Lessons Learned from Teaching

 Academia, Entomology, Science Communication, Student Info, Teaching  8 Responses »
Mar 302012
 

You may have noticed that this blog has been rather quiet lately. Too quiet… My apologies for that, as there’s been a lot of cool science going on in my absence! I hope to get caught up on some of the delightful Diptera discoveries that have been published lately, not to mention all sorts of other fun stories, but for now they’ll have to wait for another day.

Why have I been neglecting the blog as of late? In January I was offered the opportunity to build and teach a Horticultural Integrative Pest Management and Plant Health course for Mohawk College in Hamilton, and I saw it as an excellent chance to expand my CV and gain valuable teaching experience (also make some money, ’cause that’s pretty important). I knew from the outset that I was in for a challenge; I was hired less than 2 weeks before the course began; my combined knowledge of IPM, botany and horticulture amounted to 1 university IPM course and some extremely black thumbs; and oh yeah, I’ve never constructed and taught a course before! Nevertheless, I took the rough curriculum the college provided and set out to make my mark on the horticulture class of 2012.

I expected this course to be as much a learning exercise for myself as it would be for my students, and it certainly lived up to expectations. Here are a few things I learned while teaching.

1) Lesson preparation will take longer than you anticipate

Before accepting the position I tried to guess how much time I would need to devote to the different projects/duties I have on the go:

Time Management Guess

An example of poorly estimated time commitments (and poor penmanship)

You probably guessed that those 6 hours/week of blogging didn’t happen, with much of that time being spent on lecture preparation. The amount of time needed to prepare lectures from scratch really blew me away, and I usually ended up spending at least one day on the weekend plus all day Monday & Tuesday getting ready for my 5 hour lecture on Wednesday. Because IPM isn’t my area of expertise, a lot of my time was spent on background research, getting up to speed on topics before trying to teach it back to my students. Theoretically that prep time would go down if I was teaching something I was more familiar with (i.e. taxonomy or general insect diversity), but the decrease probably wouldn’t be that dramatic. I must admit that I learned and retained more having to teach these topics than I did as a student sitting through class…

 

2) Five hour lectures require creativity (and a good night’s sleep)

A 5 hour class is not an ideal learning environment, especially for a group of students who would much prefer to be outside! In order to try and retain their attention, I broke my class into 4 segments with short breaks in between: 1 hour of review & quiz covering the previous week’s work, 45 minute lecture on Topic A, 1 hour lecture on Topic B, and 1.5 hour pest identification lab. I found this worked pretty well, with the students still paying attention through most of the classes, and only occasionally head bobbing (which is pretty hilarious to see from the front of the room, albeit a little disheartening).

Trying to keep the students engaged for each of these lessons required a little more work. I found YouTube to be invaluable, providing a lot of great resources to help illustrate my points (and give me a chance to grab a sip of water). If you’re interested, I’ve created a playlist of all the videos I included (or promoted) in my lectures; 72 clips in all. Some of them might seem a little odd out of context, but they made sense (mostly). Of all the videos I showed, I think I got the largest reaction out of the early DDT propaganda videos; seems the students didn’t like the idea of eating their cereal with a helping of insecticide…

I tried to draw on my natural history & pop culture knowledge to draw the students into the topics. Whether it was using Jacob from the Twilight series to introduce the concept of the “silver bullet” (heh) or using movie plots to explain the differences between invasive species control tactics (Containment = Outbreak; Control = Night of the Living Dead; Eradication = Independence Day), by bringing pop culture references into the lecture I could usually get the students to show signs of life. My students also seemed to enjoy parasititism, so anytime I could find a way to work a parasite into a topic I did.

Also, it seems giving a 5 hour lecture is physically exhausting! I’m not sure whether it was the standing/pacing or the mental marathon to stay ahead of the students, but I was pretty wiped each afternoon following my class. Make sure to eat your Wheaties prior to teaching, and have something to drink nearby!

