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Monthly Archives: October 2011
First, read 2,000 papers, then begin your Ph.D. research
For my husband, David Queller , advice that stuck came back when he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois and had last week’s seminar speaker, Doug Schemske , as a teaching assistant in a biology course. … Then there were the days at the University of Texas where Don Feener had always read more than we had and had a knack for picking the most important papers out of the new journals that lined the mezzanine of the zoology library in Patterson Labs. Continue reading
Introducing undergraduates to research: first tools, or first ideas?
If I want to chop up some DNA for an experiment, and get it to a certain size, I’ll learn all about which restriction enzymes work well together, and what size pieces they make. … But when undergraduates come into our laboratory for independent study, or as work-study students, there is a certain efficiency to teaching them a couple of months of tools. Continue reading
Interactive teaching with our chair, Kathy Miller
Walk through the room and you will see many, even most, students are texting, stalking someone on Facebook, or doing their homework for the next class. … If you can get students to read the material in advance, then grapple with it in class, then you can run classes like this one. Continue reading
Posted in The joy of teaching
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Lose the laser pointer! Let your slides speak for themselves!
So many speakers use fiddling with the little red or green light as a kind of scribbling on the slide, distracting the audience from the very thing he, or she, wants us to look at. … It would be great if you could have a first figure that just shows the predicted pattern, so we can get used to the way you present the data before we see the actual data. Continue reading
Can we teach the joy of research to undergraduates in one afternoon a week?
Another thing I could have done is found a lot of ponds of different sizes, but otherwise similar, and hypothesized that larger ponds would have more species diversity. … For example, they could hypothesize that gram for gram, they will find more social amoebae in samples of dung than in samples of soil because there are more bacteria in dung, and social amoebae eat bacteria. Continue reading
