Microteaches #3: A-Level Exams Begin

AS Biology is the first exam of the season, and it's happening on Monday. Precisely 0% of my students showed up to the final class before the exams, so I hope the little sods were all at home busily revising.

Maybe they'd find this video, linked from Seven Deadly Synapses, useful for reading pedigrees:


My A2s will be leaving by 10th June, and I wanted to get them something to remember me by. They've been a small group (no more than 10 students) and we've all got to know each other well (they were the darlings that pretended I was their adoptive mother to get free cake at Nandos). So I bought them each a copy of "Do We Need Pandas?" - the crapness of pandas has been something of a running joke throughout the year. And in each copy, I wrote the same words my A-Level biology teacher wrote to me 13 years ago:


Myosotis arvensis should sum up my message to them quite nicely...

I submitted my abstract for this year's SVP meeting in Las Vegas: "Teaching Evolution To Diverse Groups Of Students: Opportunities And Threats". I've put it down for the E&O Poster Session - really hope it gets accepted. It's formed part of my PGCE course this year, so I'll have a short paper to around the time of the conference itself.

On the subject of conferences, if this is what climate scientists get up to when they all meet up then it's clear that SVP need to up their game:

Coursework Hell

The A-level students are meant to be handing in their coursework this week, and I need to have an abstract good to submit to SVP before the weekend, so everyone is rather stressed to say the least.

Despite trying to live by the sticker on the door to the Cambridge Earth Sciences photography lab ("A lack of forward planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"), the kids are leaving things to the last second, and their stress and panic is scaring me too.

However, I had to laugh when the biggest, scariest-looking student I have ever had the pleasure of teaching came up to my desk, said "Hi Miss," then took several steps backwards before confessing he hadn't finished his report.

Still got it.

Why Didn't I Think Of This Before?

The final course I'm teaching to my BTEC National Diploma class is "Principles of Plant and Soil Science". The little darlings have to look at plant anatomy, physiology and industrial use, before we give them a few crappy £3.50 Homebase soil meters and send them off to the park for an hour. Needless to say, they are not quite as enthused by plant science as they might be (although one of them thought being a "plantologist" was a pretty good job).

In a discussion about pollination and scent, it occurred to me that they might appreciate looking at really stinky flowers. And then the lightbulb lit above my head.


These are teenagers - what better way to get them into plants than to tell them that such an organism exists as the Amorphophallus titanum? And to help them figure out how to translate the name. The shrieks of delight when they worked out (eventually - they didn't know what a phallus was) that some scientist had named it "giant misshapen penis" will stay with me for a very long time.

So I didn't stop there - we looked at orchids that resemble the vulva:


And then the coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica), which is about the size and shape of a human arse:


I have to say, though, having played my trump card of the "bum seed", I still need to make photosynthesis and transpiration interesting through preferably smutty means, or I'll never keep their attention until the end of June.

So there's a challenge for you - let's try and make these topics as filthy as possible to get the BTEC kids interested. Failing which, a thought experiment courtesy of one delicate young lady:

"What would happen if trees farted?"

Microteaches #2: Easter Blitherings

Term ended on Friday. I could (should?) have gone down the pub and faceplanted into a pint or eight, but even that was too much hard work, so I sat in the garden, had two margaritas then decamped to Nando's.

It's been revision for the A-level students this week, so I didn't get much relaxation over the weekend, but yesterday was officially the first day of my holidays. My intellectual capacity deteriorated so much since I left college on Tuesday, that I wrote 7 + 5 = 15 when tutoring yesterday afternoon. Fortunately my GCSE student was equally exhausted, so he didn't mock me too much.


More depressing is the students' lack of numeracy skills - there have been some issues over how to calculate means and percentage increases... I have made a note to go over some of this basic maths for biologists before their exams, or they will be, to use the technical term, fucked.

Teachers in the UK have been frothing at the mouth (or switching off the television) at Jamie's Dream School, where the Rubber-Lipped Twat^TM decides he wants to run a school for "kids wot the system's let down innit", or words to that effect.

On the one hand, it has been really good for non-teaching viewers to see what the little darlings can be like (I have some approaching that level of disruption, but they can all be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the moment they decide to channel Harlem, they'll be OUT!). On the other hand, I can't help looking over my shoulder in case Pob Michael Gove decides to replace us all with dodgy celebs. Would my "Physiology of Human Regulation and Reproduction" classes be more informative if Kinga from Big Brother taught them perhaps?!

