other features, indicating liquid water existed on Mars at some point.

In the early hours of Monday 6th August, the Curiosity rover landed on the surface of Mars, bringing with it the Mars Science Laboratory. The aim of the mission is to identify organic molecules, or at least trace molecules indicating that organics existed on the surface of Mars. This would provide evidence for life on Mars at some point in its history.

Why am I, a palaeontologist-turned-biology-teacher, so interested in the evidence for liquid water on Mars? One of the most frustrating misconceptions I come across is the erroneous idea that biologists are trying to use evolution to explain the appearance of life on Earth. In fact, evolution does nothing to explain origins of life - this is all down to abiogenesis. By studying what might have happened on Mars, we have the opportunity to look back in time. We know a fair bit already about how molecules can join together in increasing complexity, and we know a bit about early archaean organisms. But in Mars we may have a "stopped clock" of early life in the Solar System.


In short, if we can figure out why there is no complex life form on Mars, then we can figure out why there is complex life on Earth. It goes deeper than just being a "Goldilocks planet". In answering questions about our neighbouring planets, we may find the answers to the questions we're asking about ourselves.

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The Stokenchurch Gap

I've just got back from a visit to my parents' house up north. One of the best bits about the journey up there is the drive up the M40. We go through the Chilterns, and a Site of Special Scientific Interest - the Stokenchurch Gap.


I was in the rare position of being in the passenger seat and having my smartphone to hand for photos. It was also not raining, snowing or foggy.

It's known as the Aston Rowant Cutting on Natural England's citation, and it is protected for the following reasons:

A stratigraphically important site providing the best Coniacian section in central England, part of the Upper Chalk succession. Above the Chalk rock exposed at the base of the cutting there is a late Turonian to basal Coniacian section of coarse grained nodular chalk, extremely rich in fossils and important in defining the boundary between Turonian and Coniacian age rocks.

It's late Cretaceous, containing a number of marine organisms.


It would be lovely to explore, but I imagine the combination of the SSSI and its location next to one of the busier motorways in the UK makes it fairly inaccessible.


However, with views like this, and such impressive chalk geology rising up on both sides, I'm content to drive through it every few months.

Summer Homework 4: Saving The World

Is there any point trying to save the Earth? Describe arguments for and against environmentalism, and offer your conclusions on the fate of the human race.

The Earth has been through some interesting times in its 4.54Ga history. There is evidence that it was covered in ice at various points (though the extent of this ice is somewhat debated still), and that there were times when it was a really crap place to live, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Life on Earth has been through a number of mass extinctions, most notably the Permian-Triassic extinction, resulting in the obliteration of 90% of marine species.


Marine extinction intensity, from Wikipedia
Species have appeared and disappeared. More than 99% of all species that have ever existed on the Earth are extinct. Big deal.

The climate has changed - though we are talking about global warming, we are in a much colder period now than many periods in the past. It has been both warmer and colder than this in the Phanerozoic eon alone. So who's to say that this hasn't all happened before? In fact, the idea of a "resilient Earth" is used frequently as an argument against anthropogenic global warming.


Phanerozoic climate change, from Wikipedia
And yet this is not a comforting state of mind to have. Species go extinct, climate changes, all over geological time scales - that is, over millions of years. Historically, climate has changed sufficiently slowly as to enable species to migrate or facilitate adaptation and evolution. Local changes may be rapid, but global changes are slower (notwithstanding bolides, large-scale volcanism, and so on). What's happening at the moment is faster than we've seen before.


Hockey stick curve, from IPCC 3rd Annual Report
Now, it is possible that we are seeing this rapid change because we are able to see our recent fossil record with greater resolution than the more distant past. However, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we have burnt millions of years' worth of fossil fuels, chucking tonnes of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere over and above the normal flux of the carbon cycle. There is a causal mechanism linking atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to global temperatures, via the greenhouse effect. We have lost the golden toad, the Yangtze river dolphin, the Pyrenean ibex, the Western black rhino and the Pinta Island tortoise, just in the past decade or so, and that's just the cute cuddly vertebrates - Flying Spaghetti Monster only knows how many invertebrates and plants have become extinct in that time (though my guess would be hundreds).

As these organisms die out, they clearly affect the ecosystems to which they belong. And of course, Homo sapiens is part of these ecosystems. A soundbite often attributed to Albert Einstein says we'd have about four years left if the honey bees became extinct. It may be hyperbole, but it's rooted in a truth - we depend on the pollination of plants, whether it is by insect or wind. Extinction of many of these species will have a disastrous effect on our survival.

Climate, too, will affect us. We are seeing more droughts, more storms and more extreme weather. As the average annual temperature increases, the arid and semi-arid biomes spread towards the poles. We can grow Mediterranean crops in the southern UK. The boundaries of our major ecosystems are pushing polewards, leaving plants and animals stranded, unable to migrate or colonise quickly enough.

