One of the Edexcel Unit 2 core practicals is the extraction of fibres from plants and the testing of their tensile strength. Students who have already done one of the AS physics practicals on Hooke's law should have had no trouble designing their own practicals, and I made sure there were physics students on each table to assist.
However, it occurred to me that the problem was not with biologists who didn't know physics, but with physicists who didn't know biology...
Why yes, that would be an entire stick of celery wedged between the bulldog clips. Extracting celery fibres. UR DOIN IT RONG.
This week has been one of those shitters, as far as weeks go. So this evening I've got myself a very large margarita (which you know is my favourite), and I'm toasting you as I go.
So this is for you and what we've all been through this week together:
For the A2 students who managed to do better in their biology results than in any other subject. You have shown a damn good understanding of the subject I love, and crucially given me bragging rights in the staffroom.
For C, who pleaded and pleaded for me to improve my predicted grade for him, and who said he would prove me wrong and perform better, well done. I am so proud of you, and I'll take spite as a motivator!
For A, who surprised everyone with an A grade, that was amazing - now do it again.
For F, who saw her results and hugged me, that meant a lot.
For the gang of boys I call the Women's Institute, your light sabre fight with the 1m rulers was fun this morning. Thank you for taking it in good humour when I implied there was a more Freudian explanation for your obsession with the big long sticks.
For my L2 group, thank you for only thinking to squirt the bottle of water at my computer screen, and not the big bottle of fake blood. That means a lot.
For S, who confessed she was responsible for this page because she felt I was an inspiring role model, you don't know how good that felt.
For K, who bounded into his genetics class on Monday to say he had an offer from University of Bedfordshire for biology, that is brilliant news!
For T, who has gone up against management, fighting for his rights and the rights of the other students, I am so proud of you. Some of the things that have been said to you today reminded me of another vindictive personality who made me cry hot tears of rage too.
For my amazing technician, who can keep his head when all about him are losing theirs (including me!), thank you for your patience and ability to pull practicals back from the brink.
For the ladies in the canteen who are so understanding when I run in, buy three cans of diet Coke and two Creme Eggs, you brighten up my day when I can feel the panic rising.
And for my husband, who has taken this week, only seeing me for a couple of hours at the start and end of the day, in his stride, and who, being a teacher too, just gets what it's like, and why I am doing this.
In Friday's Grauniad, Oliver Burkeman was asking what the two things were to know in each subject. I thought this was a useful exercise, and might set it to my students as homework. What are the two main things to know about biology?
I'd be tempted to go with the following, borrowed from Theodosius Dobzhansky and Michael Lynch:
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
And:
"Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of population genetics."
My students haven't really done population genetics (the A2s have done a bit, but they haven't really done it). So they might have less nuanced ideas about the "two things". Maybe to look at it in my own words I'd go for a slightly different approach.
Life is an exercise in reverse entropy.
And:
All living organisms evolve, though the rate may vary.
What do you think about these "two things"? Would you choose different ones about biology or life sciences, or indeed the earth sciences, since I have a very earth sciencey view of biology!
Full disclosure: In return for agreeing to review the experience on this blog, I received a free pet photo shoot. The reviews were run by FuelMyBlog.
There comes a time in every proud parent's life (and they don't have to be human babies) when it's time to record one's pride and joy for posterity. When the opportunity for a free pet photo shoot came up on FuelMyBlog I volunteered - it would be nice to have a photo of Jabba done professionally, and I was interested to see how he could be posed in case I wanted to try out a few tricks with my DSLR.
The company is Wish. They are part of a blossoming "experience" industry, and one of the things they offer is a pet photo shoot. At the time of writing its cost has been marked down to £15, usually £50. This includes a 7x5 photograph.
Upon receiving the voucher, I had to phone to activate it and make the booking. However, the main problem with this was that the phone number was only active between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday. I usually work 8am to 7pm minimum, so it was always going to be nigh on impossible to phone them. In fact it was the Christmas holiday (having received the voucher in early November) before I was actually free to phone. And the most annoying thing was that there was no information they asked for that could not have been given online. I could have done this over the internet and been sent the details of the studio that way.