For some really superb analysis, check out posts from The Behaviour Guru - Tom Bennett's descriptions of each episode have been some of the few things I have read aloud to Paul recently (Doctor Grumpy being another).


In other news, Jabba is in excellent health, and absolutely adores his palm tree. I think perhaps he's been listening to too much Jimmy Buffett.

A Bit Of Maternal Pride

I've had a very busy and stressful fortnight (today I noticed I now have a full-on streak of grey hair at the front, which although not caused by the stress seemed an apt visual accompaniment...). Another member of staff and I joined up to organise our college's participation in National Science and Engineering Week. We had trips up the wazoo - to a "Chemistry In Action" event, to a criminology workshop, to the Science Museum and to the Natural History Museum.

I would like to apologise firstly to the staff in the Sexual Nature exhibit for the large drawing of a penis left on the comment board. I shall encourage them to draw it more anatomically correct next time...


My BTEC students have been taking part in I'm A Scientist: Get Me Out Of Here!, in the Space Zone. If any of you think that the vocational students are unable to deal with complex theoretical ideas, then check out my lad "waveicle" and some of the questions he's asking - every time I see a new question from him I get a swell of pride.

Great friend of mine Dave Hone very kindly agreed to come and give a talk on feathered dinosaurs, which was attended by about 50 or so students ranging from pre-GCSE up to A2. All I was able to offer him in return was one of the chef's more "experimental" recipes in the staff canteen, but there'll be a nice big pint of cider with his name on it down the Town Wharf come the summer. And he did say the students were better behaved than some of his undergrads, which is always nice to hear (even if I did have to give a couple of girls the hairdryer treatment later for being physically incapable of not speaking for more than ten seconds)...

And finally, the AS science students, admittedly with some degree of inertia, undertook some Science Busking activities, which drew absolutely massive crowds. The nice thing about objects with a lot of inertia is that, while it is really difficult to get them moving, once they're moving they really go! These guys were no exception. Since my video footage is up on the officially sanctioned YouTube channel, I can at last show you the little darlings in action:


You'll see me hamming it up pretending to be all nervous that the water balloon was going to burst, and the absolute highlight of the entire video is when the boys levitate the Principal from 2:30 or so onwards. So I'm incredibly proud of my students - they've risen to a lot of challenges in the past week and shown that they're growing and developing into very insightful, communicative scientists. I wonder if any of them will get a Nobel Prize?

(Of course this now means that I've told you where it is I work, so a) please don't come and stalk me, and b) if you look back at any of my blog posts and find I've done something stupid like call a manager a nobber, please let me know.)

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.

Microteaches #1: February Half-Term

Bloody typical. I spend all this time putting together a post on GCSE Biology teaching specifications, and they all go and change it! Well, actually I did know about this, but at the time, and until the end of this academic year, there will be students examined under the old specification. The good news for you and me is that the specifications have not changed very much at all - I'll get up a revised post sometime soon. Anyway, here are some mini-bits that don't quite make up a full blog post, for your reading pleasure.

Mike Keesey has launched Phylopic, a resource with silhouette images for anyone who might need them in their phylogenies. It's wonderful to see these, and I hope many more people contribute. Best of all, from my perspective, is that they are on a clear rather than white background, so I can put them into my teaching slides without having to edit the backgrounds out. Not every organism is so easily converted to silhouette though (amoebas and bacteria...):

  
In reference to last week's highlight of AQA GCSE Fail, there have been some follow-ups. My post hit the Bad Science forum, probably as a result of being included on Ed Yong's Missing Links post. I've since seen that the New Humanist picked up on this, and managed to extract from AQA confirmation that future exams will not contain anything on creationism or intelligent design. I should bloody well hope so.

But AQA aren't off the hook yet: the bar-stewards discovered a marking error in some of their A-Level exams on 17 September 2010, but didn't think to notify Ofqual or UCAS until 30 September 2010. UCAS Clearing ended on 20 September 2010. Over 600 scripts were incorrectly marked, for GCSE, AS and A2, and this resulted in 13 A2 students not being able to get their first choice of university due to missing the grades (which they subsequently received), and not being able to do anything about it because UCAS didn't know until 10 days after places were no longer available for the 2010-2011 year.