In the end, the Earth probably will recover. The ferns, the cockroaches and the lawyers will survive the next great extinction. The populations of other organisms will bottleneck, and there will be increased diversity millions of years later. But humans are unlikely to make it.


We need to save the Earth and its residents. Without the bacteria, fungi, plants and other animals, we are doomed. The Earth is the only home we have ever known, and if we break it we're not getting another.

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A Gneiss Photograph

I was flicking through some photographs this evening, and found one of my favourite photos of Paul.


It looks like an old photo, perhaps from the 1960s or 1970s. In fact, it was taken on my SLR with what I later discovered was damaged film. It was our honeymoon in 2006, and when this was taken we had paused on the crest of the Bighorn Mountains on highway 16. He looks like a rock star, rather than a newlywed legal secretary.

Behind him is an outcrop of the Precambrian gneiss for which the Bighorn Mountains are renowned. The Roadside Geology of Wyoming says these are Archaean - once sandstones and shales, metamorphosed and folded.


I couldn't resist taking a proper geology photo, with lens cap for scale, of the folded gneiss. Paul let me off with this bit of geo-geekery, even on our honeymoon. After all, as they say, geologists make the bedrock...

A Retrospective On My Female Teachers

I started writing this before the summer, as a reflection on the end of my part-time PGCE, my probationary period and my second major exams season. I was thinking about some of the women who have taught me and who in doing so have shaped me as a teacher. This is not to diminish the influence of male teachers - on the contrary, my father, my utterly insane A-level chemistry teacher and numerous university lecturers were all incredibly important. But I wanted to showcase the women in whose footsteps I dare to tread. This seems pretty relevant as a contibution to Ada Lovelace Day, this Friday.

My mother
For most people their mother is their first teacher. We were fortunate that my mother was able to be at home for us throughout our childhood - even now, she is the hub of the house, and visiting my father when my mother isn't around (she spent months in hospital this year) is eerie. I probably cannot fathom how much I owe to her, but I recall how she encouraged me to read lots and lots about the human body. She taught me that On Old Olympus' Towering Top A Finn And German Vault And Hop, although we nearly had a full-on screaming match over which part of a vertebra was anterior (when veterinary anatomy and human anatomy collide...).


© Wikimedia Commons (user FocalPoint)
Genetically, I inherit a good hand for drawing, and I attribute the ease with which I draw cells, tissues, organs and systems to her. But perhaps the one aspect of my teaching most influenced by my mother is my use of The Mayhew Look (named for my maternal grandmother, great aunt and great-grandmother). It is the you-had-better-stop-doing-that-right-now look, the I-cannot-believe-you-thought-you-could-get-away-with-that look, the you-are-in-so-much-trouble-right-now look. One of my A2s last year confessed that the only lecturer he was afraid of was me, and the look strikes fear into the current crop. That is all down to my mother and the pedigree of strong women that came before her.

Mrs Pauline Cassin, Norcot Primary School
When I was about six years old I was notoriously slow at getting changed after PE. Sometimes in desperation I would just put my school uniform on over my PE kit. On one occasion, Mrs Cassin reached the end of her tether, and she got so annoyed with me that she threw a shoe at me. She immediately went to apologise to my mother, who said it was quite okay and she would probably have thrown the other at me as well.

Footwear olympics notwithstanding, however, she noticed that I had rather a talent for mathematics, and I was dispatched every Friday morning for a gifted students class. This may have been the best thing to come out of my entire pre-secondary education. Some twelve years later, I wrote a letter to her via the local authority (she had long since retired), and told her that I had got into Cambridge. She was overjoyed. Sadly, I expect 25 years on, she may no longer be alive.

Dr Elizabeth Jones, Nottingham High School
Dr Jones was one of my A-level biology teachers, and she absolutely loved the Aqua song. She also loved to draw a Native American dwelling when discussing adenosine triphosphate. Yes, I do that now. She used different coloured pens on the whiteboard, and red always equalled energy. I do that too. She was passionate about plants and botany, an aspect of biology that utterly bored me at the age of 18. Now I find myself with classes of students all as bored witless of plants as I was, and history repeats itself. I wish I could go back and tell my idiotic teenage self to listen to her and become fascinated by the inner workings of plants and their place in ecology, but I can't, so instead I tell my students that one day they will find themselves in my position now, wishing they could go back to their biology class.


© Wikimedia Commons (user Fabelfroh)
When I left the High School, she wrote in a little notebook I had for such occasions the simple message Myosotis arvensis.

I didn't.

Dr Christina de la Rocha, University of Cambridge
Christina taught us one of our climatology classes - just a few lectures. They were the only ones I got. She was one of the few members of teaching staff, it seemed, who didn't think it was enough for them to turn up and talk at us. She taught - boy did she teach. Her first lecture is seared in my memory and that of many of my classmates - she said everything she needed to say in 35 minutes, having completely overestimated the time she'd need. She seemed utterly mortified, but we were very happy - after all, it had all made sense. Christina was also one of the few lecturers who would spend as long as it took with us on one-to-one tutorials. She gave her absolute all to her students - something I realise I do too (to the detriment of any form of social life).