So it was the new year before the studio got in touch with me to arrange Jabba's close-up. The studio in question was The Click Studios in Richmond. Again, the same problem presented itself that I had to call during normal office hours on a Monday to Friday. But somehow they managed to get hold of me at ASE (!) and then after I had finished teaching one afternoon. Jabba's portrait was duly arranged for 4th February.
Despite me giving them my name on a number of occasions, they insisted on calling me Juliet. Eventually I stopped trying to correct them and answered to Juliet each time. When we arrived for the shoot, the studio was crowded - there were at least three full families in there, waiting either for viewing or for their own photo shoot, and so we stood. We at least didn't have to wait very long. Our photographer was absolutely wonderful. She was not a fan of reptiles, but despite her nervousness around him she was professional, talented, and talked to him in a soft soothing voice. The whole shoot took about 10 minutes, and then we were invited in for viewing.
I'm always a little nervous about viewings, having had a bad experience with an unrelated agency a few years ago. I expected to be given the hard sell and sent on a guilt trip. We had none of that - the man showing us the photos accepted that we were just looking for one good photo for the 7x5 image, and he helped us narrow it down to one good one.
Nearly two weeks later I missed a call from them to say the photo was in, we could collect it, but that we should phone them before we come in. I phoned back on the Saturday, but they didn't answer. They also didn't return my voicemail. So last Saturday I phoned in my Teacher Voice. They called back within half an hour and we collected Jabba's picture.
It's a gorgeous photo. The photographer did an excellent job and she is to be commended. However, the experience was less than stellar. Simply the inaccessibility of the companies outside normal office hours (even banks do a Saturday morning) has been enough to deter me from using their services again, coupled with messages from FuelMyBlog pushing me to update them. The cost, were it £50, was a little steep for the 10-minute photo shoot and the photo.
And they have yet to refund my £20 deposit! So I may be writing a complaint letter...
I may use the studio again if I was looking to book a family or couples portrait, but even so, some of the prices look steep. For example, though it was six years ago, I paid £850 for our wedding photographer, including 300 photos and an album. I understand that studios have premises to maintain and so on, but it seems like an awfully big mark-up.
Detail of Jabba's portrait, scanned in badly and used for evaluation purposes.
Half-term was last week. I thought I'd have a bit of a break, some time to lie in. Didn't happen. We had an action-packed few days celebrating my birthday, and there were builders in renovating the flats upstairs, which consisted of drilling and hammering very loudly from 8am. There was a frisson of excitement as they managed to drop a heating pipe through our ceiling on my birthday itself, and that of course was it - it was impossible to relax when wondering if any more hardware was going to pitch itself into our flat. I'm so tired that I feel like Steve.
Pissing me off massively during half-term was the article in the Indy stating "Female teachers accused of giving boys lower marks". The paper itself is available here. Sadly I don't understand enough of the statistical metrics, and indeed didn't have much time to read in detail, to be able to comment much beyond the executive summary. But the basic gist seemed to be that boys assume that their work will be marked lower by female teachers so they don't try as hard. Girls assume their work will be marked higher by male teachers so they try harder. And while female teachers confirm the boys' beliefs by marking girls more leniently, the male teachers mark boys more leniently.
So what is going on there? I don't feel that I do mark boys' work more harshly. I sometimes think I do the exact opposite. Male colleagues of mine are exceptionally hard on the boys, and on many occasions I've had blazing rows with them to try to save my boys' places on courses. If anything I allow boys more leniency than girls to compensate for my colleagues. I am but a single data point though. And to be fair, my style of teaching mostly involves revealing increments of cleavage in return for coursework.
Professional Pob impersonator and all-round fucking moron Michael Gove has delivered another slap in the face to teachers by saying "If you [teachers] love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well" (from Huffington Post). This is in the context of expecting us to stay longer during the day and take shorter holidays.
Well, Govey, this week went as follows. On each morning I've been in at 8am - this is the earliest I am allowed to enter the premises. If I could go in at 7:30am I would. On Monday I left at 6:30pm when the college shut. On Tuesday I left at 8:45pm, yesterday at 7:45pm and this evening I ducked out early at 7pm. Tomorrow is a training day so I might get to leave at 5pm. Twelve-hour days are nothing unusual. On Tuesday and Wednesday I had to sit down at my laptop when I got home and work for another three hours. During half-term most of us went into work on at least one day of our holiday, and I will have three days taken out of my Easter break for revision purposes. So I would like very much to know what more Gove would like me to do.
