We had a great time in Costa Rica this spring. A geology professor at school does a continuing education class nearly every other year and we got to go along this time. He has the director of a private field station organize nearly everything so we got to do some really fun things in locations that weren't crowded by Americans.
We started out travelling around the country and our first stop was at a local market to practice our nonexistent Spanish. The produce was worth it though.
We were lucky enough to be around for an oxcart festival/competition.
Of course we were the only gringos around and so we got lots of funny looks. These folks take some serious pride in their carts though so they were all very nice about letting us photograph them and their art.
We spent the second half of our trip at a field station located on the Pacific side and had to take a rather interesting boat trip to get there. I don't have any photos but we got to see flying fish on the trip and when we took the boats out again to a national park.
Well, it was all very lovely and scenic until we had to land. Apparently they had not seen such large waves in quite some time. One of the folks helping the group ended up underneath the boat at one point. The worst thing that happened is that several folks got VERY wet and had their pride bruised but it was one of the more "interesting" parts of the trip. Yes interesting would be a euphamism here.
The field station and surrounding areas were great for nature photography.
The sloths are fuzzy because I had to take the photo through a spotting scope using my point and shoot:
Check out the bit of red in the coati's mouth. It's eating a crab.
We did try to be a bit educational and trapped bats. Often you can just set up a stationary net and the bats will just fly into it because they can't see it. However, the bats we were interested in live in caves that open onto the ocean so we had to stand there and actually toss the net over the poor things since there was no place to set a net. Marius was particularly entertaining to watch.
We spent one day out at a national park. I went on the long hike where we were supposed to see lots of wildlife, while Marius went on the shorter hike that was supposed to end in a swim. It turns out Marius got the better deal but there was a price. The group had two massive trees fall over and land right behind them on the trail.
No one was hurt and it was great hearing how much closer the trees fell to the group as the trip progressed.
There was also some shopping of course and they did a really nice job of making sure we got to see things being made before we bought them.
Including the organic coffee we got:
I never planned on going to Costa Rica because it all seemed very touristy to me based on the trips that others have taken. I have to say that Kelly (the geo prof) and the local guides did a great job of minimizing the touristy crap and we had a great time.
You don't need a special toy to make yogurt though. There are fairly good instructions on how to do it in your oven or in a cooler but it will require a bit of babysitting. That being said, I should have babysat my own yogurt a bit better. The instructions suggested incubating for seven hours but that was too long for my batch and a few came out with whey pooling on top. I'll show you the process the next time I make a batch so you can see how easy it is.
I've been really bad about posting so I'm going to try and do better and catch folks up on some of the fun things we've been doing.
The spring semester was really hard for me. I taught a brand-new course and had a group of very difficult students but I survived and I have learned a few things that will (hopefully) minimize such problems in the future. However the process of getting to this point involved quite a bit of hair pulling and beating my head against the wall.
There were some really great points in the past four months though. We went to Costa Rica for ten days in March and have some really great photos that I will share in my next post (which will be in the next day or so instead of in another four months!). I also went to Cambridge, Vienna and Prague with a group of humanities professors from my school (I was one of two token scientists) which was an amazing experience and I'll try to post photos from that trip before the end of the week. In between and ever since, we've been hiking and canyoneering like crazy people. Unfortunately my last camera died in a canyon right around the time of my last post. This may be part of the reason I haven't posted as much. I got a replacement in time for the trip to Europe but haven't taken it in a canyon yet. I have already begun to rectify this with a short trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon but it will probably be next month before I get any additional photos to share.
Why next month? Because last week we did Fat Man's Misery (the wrong way) on Wednesday and then Orderville on Friday. These are both beautiful canyons. Orderville is a very easy canyon that then feeds into the Narrows of Zion. However, Fat Man's Misery, while normally not easy but doable, turned into quite a challenge for us because we parked the cars in the wrong place and ended up hiking the normal ~4miles to and through the canyon and then (what I estimate) nine miles upstream in a river and another mile overland to get to the car instead of the 2.5 miles we were supposed to do after the canyon. Not only did we have to hike that extra distance but we had to hustle out of the canyon because we started to hear thunder and you DO NOT want to be in a canyon if there is a storm because of the risk of flash floods. In fact, we probably should not have been in there at all that day but the weather predictions were a bit off and the sky looked clear when we started out. Fortunately we only experienced cold rain but it still made for a miserable day of slogging through the river and at the end of it all I developed runner's knee.