She dated my undergraduate supervisor for a little while, and I remember him showing off a present she'd given him - a little vial of bioluminescent dinoflagellates, that glowed when the vial was shaken. It's something I still think is incredibly sweet, and a reminder that geeky science-based gifts can also be cute and romantic.

I'm hoping that maybe, in 20 years' time or so, I will see a blog post (or receive a holographic message delivered by a robot on a hoverbike perhaps??) talking about me in even half as glowing terms. I teach because I love it - I love the opportunity to share my enthusiasm and passion for biology, and I want to inspire more and more students to aim high and achieve great things. We do this with no expectation of thanks or reward, but it's still nice to be noticed...

The Truth About Fieldwork Data Collection

Skidding in late like one of my students handing in homework, here's my submission for the Accretionary Wedge #38, with the hope that since Anne's deadline was "before you go to bed" and that there may be some bloggers in Alaska who are still up, and that crucially Anne may still be asleep for another hour or so, I can sneak in my post.

The theme is "Back to school", and I've been back at school for three weeks (many more if you include enrolment and induction). I am teaching my favourite A-level topic - "The Natural Environment and Species Survival" (and crucially have succeeded in palming off all the immunology and infection stuff on my colleague), involving a lot of evolution, climatology and ecological principles. The students covered a bit of biodiversity and conservation last year but this builds on it.


The A2 class of 2011 on fieldwork - all now off to university, and since this photo now appears in the prospectus I feel okay about posting it online...
For me, one of the most important things I can teach my students is how to do fieldwork. I appreciate that few of my students will ever go into a field-based science (although I am delighted to report that the student I dispatched to do Palaeobiology & Evolution at Portsmouth is having a fantastic time), but it is a superb skill. For the past two years the A2s haven't had a choice - their coursework component has been field-based. This year I may be giving the students an option to do lab-based work instead, but I will still strongly encourage them to still choose a fieldwork project.

It is difficult for the students to think of an original project. Lab-based projects, if unoriginal, give predictable results, and students are perhaps simply repeating the same experiment over and over again through the years. I know I looked at Elodea, photosynthesis and light intensity for my A-level practical - yawn. What I like about fieldwork is its unpredictability. Over the short period of time we have in the field, students essentially choose an area and study biotic and abiotic factors - proximity to hedges or streams, pH of soil, amount of sunlight received, soil moisture, number of species. Despite using a small private nature reserve, and having done this two years running, I have yet to see two projects with the same results - they always choose a different transect, or have a different idea about how frequently to take measurements.

And that is the the crux of it all. I had a student before the summer who, on a short practical quadrat-chucking exercise on campus complained, "This is crap, there's hardly anything here and it makes no sense". Essentially I said to him:

"But don't you see? There is hardly anything here. And you're measuring exactly what is there - you have no expectations of what the answer should be, so all you are doing is pure data collection. Collecting data without an idea of what the results should be is as close as you'll get to eliminating your own bias in ecological fieldwork. Also, do you realise that you are the first person to ever collect this data? No one has ever measured that species, on that transect before."

I saw the realisation dawn on him - this is what science is actually about. Doing an experiment and collecting data without having any idea what the result will be. I dislike the hypothesis-driven way of doing science. It can end up putting the cart before the horse. I'd rather approach a scientific investigation with "I wonder what happens if I do X" than "I think if I do X then Y will happen". There are, of course, times when either is appropriate, but when students are taking their first tentative steps towards doing "real" science, with no teachers' notes and "right answers", the prospect of Y not happening can be disheartening.

So I would encourage my colleagues to be more honest about data collection in science, and to give the students the chance to investigate questions you don't know the answer to (admittedly, easier once dealing with undergrads). Real science rarely gives you a nice straight line graph or results you can use to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Real science is anomalous, full of errors (all ready to be minimised by the prospective scientists as they hone their technique) and deliciously exciting.

Half A Lifetime Ago

I've been digging out and scanning old photographs this week. I think I still have two albums full of geological photos to scan, but these were some of the highlights of my school and university life. There are a few little gems waiting to see the light of day. The more enterprising of you will click through to the album (I think Picasa allows you to see the whole album if you have access to one image). Beware - what has been seen cannot be unseen, so consider whether you really want to see me dressed up for the Rocky Horror Show circa 2000...

One that I thought was worth showing you is this:


This is me, aged 13. It was my first Trailblazer expedition (Trailblazer being a Nottinghamshire County Council scheme acting as a precursor to the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme). I was about halfway along The Roaches, and you can see just about how much I'm enjoying the experience - NOT. I complained all the way up the hills, and cried all the way down the hills. There may have been some landscapes, but I didn't take any photographs. I suffered from hammer toes, which meant every expedition was coupled with blood blisters under my toenails, and frequently temporarily losing the nail. I was also extremely asthmatic - I'm holding my first aid kit in the photo, so I was almost certainly going for my inhaler.