This term is all about coursework, and my A2s are starting to complain that they're not doing fieldwork. They were the ones who moaned like buggery about having to do so, and now they're having to live with doing lab-based research projects. It's going to be an absolute disaster. The AS students are doing better, and some of the more interesting topics I've seen are on ageing, cirrhosis of the liver, Kawasaki disease, conservation of gorillas, testicular cancer and equine colic. We're going on a trip next week, so if you hear that a constituent college of the University of London out in Surrey has burnt to the ground, you'll know that was my lot. I predict it will be a matter of minutes after the coach pulls out of our car park before the strains of "Stop the bus I want a wee-wee" are heard...
The A2s started respiration this week, and by this morning we were onto oxidative phosphorylation. They didn't care much for the gorgeous diagram I had up on the IWB, and they asked me to draw it out for them. So I did.
Put it this way - they'll never forget what ATP synthase looks like, will they?
Fortunately they were all on the ball with the comments, and we had such gems as:
"We're going to be shafted in this exam!"
"I feel like a bit of a knob..."
"Miss, stop dicking around!"
Was tempting to say "Don't feel intimidated, lads, it's only 10 nanometres long!", but one of them was already regretting his decision to apply for biochemistry degrees at university, so perhaps it was just as well I didn't.
Students are curious creatures. They ask a lot of questions. Many of them are personal. I answer questions about why I don't have children, because I like to show them that it's possible to have a happy and complete life without having children (many of them say they didn't realise that not procreating was an option). I tell them what university is like, including the fact that I partied a lot and nearly failed at the end of my first year. Some things are out of bounds - I refuse to answer questions about sex or drugs.
For all that though, there is one question I hate receiving, and someone from every single class I teach asks me every single year. Sometimes twice. "Why didn't you become a doctor, miss?" I loathe it. It makes me feel utterly inadequate, and I feel quite hurt by it, though I know that isn't the intention. It seems to be quite common, though usually directed at nurses, according to some of the 120,000 hits for the phrase - I bet it makes them feel like shit too.
The truth is that it never figured in my plan. From a very early age it was dinosaurs that I obsessed over. I always wanted to be a palaeontologist. I had a variety of science-themed toys growing up, including a Fisher-Price doctor's kit, but also a Salter's chemistry set, an electronics kit and a microscope. Grandpa was a GP, and I loved his study, complete with a skeleton, sphygmomanometer, and loads of textbooks. His three children all went into the medical profession - my uncle became a consultant radiologist, my aunt a theatre sister, and my mother a radiographer. It was all very interesting, but it wasn't for me.
I could have become a PhD doctor rather than a medical doctor. I tried it twice. The first one didn't work out. The second time coincided with the worst personal ordeal of my life, the start of my teaching career and the beginning of my PGCE - something had to give and it was the PhD. It has been suggested more than once that I am not intellectually capable of postgraduate study, and that's probably true.
So having "failed in the real world", I am a lecturer in an FE college. Don't get me wrong - I think my job is amazing. I get to spend my days helping students to feel as enthusiastic and passionate about science as I am. I am, for some of them, the only adult who shows an obvious interest in them and their well-being. In retrospect, if I had done a PGCE immediately after graduation rather than seven years later, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, stopped myself from getting so much into debt, and Paul and I would probably own a house by now. I am proud of my job - I'd do it until I drop dead. My parents are proud of me. My husband is proud of me.
But the thing that is implied by "Why didn't you become a doctor?" is that being a doctor is the ultimate career. It doesn't matter that I have the chance to provide the biological foundation for 30 years' worth of medical students - doctors are better than teachers. Teaching is taking a bit of a pounding at the moment by the government, the media and the general public. It seems it has a similar reputation among my students. They share the same thoughts as the lawyer in Taylor Mali's "What Teachers Make" - what's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?
Most of these kids are from families who all want their children to become doctors or engineers. So they've just grown up with the view that if they're good at biology they become doctors, and if they're good at physics or maths they become engineers. Because I'm good at biology (hey, I'm the teacher!), then I should have become a doctor. Their question is asked innocently, but the implication is still there, that in some way my career choice is a consolation prize to becoming a doctor. I got into Cambridge University - I probably could have got into a medical school somewhere. If that had been what I wanted.