In more palaeontological news, there is a new species of sauropod dinosaur, Brontomerus mcintoshi^[*]. Now that we have "Thunder Thighs", I wonder if there'll be any more dinosaurs springing up with the other cruel nicknames I had as a child... They're currently getting a good deal of publicity, although as Dave Hone predicts, there'll no doubt be a load of inaccurate references to Brontosaurus.

Currently not getting any publicity at the moment is a paper linking sex, climate change and dinosaur extinction^[*]. You'd think the redtops would be all over this like a rash. I have only skimmed the paper so far, but I am intrigued by a possible issue regarding genetic sex determination (GSD) and temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). For this to be a plausible mechanism, I would presume it would have to be shown that most, if not all, GSD species survived (not simply birds and mammals), and that most, if not all, TSD species died at the end of the Cretaceous. Rising global temperatures could have a rather major effect on TSD species, but one wonders if perhaps parthenogenesis as demonstrated in a number of reptiles could have countered this in the past.

Right, students - consider this your homework (in addition to the rest of it) - go read Silber's paper and come back and report on your views of its plausibility.

Finally, this has been amusing and appalling the kids in equal measure this week:


Following the theme I shall be attending the NHM After Hours event this Friday, visiting the Sexual Nature exhibit and the Let's Talk About Sex talk. I'm contemplating taking the AS Biologists to the Sexual Nature exhibit, so I'm off to scout it out to see if the little buggers are mature enough to deal with the contents...

^[*]Silber, Sherman J. 2011. Human male infertility, the Y chromosome, and dinosaur extinction. Middle East Fertility Society Journal, [In Press], Corrected Proof, Available online 17 February 2011, ISSN 1110-5690, DOI: 10.1016/j.mefs.2011.01.001
^[*]Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011. Brontomerus mcintoshi, a new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56(1):75-98. doi: 10.4202/app.2010.0073

Is That A Triceratops On Your Junk Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me?

A little light relief after all the deep academic navel-gazing, I think...

Thanks to my friend Owen, I am now aware of the existence of these swimming trunks:

  
Come on guys - buy these and wear them in the hot tub on the first night of SVP. It will make a change from the dino-themed ties and t-shirts.

I dare you.

There But For The Grace Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster

It was only a matter of time. Another teacher, in the US this time, Natalie Munroe has been suspended, having posted some rather unsavoury comments about her students on her blog. This follows hot on the heels of the sacking in the UK of Katharine Birbalsingh. Those of us in educational roles are likely to find ourselves under increased scrutiny, as we are coming under attack more frequently with the educational reforms hitting the UK. The only thing the tabloid newspapers seem to love more than a disgraced politician is a disgraced teacher.


My lab yesterday morning, after a ritual massacrebloodstain analysis practical
The comments she makes are pretty damning - there is a cache available. However, I had been more sympathetic to Ms Munroe before reading what she'd actually said. I feel more for the students who have commented on the cached blog post - I cannot say I would have been thrilled at being called a "complete and utter jerk" by my teacher! Who would?

There are some students in the world who are undoubtedly little shits, who do not want to be in school, who do not respect what their teachers are trying to do and who have no interest in learning. I wouldn't tell you if I had any of these students. Bitching about students is what the staffroom is for, and there's a reason it has a lock on the door.

I know that a couple of my A2 students have found this blog - it does not take a lot of googling. They were pleased at my glowing report of the Great Nando's Birthday Party (and I'm still waiting for the YouTube video, incidentally). Have I been back and made sure I haven't said anything unkind about my kids today? You betcha. Is there the possibility that one of you might read through and pick up on something I missed? Probably - and I'd hope you'd tell me. Do the students know that they are referred to collectively as "little buggers", "little sods" and if I'm annoyed with them "little darlings"? Of course.

There are real problems in schools and colleges with behaviour - hell, you only have to nip on to the TES Behaviour Forum to see some appalling situations. Surely the vibrancy of the TES forum and the increase in numbers of blogs means teachers are in need of support, of a sounding block, and sometimes a need to rant outwith the staffroom door. Maybe the teachers being disciplined for voicing their frustrations should count as a warning shot for the senior managers blamed for the poor behaviour management in schools.

I should add that I have few behavioural problems and that our college's policy on behaviour is pretty effective. The college also has a reasonably liberal policy on online activities as long as we do not bring it into disrepute or identify students.

Until then, if you're going to call your student a "sneaky, complaining, jerkoff", do it in an anonymous, untraceable manner...