Fast-forward 14 years. The surly teenager gave rise to a twenty-something who actually quite enjoyed being outside. At 18 I'd had corrective surgery, removing the distal phalanx from each second toe (as an aside, I now wish my surgeon had kept the bones for me!), and it gave me a new lease of life as far as the great outdoors was concerned. It also meant I could continue my dancing classes, but I haven't scanned in the pictures of me doing the rumba yet...

A four-year geology degree was also a great way of getting me fitter. I did whine a fair bit through my first and second year, but the end of my second year brought the mapping project, and after six weeks of wandering the Lake District I came back super fit and super buff. And so Paul and I began to contemplate going on holidays that involved a fair bit of hiking. In late 2007 we went to the Peak District (we stayed in Castleton, not too far away from the Roaches as the crow flies), and on our first day did a circular hike on Hathersage Moor. Paul took a photo of me on a short break, immediately post-Mars Bar:


I'm smiling, for starters. I'm also very well-clothed for the weather - that jacket has been going over a decade and is still in great condition. My hat, I think you'll agree, is far superior to the woolly number I sported in 1993. I don't remember being cold at any point on that holiday, although having to take a field piss on top of Kinder Scout is a particularly bracing experience for a woman. I don't need to take my inhaler as much now - oddly enough I am now more likely to need it from being indoors in a dusty environment than being outside exercising.

If you'd told me at 13 that I'd be yomping over Hathersage Moor, hiking up Kinder Scout, tackling Winnats Pass and scaling Mam Tor for fun, I'd have laughed (and then probably needed to take my inhaler). There are maybe two points worth making out of all this. The first is that it's very useful to keep records of our younger selves - it's a great way of seeing how far we've come. It's one of the reasons I like keeping as much of my students' work as I can, and then showing them their first pieces of work for me when they leave at the end of the year/two years. They look back on their journey and can see their improvement. The second point is that if someone told our younger selves what we'd be doing once we were double that age, we probably wouldn't believe them. It simply would not compute. But life throws us some unusual consequences, and maybe my students won't rule out anything in their futures - what they turn their noses up at now may come to be one of the things that bring joy to them in another 18 years' time.

My Month Off

I was asked today what I was doing now I'm on my summer break. It's a tough one to answer, because I honestly haven't given it much thought. Since I left work on Friday I have been for Chinese twice, ordered pizza once, and cooked twice. I spent much of Saturday feeling very low and melancholy - a common affliction of teachers once the marathon of the teaching year is over. Now it seems everyone is off in the bits of the USA I love the most, and I won't be going there this year at all. I am really pining for the Mountain Timezone - you can help by sending care packages of good tequila, since the best I can get is José Cuervo Gold. And preferably lots and lots of margarita mix.


Yesterday I was able to get stuck in tidying up the garden. Poor old Jurassic Park has been very much neglected, as has its blog. But for most of the year, I guess the organisms that I've been pruning, deadheading, potting on, tying in, training and nourishing have been the eighty-odd students I've taught, which has been well worth it. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, indeed. And in between a gazillion loads of laundry, washing up, cleaning the flat and ignoring the Ironing Basket That Will Not Go Away, I squeezed in a visit from a former student.

Paul is at work until Friday, and then we have a month until I return to work. In the middle of this period, my little brother is getting married, which is all very exciting (and means Jabba gets to go on holiday to Uncle Matthew the V.E.T.). So what am I going to do with myself?

I have a shitload of DVDs to watch and books to read. This is Britain, so we will have plenty of rainy summer days, and to my great shame I have still not finished "Origin Of Species". Usually I have no problem at all with books written very formally. And I understand the concepts entirely, of course. But I get distracted by the floweriness of Darwin's prose. I know, bad biology teacher. When I do finish it, I have promised myself a little inky something, somewhere (exact location as yet undecided...):


I want to finish "The Greatest Show On Earth", which will be slightly easier going. Yes, Dawkins is evidently a misogynistic arse, but his books are still well written (I don't think anyone's been calling for a boycott, have they?). DVD-wise, I have at least a season and a half of "Teachers" to finish watching (scarily true to life), and I have been promised "Game Of Thrones" too, so now I can find out what all the damn fuss is about.

There's a garden design course I paid for, sitting in a magazine file waiting for me to give it some attention. I might get going with that at long last. I have at least three gardening magazines that I haven't read yet. I plan on spending several evenings at the cinema - "The Tree Of Life" looks beautiful, and of course there's "Captain America". "Cowboys & Zombies" and "Cowboys & Aliens" both look great fun. And add into the mix "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes", and that's every week taken up with at least one film - bonzer!