Students who want to have children are able to understand why some people may not want to have their own children. So why the lack of empathy for someone who genuinely never wanted to be a doctor? Why imply that I'm defective?
Though it isn't on the Edexcel specification, I like to teach my students the difference between a light microscope and an electron microscope (not always obvious for them...), and then the difference between scanning and transmission electron microscopes.
Light microscope, at the Science Museum, London, June 2010
So a light microscope is great because entire cells can be seen in colour, but of course we don't get to see details of organelles. The transmission electron microscope (TEM) is ace for this, but you only get one slice through a cell at any one time, so the image may seem rather abstract.
Even for apparently bright A-level students, that concept is rather complicated, so I like to use a more visceral example. It's good to pick the one student who's really been pissing you off all lesson, probably talking while you're talking or something. Bring them up to the front and get a 1m ruler. Hold it diagonally across their body from shoulder to waist (trust me, you do not want to take any other angle). Then ask the assembled, if now rather amused, masses the following:
"If I were to take a sword and cut a slice through this student at this angle, which organs would I pass through and what would the surface look like?"
An animated discussion will now ensue as the students come up with increasingly bloodthirsty ideas about which organs will be visible.
Transverse section through L1, from Gray's Anatomy
Once they've discussed the many and varied ways in which the victim could be made to suffer, follow up with:
"Would this give you a good idea of the human body overall?"
Hopefully the unanimous response would be "no". So then, they can exercise their higher level thinking skills and come up with a way of getting an idea of the structure of the whole from thin slices. Some of them might even be aware of the Visible Human Project, which did just that. Or, perhaps more in keeping with how a TEM actually works, they could come up with a ballpark figure of how many other students would have to be sliced through at different angles to build up an image of the whole human body...
Incidentally, Google really should be clever enough to exclude all images of the popular US drama "Grey's Anatomy" when I'm looking for the anatomical textbook "Gray's Anatomy". And there should be an "assume user is not a bloody idiot" option, so that it doesn't say "Showing results for Grey's Anatomy. Search for Gray's Anatomy instead?".
I'm in recovery from the brilliant ASE conference in Liverpool, so while I collect my thoughts, consider this, spotted on the Taylors Coffee website.
If you were looking for Hot Lava Java, the coffee that goes up to six, why in the name of Flying Spaghetti Monster would you be remotely interested in decaffeinated coffee??
Time to rethink the advertising, or at least the algorithm used to suggest other products.
It seems that every few months now someone gets their knickers in a twist over teachers' use of social media. This is usually due to some wazzocksspoiling it for the rest of us. With the emphasis on some. I've discussed this before and at some length.
This time it's Jim Docherty of the SSTA telling us:
"First thing is don't bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn't help."
No chance of that, Jim - I only have a social life for a couple of days at Christmas and Easter, and for a week or two in the summer! But how patronising. Then, there's:
"Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general."
This, of course, would make it very difficult for teachers to contribute to #SciTeachJC, #ASEChat and #UKEdChat. Not to mention the sheer quantity of useful links, advice and resources I've been able to exchange both ways with other teachers.
As ever, Tom Bennett is a voice of reason, and his rules should be required reading for teachers setting up their first blogs or Twitter accounts.
For my part, I maintain a degree of anonymity. My Twitter account has never been associated with my full name, and though the bio bit is fairly obviously me, it still has to be found first. I block the college, and deliberately do not link to the college's website. Former students are most welcome to follow me (and be followed) once they have left the college, and I love chatting to them via Twitter, e-mail and text messages.
As for this blog, you won't find it via a search for my married name. You will find my profiles on Academia and LinkedIn. And they go to my personal website, but there's no link to the blog. Some students find out my maiden name - I don't conceal my former identity - but I don't go into the classroom and shout it out. Actually, very few people ever google me, least of all my students. Should they find this blog, then they will find the majority of my complaints directed towards politicians and the general public. Some individual interaction with students is mentioned here, but they are always given full anonymity and treated with great affection.
And, though I admit I am very fortunate in this regard, my online activity, so long as it does not bring the college into disrepute (or involve illegal activity), is contractually protected. This is, I think, an advantage of working in FE where most lecturers are industry professionals with additional careers within their industry. As with most codes of conduct and guidelines, everything there is to say about one's online presence can all be distilled into one easy motto.
