Snow Day Reflections

Living in the northlands, snowdays are a welcomed disruption to my busy life. Today as I sit in my warm home while the blizzard roars outside, I am able to catch up on the endless grading that seems to find me at the end of every semester....

I teach college science. Some of my students are science majors and take my biology course that prepares them for their careers in science. My other students are not science majors and only take my biology class because it is part of their general education curriculum. I enjoy all of my students, but it is the latter group that I reflect on tonight.

For many of them, my course may be the only science course that they take in college, and so I feel I have a responsibility to teach them how to be scientifically literate citizens. We spend our semester working through consumer product testing, understanding how to interpret data, and examining the big issues in science facing Earth today.

Despite my attempts to make the content interesting and relatable to my students, I am met with poor attendance, apathy, and laziness toward my lessons. *Sigh* Not by all, but most.

Here comes the humor (or sheer terror) of my reflection...

For a lab assignment, I  encouraged all my students to get involved in a citizen science project. I showed them lists of all kinds of research currently looking for citizen input and even selected one to highlight. This project is building a database of where different species are found all over the world. People are supposed to take pictures of organisms and upload them to a website that will name them with their genus and species names as well as place them on a map. I asked my students to take 3 pictures of living organisms that could potentially be added to this site. I have 3 sections of lab for this course, and in my 3rd section, I have 13 students. Of those 13 students, only 2 submitted pictures. Of the 2 that submitted pictures, one submitted this one:

He made sure to tell me that the picture was of clouds...

As I wait for this blizzard to pass, I wonder if I am in the right profession.

New Year's Resolutions

Well, after thinking about it for nearly 3 days, I finally decided on what my New Year's Resolution would be this year...to write everyday.  As a graduate student who would like to graduate someday, I thought that this would be a great way to push me to really buckle down and write.  As it turns out, this is day 5 of the new year and this is the first thing I have written!  I figure that writing every day actually means writing every weekday.  Since New Year's Day is considered a holiday that does not count as a weekday and then I really couldn't start on Thursday and Friday because I am still on holiday break and so those days don't really count as weekdays.  So actually, I am starting my resolution early this year by writing this post on Sunday afternoon!

Does that mean I can take tomorrow off then?....