Other than that, I'm looking for a few day trips to areas of geological or ecological interest. So if anyone has any favourites, let me know. Anywhere with a good walk, a nice pub with great food, and some superb wildlife or geology to be seen (without needing to ask for access permission first, preferably) will be considered, and I'm on the look out for good field trip locations too (for which all of the above criteria apply, but crucially it should be topographically arranged such that only the teachers' mobile phones have reception). I'm especially interested to know how close I can get to the Stokenchurch Gap without trespassing on the motorway, because that stretch alone is why the M40 is my favourite road.

The Best Bits

Events over the past few days have triggered a few trips down memory lane for me. Submitting an extremely late UCAS entry today, going for a drink with the A2s on Monday and dinner with the BTECs last Friday, and generally watching these little baby birds spread their wings and fly away. A few of them have asked me what university is like, and what my fondest memories of university were. Sadly many of these events took place before digital cameras were around, and I haven't scanned half the incriminating photos associated with this, so imagination it is then.

• The cleaner in my first-year halls of residence, who looked after me like I was her own daughter when I got gastroenteritis
  
• The engineering student from upstairs who carried me from his room to my own and put me to bed, before sleeping in my armchair, the night I drank enough to die
  
• Being able to do a full evening's studying and go out clubbing at 11pm
  
• Soup with an absorbance of 1%, salmon en croute with sultanas and desserts constantly served with condensed milk because the chef did not like his puddings being "adulterated" with custard
  
• One of the geologists having their birthday during our Dorset fieldtrip, and the DJ in the "Ace Disco" in the basement of the hotel in Weymouth playing "You'll Never Walk Alone" for the happy scouser.
  
• The demonstrators' risk assessment for Tintagel, Cornwall, which warned of the dangerously high cholesterol levels associated with the Cornish pasty shop at the top of the hill
  
• Experimental sandwiches from hotels and B&Bs, such as beef and cranberry, or cheese and stuffing
  
• Cycling against the bracing Cambridge wind, whichever direction we were going in ("Nothing between here and the Urals")
  
• Working in the Sedgwick Museum with "Uncle Rod", a kindly curator who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hammond in Jurassic Park
  
• Enjoying a 46oz margarita in New Mexico on fieldwork
  
• Skinny-dipping in the Gulf of Evvia (Greece) in mid-December, after way too much retsina
  
• Getting to work on a real dinosaur fossil for my MSci project (still amazes me)
  
• Being taken seriously as a scientist by other scientists
  
• Certain undergrads from the year above me chucking cuddly Pokemon toys around the library when the librarian wasn't looking, and playing LaserQuest after dark in the department
  
• Coming out of our final exam and hearing the champagne corks pop
  
• Some cute LLM student from another college asking me to marry him at my May Ball

Let's hope equally fond memories await the matriculating class of 2011!

Two Great Geological Words

It's time for another Accretionary Wedge, and Evelyn has asked for our favourite geological words. I briefly toyed with mentioning all the rude words and phrases (my AS Biology lads are rather taken with the thought of entering a profession where they can say "fantastic cleavage and a significant prospect of bedding" without being fired, slapped or both). My own dear husband gets far more mileage out of "schist" and "gneiss" than any non-geologist should.

Instead, I went with two words with similar etymology: "turbidite" and "bioturbation". Both stem from the latin noun turba, meaning "disturbance". Now, turbidites were some of the first aspects of geology I remember studying, and I'll confess to not having a bleeding clue what the lecturer was going on about until much later. I had some turbidite sequences in my geological mapping area, but no beautiful Bouma sequences.


SEPM have an excellent page describing the fining-up nature of a Bouma sequence. When one finds it in the field it is an indicator that these rocks were once on a continental slope, hundreds of metres below the surface of the ocean. A mind-blowing thought for any first-year undergrad in geology.

I made a pseudo-Bouma sequence with some of my BTEC students a couple of weeks ago (although not in the context of geology). We did the old soil jar test. Sure enough, when we'd given our jar of soil and water a good old shake, the largest clasts settled out first. The silt settled within an hour, but the clay actually took well over two weeks to completely settle out of the water.


Yes, that is my dinosaur ruler, bought from the Natural History Museum nearly 30 years ago.

Bioturbation is a geological event that is a lot easier to see as it happens. Thousands of organisms make their homes within the sediment, and most of the rest exist on top of the sediment, whether on land or underwater. Their burrows, footprints and traces churn up sediment and leave sometimes an indelible mark in the rocks. I love a good dinosaur trackway, I do, and it's great to see them in their most recognisable orientation:


But in cross-section the story would be very different. There are three claws that dug into the sand, distorting the layers underneath. The pressure of this bipedal dinosaur would have been enough to compress layers under its footprint, like these footprints from the Mammoth Site.


I spent a very happy summer working at the Mammoth Site, giving tours of the bone bed, and can remember these exact footprints from the second stopping point of the tour. It was a great way to introduce how the mammoths got trapped - the sediment is all messed up from the suction generated by the mammoths trying to move their feet in the mud.