Yes, I developed a condition called runner's knee from canyoneering. I am nothing if not creative in how I get my injuries.
So this means that I am out of commission for a few weeks while this thing heals. This is a bummer since the summer is the time when we get to go canyoneering without freezing our butts off. It's also the only time we really have to travel. In reality, I've been pretty lucky. We had some really awful conditions for going into a slot canyon and the worst thing that happened is that my knee is a bit inflamed. Am I allowed to feel old in my 30's?
Given that I'm a biologist, you can imagine where I come down on the debate about teaching anything other than evolution in science classes. However, I figure there are plenty of folks out there who may not know the amazing amount of data we have supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection (and keep in mind here folks that scientists use the word "theory" differently than lay people, theory= long standing idea with LOTS of data backing it up; theories are not just educated guesses -those would be what we call hypotheses). Recently the National Academy of Science released a free publication summarizing some of the most interesting data and how our understanding of evolution has led to dramatic developments in fields such as medicine and law enforcement. I've put a link to the booklet over on the right side of this page. It is currently free to anyone who wants to download it.
For those who want the movie version you should check out NOVA's special on the court case in Dover over teaching intelligent design. The film is in two parts and is called Judgment Day. If you watch this, keep in mind the fact that the Dover school board really screwed up when they mandated that i.d. be taught by including language of a religious nature in their documents on the subject. As a result, the Discovery Institute (the organization fighting to have i.d. taught in science classes) basically abandoned any attempt at defending the school board. Instead they are waiting for a school board that is smart enough to keep religion out of their documents for their big court battle on the issue.
So we had a lovely holiday. We had three weeks off between semesters which really didn't amount to three weeks of vacation. I spent the first week off in training and the last week prepping for a new course I'm doing this semester but the holiday was still nice.
We spent five days in D.C. with my family but before we left santa had to make a visit. M got me this for Christmas.
Isn't it beautiful? It's much more beautiful in light of the fact that my Mario Batali dutch oven has a big crack in its interior enamel after less than a year of use. It's a shame since I'm always a big fan of less expensive alternatives.
Of the few photos we took during our trip, this one must be my favorite.
My mom. Santa was VERY good to her this year.
I was at a holiday party just before Christmas where a number of colleagues were guests and I met several faculty I had yet to meet. I'm having a lovely conversation with a grumpy old English professor (not really grumpy but I'm pretty sure he'd be pleased if people viewed him that way) about my sweater (the silk garden tie-dye number for those who have seen it) and trading pedigrees as academics are wont to do when he looks at me and asks "Do you want to go on the trip?"
I of course stared at him blankly in reaction to this complete non-sequitur and then proceeded to give many looks suggesting that he should continue since I hadn't the foggiest clue on what he was talking about (I'm sure the lacking a clue bit dominated most of the looks). Well it turns out that this guy has a grant from NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) to take faculty from our little college on trips. They go once a year and each trip starts out with a seminar series at Cambridge (including as many Nobel prize winners as they can dig up apparently -Hawkings has participated) and then traveling with the seminar speakers to two other locations. This year the trip will include Vienna so that we can go to the opera and ballet and then Prague just because it sounded like it would be fun (his words). Apparently nearly everyone else in the room at the time knew about it since they were primarily in the humanities (and have right of first refusal for these trips), but every year they grab a few folks from other disciplines to round out the group. The guy in charge loves nothing better than to find unsuspecting new faculty who seem like they might be fun and to invite them to come along. That would appear to be me this year.
The grant pays for everything during the two weeks except for souvenirs and he just followed up his invite with an unofficial, once-all-of-the-humanities-folks- are-signed-up-and-it-isn't-unseemly-to-invite-the-outsiders-I'll-get-the-formal-invite, written invitation to go on the trip.
Holy shit! Karma just can't possibly explain this one...
Phew. It's nearly over.
I have a couple of marathon days of grading and then I'm done. I know students think that studying sucks, well grading sucks eggs big time.
Not only is it the least enjoyable part of teaching but it can be downright painful when a student you like does poorly.