All through my geology degree it was a race to get to the outcrop before the lads tried climbing it, as it would invariably be subjected to some post-lithification bioturbation, accompanied by the shrieks as they slid down the rock face. So I have fond memories of my fellow geologists wrecking the outcrops for the next year group as well.

Plus, "turbidite" sounds a little bit rude.

Things My Students Learned From Me

Last year (for some reason I didn't do any this year) I regaled you all with the things I learned from my students. It is now the end of term, or near enough - I don't expect to see the BTEC students in next week as they've all handed in their work, and in fact as this post is published I am sitting down to dinner with the class I've taught for two years and their tutor. The A2 students are all done bar those insane enough to do A-level physics, who have their final exam on Monday. And the AS students have had quite enough Intro to A2, and hopefully are defoliating trees to do the leaf margin analysis I set them as summer homework.

Occasionally I am reminded that my students learn things from me. Obviously one would hope that the key points of the syllabus are the major things they learn, but sometimes they say something that lets me know they were listening to an off-the-cuff remark or brief aside.

The word "misanthropic"

In an attempt to wear me down at the start of the year, whenever I asked a student of non-white heritage to move seats (I asked a lot of students to move - many of these were not white!), a couple of my absolute favourite students shouted out "Racist!". My response to this was "I'm not a racist, I'm a misanthropist - I hate everybody equally". The outcome of this was one of my A2s taking that word as a lifestyle choice, and Misanthropic Network was born (fortunately they haven't posted anything since April as they are all far too busy revising for exams). You should check it out - the "Walking With Humans" video is very funny.

Skinner boxes

One of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching GCSE biology last year was a brief section on animal behaviour, including classic and operant conditioning. The students, being bloodthirsty little boys and girls, really responded to the idea of electrocuting rats and pigeons, and thought it should be a central aspect of college discipline.


Some of those students are now in my AS class, and if any of the others misbehave, or if I am trying to encourage attentive and responsive behaviour in class, one of my former GCSEs will pipe up "Get the Skinner box, miss!".

The true nature of pollen

When talking about plant anatomy to a load of students who really don't give a shit about anything that isn't human biology, it sometimes helps them if I make the connections between the organs and tissues. This means I really labour the point about flowers being plant genitals, for example.

It made my day when I heard a student sneeze in my class and then squeal "Stupid tree sperm!" - something embedded itself in her memory.

When to say "bastard" in polite company

Why, when you're referring to the bastard wing or alula, of course!


We have a swear jar. It's 10p for "shit", "fuck" or "cunt". If I drop an F-bomb I have to put in 20p as I'm a teacher and I should know better. The A2s have to put in £1 if they mention the word "germ" during the immunity topic. Some of the little darlings tried to get me to say "bastard" in an attempt to extract 20p from me for the swear jar, by retrieving one of the pigeon wings and asking me what the label said. They got part of their wish, for me to say "bastard", but they also got a long lecture on why it was called so and why that was not a swear word.

Cummingtonite


I rest my case.

It might be worth taking action against AGW

I scraped the surface of climate change on Tuesday with the Intro to A2 class. They saw the evidence, but were a little sceptical still. So I showed them this video:


Usually some of them zone out if I bung on a video, but they fixed on the screen and watched intently for the whole 10 minutes. They even said that it was a really good video. And then they said I'd ruined their summer for them and made them really depressed.

So I reminded them that there was still plenty that could be done and that they could go some way towards doing those things, and I bid them on their way for the summer.

Salvage

This summer my colleagues and I will be leaving our 30-year-old science labs and moving into a brand new state-of-the-art science block, although perhaps they'd be a little more state-of-the-art if the physics lab had vacuum or compressed air taps...! This has meant a lot of consolidation of materials. Where possible, specimens and resources have been donated to other organisations - a number of local schools are the proud recipients of some of our pickled animals, some charities have many of the textbooks, and skeletons and dried specimens have been split between staff and students as mementos of their happy times in the lab.

It has meant that I've been able to snaffle some absolute gems. For one thing, we are only taking the microscopes with built-in lights. So the models with mirrors and separate lights are going. I have two (one for me, one for my father), and some enterprising AS students who were in the right place at the right time have the others.


A microscope would be useless without anything to look at, so here is a representative histological set of animal and plant tissue. I shall have great fun with this!


There were several rock and fossil specimen trays going. I grabbed them all. If we ever offer an A-level in geology (or even a BTEC unit) then I will willingly return them. The most intriguing is this one, which appears to be from the Open University:


There are the usual rocks, mostly igneous or metamorphic. Lovely specimens of granite and basalt especially. An obligatory hand-lens is included, plus some odder kit. There is a little compass, some magnets and some iron filings. None of the rocks appear to be magnetic! So I'm wondering why I have this stuff. I know I spent much of my first year at university drunk, but I'm sure I'd remember using compasses and iron filings to identify rocks. I also have a little photographic slide with a lot of little white lines in an otherwise black film, and a green filter.

I've also, as you'll see, got a spectroscope. Now, I really don't remember ever using one of them to study rocks! This is a set from before my time, so had techniques changed before 1998, when I arrived at university?


I'm in two minds as to whether to make this my new field kit box (as the old one is falling to pieces), or to use it for my lunch when we move to the new staffroom...

Wordless Wednesday: Immaturity

My Favourite Geological Picture

Ann is calling for our "favorite geologic pictures" for the Accretionary Wedge. So here's one of my top ones (Coral Pink Sand Dunes has already been submitted) - a unique choice, I think you'll agree:


It is what appears to be an enormous fossilised penis. On a very crude level (usually the one at which my students operate) this goes some way towards making this my fave. It's from the Lulworth fossil forest on the Jurassic Coast in the UK. The forest is mid-Jurassic, flooded when sea levels rose. What we have is a somewhat amusing arrangement of a fallen tree trunk flanked by two rings of algae.

This geological knowledge did not stop my fellow students from behaving like children, including one who decided he was going to lie in the tree trunk as though about to be ejaculated into the English Channel.

So here's mine - the first known CDC in the fossil record.

Farewell To Another Professor

Today I received my copy of GeoCam, the alumni magazine for the Dept of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. And my heart sank when I read that on 16th September of this year Professor Tjeerd Van Andel died. He was one of my lecturers for the module on climatology I studied in my third year at Cambridge, and taught the first year sedimentology course.

He told us about the North Atlantic Conveyor, about ocean currents and thermohaline circulation. We learned about CCDs and ACDs, and I got to take out my frustrations on a LOT of foraminifera. But most memorable was the lecture he gave at the end of Lent term in our first year. It was a slide show of his work aboard Alvin, the deep-sea submersible. Professor Van Andel was the first person to ever see the weird and wonderful animals living around the deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Hydrothermal vents are on the GCSE biology specification, in the context of adaptations to extreme environments. It has been, and is still, a delight to pass on some of what I learned from Professor Van Andel to a generation of eager (in theory) science students. And I am so proud to be able to tell them that I was taught by the first person to see the tube worms, crabs and snails that make their homes there.

It is an irony that, on the day I learn of this great man's death it is also announced that Alvin is to receive an upgrade for the next 50-odd years of research.

There is an obituary from the University of Cambridge, and a longer one from Standford University, along with some delightful memories of his earlier years.

In geological terms, 87 years was no time at all.

Things I Learned From My Students #9: Snow

The UK is currently the laughing stock of the best part of Europe and North America, as we've had some snow and ground to a halt. In fairness to us, snow like this is the sort of thing for which we're about as prepared as Toronto is for a plague of frogs, due to its rarity. On the other hand, you'd think if you got a plague of frogs three years running around about the time that plagues of frogs were most likely, that you might start planning for the increased chances of being plagued by frogs.

Anyway, London only just got the snow today, and it's not bad enough to close the college. So it was on with the hiking boots to brave the treacherous two-minute walk along the ungritted road to work. And on with a few more revelations.

1. It takes a special sort of teacher to leave the windows open in the biology lab over the weekend, rendering the internal climate positively Siberian (this was NOT me).
   
2. No matter how cold the students are, they are never cold enough to take you up on the offer to put a lab coat on as another layer.
   
3. Edexcel doesn't think it's worth teaching students about competitive and non-competitive inhibition anymore.
   
4. Despite nearly 30 years of public outreach and education on this matter, students still think that HIV came from people having sex with monkeys.
   
5. None of them had ever heard of a dental dam.
   
6. Yet one of them has a fleshlight called Mirabel.
   
7. They think that Coxsackieviruses are the best thing ever.
   
8. Until they hear about Cummingtonite, that is.
   
9. People who named towns in New England were well kinky.
   
10. You never want to spot a student googling for "reason for late period".
    
11. The fake foam rock stress toy I got from Blackwell Scientific a few years ago as a promo gift is more realistic than I had ever realised...
    
12. The little bugger who threw the snowball through the staffroom window (open 3") to hit my desk this morning should be automatically presented with an A* in mechanics as they have an absolute mastery of projectiles.

There's a very definite "inappropriate" theme to this one. I put it down to covering disease transmission in A2 biology, physiology of the endocrine system in BTEC and the presence of a large student union-run awareness campaign around World AIDS Day. It's just been condoms a-go-go all week.

A Great Cock-Up On Great Cockup

It's time for the Accretionary Wedge, and for this month Lockwood has asked for our important geological experiences:

It may (or may not) be something that led you to the discipline [...], or a class, or a work experience, or a field experience. It might have been a puzzle or problem solved, or job landed, a degree completed. Perhaps it was something else entirely. It could have been an awful, disastrous experience from which you learned an important lesson.