There are always bright spots in a black humor sort of fashion. I am still amused by the fact that a student showed up to take my exam that I didn't know. Now, I sometimes mix up the names of a couple of my students but I know them all by the end of the semester. This kid had literally skipped all but the first couple of weeks of class including the three semester exams and all of the weekly quizzes and homework assignments. He could have qualified for a WF which is an automatic withdrawal (but failing) for which students who disappear before a certain date qualify but he disqualified himself by showing up for the final. I haven't graded it but it would be really sad if he does well on it and fails anyway.
That's not what was funny about the interaction though (perhaps obvious given that it is rather sad). What's funny is that he walks in and says that he is there to take the final. I ask him for which class. He gives me the call number for my class (at intro. and non-majors levels we have up to eight lecture sections for a given call number) so I ask him who his professor is. He tells me that it's me and so I ask if he's been in my class during the semester. He tells me that he's been in and out (yeah, right). Ultimately I have to ask his name. Amazingly enough I remember his name from the list of students who vanished so I gave him an exam. This is probably a situation where you had to be there but seriously, it was the most surreal exchange I've had in a while with a student.
Can you imagine the balls this kid has? He hasn't shown up for months and then pops in to take the final. Apparently this happens regularly here and so all of the faculty had a good laugh over how far I took my questions. Apparently they are all in the habit of handing out exams to anyone who walks in for finals and then they check to make sure the name isn't that of a student that they know.
I've had one of the more interesting weeks of my life.
Many of you know I was offered a position at Dixie State College of Utah (name will be changing in the next few years for those confused by the Dixie bit, we'll be the Univ. of Utah, St. George). What some of you don't know is that while they tried to offer me a tenure track position without interviewing me, they found out that it was sorta against all of the rules. So instead I've been working on a one year contract with the promise that they would do a formal search. First the search was supposed to happen within weeks of my moving out to Utah but that didn't happen. Then it was supposed to happen in early fall and they even did an entirely new search for that one. Of course, faculty being who they are, the process of going through the applications took months longer than they had planned and so I finally got to interview for my job this past Thursday.
Maybe I'm letting my ego get carried away but I wasn't too worried about being offered the job based on the fact that they had already tried to give it to me (and everyone was being excessively supportive and encouraging about my chances of getting it with the formal review process). What I was REALLY nervous about was making all of these lovely supportive folks who had been reassuring me that they wanted to keep me around, regret it. I really am a fairly decent teacher most of the time (and a really excellent one sometimes) and I wanted my talk to reflect that. So I put a ton of pressure on myself to try and do a really nice and polished talk as part of the interview to the point that I was making tiny little changes the morning of my interview as I was practicing.
Here is where everything goes south of course. I normally allow my students access to my lecture slides before class so that they can print them out and bring them to class if they have a hard time concentrating while taking notes, so I printed out the final version of my talk to hand out to the audience. What I didn't do was save that final version to my thumbdrive. Yup, that's right. I opened up my talk and hit the second slide only to find that the heading wasn't quite right.
There wasn't anything incorrect in the talk, it's just that the final version was a little bit smoother and less prone to repeating information than the slides I was projecting. Oh yeah, and the slides I had up didn't match the handouts of course. The talk went fine aside from the minor differences (literally just a title on one or two slides and a rearrangement of topics for another two slides) and the fact that I went a bit over the alloted time. Everyone was very complimentary about it but I spent the entire afternoon kicking myself over the mistake with the files.
I was so ticked off with myself that my stomach even hurt. I got home that night and realized I hadn't eaten all day but couldn't eat anything even though I heated up some soup. So I went to bed in the hopes that it would all get better with a little sleep. I woke up at 2am with a raging fever and it turns out that my stomach pains were because I went and caught a stomach flu that Marius had had earlier in the week. It's the sort of flu where you feel intermittently fine and crappy but you feel like you need to die if you eat anything. As a weight-loss diet it's highly effective; I've lost five pounds in 36 hours. For everything else (like being alive) it sucks.
Of course last night an interested third party got the low down on the job and called to find out if I had gotten the call yet and I could really only muster an "oh good" upon hearing the good news. I'm sure it was highly gratifying for her, poor woman.
I have a large number of students in my non-majors class that have been raised in a Creationist or semi-Creationist form of faith and so I make a big deal about evolution.
As a homework assignment I ask them to describe the theory of evolution by natural selection and summarize the evidence supporting it. There is more to it but that is sufficient to enjoy this little quote given as an example of evolution. Try and get past the really poor writing, this really was written by a fairly intelligent student although you wouldn't know it from this assignment. I've added the ellipses to cut out the less entertaining bits.
"...for example two big guerrillas their offsping would probably also be large... if that large of guerillas could either scare off the smaller guerillas [sic] and ensuring that their offspring would also have that advantage. Continuing in this thought experiment, those smaller species of guerillas [sic] by chance find a new environment where their smaller size might help them survive and adaptive radiation would occur and in if the population of guerillas became isolated for a long enough time sympatric (should read allopatric) speciation would occur..."
I just have this image of really fat (or buff) and really petite guerrilla fighters competing for resources, reproducing and evolving to form new species of guerrillas.
In the spirit of Laurie's Drunken Cat Sweater Contest:
This is from I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, and it's the best I can do given that I would not knit a sweater for my cat (or any other) ever.
Congress has recently been involved in passing a new farm bill that largely maintained various farm subsidies in spite of violating international law. This seems all very esoteric and we can all get behind the feel good idea of supporting our domestic family farmers but there is another side to it all. You could read Omnivore's Dilemma or just check out these two food pyramids.
For those wondering, I have basically fallen off the face of the planet. I (big surprise here) have completely over committed myself at work and am spending 12-14 hours a day at school.
Have I learned my lesson? Probably not, but if I survive spring semester, I might finally get a clue.
Earlier today we found out that S. Africa will play England in the final game of the Rugby World Cup!!!!
To give you a sense of what this means to S. Africans, here's an ad that was sent to us by a friend in S. Africa. While it isn't really appropriate for children, I suspect children are not reading this blog and that, even if they were, they won't get it. Just to be on the safe side, you'll have to scroll down quite a ways to see it.
I handed back the second exam of the semester to my majors introductory biology class. While some improved from the first exam, at least 50% showed no improvement. Given that their average on the first exam was below a C, it sort of put me into a bit of a depression.
Instructors go through a series of emotions when their students are not doing well. I personally tend to start asking what I could do differently do help them. Then I figure out that I have held review sessions, made suggestions on how to study and how many hours they should expect to study and realize that there isn't much more I can do. At that point most instructors then get frustrated and maybe even a little angry with their students. After we bitch and moan to our colleagues about the situation, we tend to calm down. We accept that students have the right to fail a course and try to develop a more Zen-like attitude about the entire thing (yes, I hate the whole Zen-like thing too, but the phrase works here).
So I got to class last night and explained that I had expected to see higher grades and reiterated what the students will have to do to improve their grades. Instead of the bitching and name calling that I have experienced at other institutions, I saw heads nodding. I had several students come up to me at the end of class and ask for help. I had several others come up to me just to let me know that the exam had opened their eyes and that they would be working harder in the future. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just remembering it. Life is so much better and teaching is so much more enjoyable when you genuinely like your students.
Please note, do not interpret this to mean I did not like my students at other colleges and universities. Okay, there were some individuals I really didn't like, but they tended to be the exception to the rule.
It's interesting, now that I've had some time to observed students in both environments, to note how very different they are.
I really enjoyed teaching at the Claremont Colleges. My colleagues were interesting researchers still focused on student education. The students were bright, worldly, well prepared for college and highly motivated.
Now that I'm at a state college with a largely open admission policy (actually all Utah state schools have to have an open admission policy, we just offer our remedial, make that developmental, classes on campus whereas many send their students to local city colleges for such courses), I have to say that my students are VERY different, however not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.
Obviously my new students are much less well prepared for college and I am regularly amazed at what they think is acceptable college level work. I will get homework assignments that have been written in IM code or even worse, terrible English. I am fairly certain that I have a student or two that may qualify as illiterate but who were not caught by the tests that funnel students into the remedial classes. Despite having a very clear policy about making up exams, students will forget what they have been told (and what is written on their syllabus) and assume I will do what they want. They also fail to listen to directions in class AND fail to read the written instructions for assignments and are then surprised when I take points off of their homework.