I'm going to go with the latter, and this is perhaps a big one for me to admit to - it's quite embarrassing, and I just hope my fellow geoscientists can still look me in the eye afterwards.


In July 2000, I carried out my geological mapping project. I mapped an area of the Uldale Fells, the very north of the Lake District. Standing on Brae Fell, I could see the Solway Firth and over into Dumfries and Galloway. I could see wind farms. When atop Great Calva looking south, I could see right down an old fault line stretching beyond Thirlmere. It was beautiful in a wild way that we don't often see in the UK. I shared the entire Uldale Fells with three classmates: I mapped the westernmost section, with Theo, Heather and Dave mapping successively further east.


We spent four days making reconnaissance trips around the area in groups, and then began our individual mapping. I was dropped off just to the west of Great Cockup (yes, it does exist, and yes, I still think this is hilarious), and was due to meet the others at the end of the day southeast of Knott, at a parking area next to a swimming spot in the River Caldew.

About an hour before our rendezvous point, I was on the saddle between Knott and Great Calva, with Hause Gill and Wiley Gill either side of me. I had intended to go down Wiley Gill, meet up with the track along the Caldew, and stroll back to the car. To this day, I have no idea why I did this, as I was perfectly capable of reading a compass.

I went the wrong way.

I went towards Great Calva, looking for the path on the left hand side of the gill, but never found it. I was about halfway down what was Little Calva before I realised my mistake. I fished around for my mobile to ring the others. But it wasn't there. Somewhere in the scrub I had lost my phone, having kept it in my pocket for easy access down the fells. I went back to look for it, and probably wasted more time than was necessary. I realised I was going to be late.


In retrospect, the sensible thing to do would have been to find the Caldew track again and hoof it back to the car Scouts pace. But I was absolutely desperate to get a message to someone. Then I spotted the youth hostel. The warden was in, but his mobile phone had very little reception. After wandering around outside for a while, we eventually managed to get my grandmother on the phone and ask her to phone my mother (I forget why I couldn't get hold of her immediately) and for Mum to phone one of the others. Note to all field geologists - even if you have mobile reception and are in a relatively safe area, write down your contacts' mobile phone numbers just in case.

Then I had to start the route back anyway. I was mentally exhausted, gutted at the loss of my mobile phone (it had a really cool Xpress-On cover and a light-up aerial - this was, after all, the year 2000), and feeling like an absolute pillock. About halfway along the track, I spied Theo walking towards me. When he caught up with me and we started walking back, he waved his fluorescent yellow CAS strap in the air as a signal, and that was when I realised just how worried my classmates had been.


It is not my finest hour. I cannot believe what a stupid mistake I made. I have always prided myself on my map-reading and compass-using skills, so I don't understand what was with my loss of judgment and idiocy. I have never made this mistake again, and I managed to map a huge area with a combination of speed over ground and detail of observations. In fact, I got the highest mark of the year group for my mapping project.

I learned to mapread twice, walk once. I learned to write contact details in my field notebook. I learned to secure my mobile phone. I have a pink zipped case with a belt loop for my phone, so I can spot it if it falls off (not that it should, fitted onto my belt). I suspect students are no longer allowed to map alone, but I don't know what the rules are at universities now (hell, my A2 biologists will not be allowed to work in anything less than a pair in a fenced in, locked nature reserve of extremely limited area!).

Now I am a lecturer responsible for my students' safety and education in the field. I set an example to them, ensuring that I am appropriately attired and shod, with a well-stocked backpack. I spend time with each of them, making sure they know how to find their bearings, and we have a good backup of mobile phone numbers and emergency contact details. Most importantly, I am very forgiving of mistakes they make, because I remember that once upon a time I wasn't quite as shit hot at this fieldwork lark as I thought I was.

A Campaign For Grand Teton

Some good news, courtesy of a comment Silver Fox made on my post a week ago:

Julia, the NPCA (National Parks Conservation Association) now has a page to submit a letter to Ken Salazar, head of the Department of Interior: click on "Take Action." They think Congress and the DOI need to respond to Wyoming by coming up with a deal.

I am so glad an organisation like the NPCA is involved and spearheading a campaign for the Department of the Interior to reach a deal with the state of Wyoming before the deadline imposed by Governor Freudenthal.

And the survey I put up has reassured me that the vast majority of you are either very or somewhat concerned by the plans, so I feel at least as though I'm not just one person overreacting or anything.


Four years ago on Thursday, Paul and I saw Grand Teton for the first time, and we fell as much in love with that place as we were with each other. Later, sitting round a campfire with the other guests at the ranch we stayed at, we met a couple who had honeymooned there 40 years ago and were celebrating their wedding anniversary.

I want to be able to go back there in 36 years' time, with Paul, and meet a young honeymooning couple. And I want to be able to tell them that Grand Teton is just as beautiful then as it was when we were first there. That's what I've written in my letter.