That being said, these are some of the hardest working people I have ever met. We have a mix of traditional and non-traditional aged students and they are all likely to have families (this is a very Mormon town after all) and full time jobs in addition to attending school full time. When they don't do well on an exam, they never (okay, rarely) blame their professor but quite willingly admit that they needed to study more. They also like their professors even when they aren't doing well in a class. As a result, while I sometimes want to tear out my hair in frustration over some of the things that they do, I really find my new students to be a breath of fresh air.
Back in California, I had a few students who thought I was wonderful (because they came to me for help outside of class typically) while the rest hated my guts because it wasn't easy to earn an "A" in my class. Here, my students respect me for making them earn their grades.
Granted, I still do have whiners who will never be happy but they are largely in the minority.
The one thing I never expected though, is that school isn't necessarily a priority for many of these students. I guess I can understand when they have families to support but I am still disappointed when students miss class entirely or leave halfway through because of work. It certainly makes it harder for them to succeed, although many fail to understand that.
Even more surprising are their parents' attitudes about their education. Marius actually had a student come to him and ask to be allowed to take a make-up exam. The reason this kid needed to miss the exam was because their parents had booked a holiday and didn't want to drive through Vegas rush hour traffic. Yup, avoiding traffic came before their child's college education. To add insult to injury, the kid's mother emailed Marius to see if she couldn't convince him to change his mind. What a wonderful woman.
Sadly our camera died when we did Keyhole but we did have the opportunity to finally do Pine Creek this past weekend. A friend took some pictures but unfortunately most of the shots look like these. We weren't in a cave but the slot canyon was so deep that very little light got down there at times. The best part was a 100 foot free rappel where you just lower yourself down without touching anything. Once I figured out that I couldn't die doing it, it was great fun. These photos also prove that I do go on these hikes with Marius despite all prior photographic evidence to the contrary.
Two weeks ago we got permits to do both Keyhole and Pine Creek in Zion. Keyhole is a short beginner rappelling canyon and a great way to get your feet wet before Pine Creek which is a bit hairier. Although we live in the desert, flash floods were predicted for the afternoon so we had to be satisfied with just Keyhole. This is maybe only a mile or two in length but with a short but steep uphill hike in to the slot and a series of rappels to get through it took us nearly the whole morning.
Here I am on my very first canyon rappel ever. The inner tube is for a friend's eleven year old daughter who came along for the fun.
So many of you know that I really like my food and I tend to like it to be high quality. I've been introduced as a tea snob or food snob or [insert your favorite here] snob not infrequently in spite of my protestations. So I figure it's about time to disillusion some of you with a series of confessions.
Until recently I would develop month long cravings for Cheetos. It's only gone now because I think I really overdid it right before the summer.
I still have cravings for fast food burgers with the exception of McDonald's.
I HATE truffles and stinky cheese. I have that "OMG it smells/tastes rotten and I think I'm going to gag" response to those flavors.
I am happy to drink 2-buck chuck and Trader Joe's brand teas (in tea bags even!) but I can't stand poor quality coffee and I have no idea why except that the taste of bad coffee bothers me much more.
I have frozen pizza and t.v. dinners in my freezer as I type.
One of my favorite comfort foods is grilled cheese and not no stinkin' gourmet version either. We're talking Wonder bread and processed yellow cheese here folks. Grilled cheese served with a bowl of condensed cream of tomato soup is like being five again.
Okay, this is getting old and you've probably lost all respect for me so it's time to quit while I'm behind. Hope your week has been more worth writing about than mine.
I asked my students in my non-majors biology class to find examples of pseudoscience and explain why they are pseudoscience as a homework assignment.
This is what I got from one student, verbatim:
"Global warming"
"Recent year's people have witnessed a series of over the top pseudo-scientific methods. Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a huge scale. There are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man made pollution. What many scientist will dispute, is whether this is a on going change. Scientist believe that one, there's an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature. Two, whether the mechanism is responsible for the CO2 fossil fuel combustion. Today climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas. They are pushed forward to the political and media driven agenda. Because it lacks a functional, broad, orderly and unified understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere. The oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, provide inroads towards developing such an understanding. Starting with the sun and the solar radiation in the weather patterns over short and long term scales."
For those uncertain about this, I have no clue as to what they were trying to say here and now that I've met with them to go over it, it's clear they didn't either.
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