 

3) Blog posts are a great way to keep students engaged outside of the classroom

Every week I assigned my students a blog post to read, and rewarded those that read it with a bonus question on the next week’s quiz. It was a great way to expose the students to topics and stories that tied back to our lectures but which weren’t necessarily about IPM. Judging by how many students got the bonus question correct each week I think they enjoyed the posts as well. Here are the posts I assigned over the semester (they’re all worth a read, believe me):

The Home Bug Garden – Clivia Foodweb: Part II

Not Exactly Rocket Science – The world’s biggest market (and it’s underground)

This Scientific Life – Berry Butts: Parasitized Black Ants Resemble Red Berries

The Beacon News – Hunting for the super-bug

Not Exactly Rocket Science – Since pythons invaded, Florida’s mammal populations have crashed

BioBlog – blood-sucking vampire moths!

Not Exactly Rocket Science – Scientists and tourists bring thousands of alien seeds into Antarctica

About.com Insects – Before You Mulch, Read This

 

Look Ma, no wings! (female Fall Cankerworm - Alsophila pometaria)

4) Seeing a student make a breakthrough makes all the hard work worthwhile!

It’s amazingly rewarding when a student asks a question that shows they’re engaged and curious about a topic. Case in point, while discussing gypsy moths (Lymantria dispar) I noted that adult females don’t fly, instead waiting for males to come to them. Having discussed the Fall Cankerworm1 a few minutes earlier, one of my students eagerly asked why female gypsy moths invest energy in developing wings which they never use2? Suffice to say I could hardly answer because I was geeking out over the question! Not only was she clearly connecting the dots between ideas, but she was applying advanced ecological & evolutionary concepts to something she’d only just been introduced to! SO AWESOME. It was these sort of moments that made every second I spent on lecture preparation worthwhile!

Of all the things I learned over the course of the semester, the most important was that I really enjoy teaching! I’ve had some experience with teaching before3, but never to this degree. There are certainly some areas of my teaching that I’d like to improve on moving forward, but overall the semester was a success, and my students walked away happy (or so they tell me at least). This course was a nice confirmation that I’m heading down the correct career path, and I’m already excited to give it another shot in the future.

IPM Class Photo 2012

My class on our grower field trip. Thanks for a great semester everyone!

 

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1 – Female Fall Cankerworms are also flightless, but have wings that are reduced to tiny little stubs.

2 – This is almost an exact quote, she actually said “invest energy”. It blew my mind in a good way!

3 – I’ve given several guest lectures at the University of Guelph and was a teacher’s assistant on an entomology field course.

Mushroom Monday

 Busy Busy Busy, Nature, Photography  7 Responses »
Jan 302012
 

Just a quick post to let you know I’m still alive. It’s been a busy few weeks, and writing new blog posts has had to take a backseat lately. Sorry about that. I hope to get a few posts up in the next few weeks as I get a handle on some of the projects, but until then, enjoy this photo of autumnal mushrooms!

I used this photo in one of my lectures last week (more on that soon, I promise) and figured I’d share it with all of you as well. My fungal identification skills are less than zero, so if you have an inkling as to what it may be, let me know!

 

Fall Mushrooms from Bancroft Ontario Canada

 

More to come soon!

Tuesday Tunes – Entomologist – Heather Wilson

 Academia, Entomology, Life as a Grad Student, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes  16 Responses »
Dec 202011
 

As a scientist, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. When I started working with fruit flies, my advisor and I thought it’d take 6-8 months to complete (it ended up taking almost 18 months of work spread out over 4 years). When I began my Master’s, I expected to finish in 2 years,  yet 11 semesters later I proudly defended. Throughout my academic career, it’s been proven time and again that nothing comes easily, and speed bumps lurk beneath the surface waiting to slow your research down. So although I was crushed and extremely disappointed yesterday, a part of me wasn’t surprised to learn my Ph.D. NSERC proposal was not selected by the university for further consideration.

There’s nothing that compares to reading that rejection letter, informing you again that you were oh so close, but please try again next year. This isn’t my first experience with the email-of-academic-death, but its repeated blows don’t soften the pain. It can be easy to blame yourself (“If I’d only gotten one more manuscript submitted…”), others (“They don’t appreciate the work we do as taxonomists…”) or even the system (“Interdepartmental politics sidelined my chances from the start…”), but it’s important to not  give in to feelings of inadequacy or contempt imposed on you by awards committees.

No, I choose to funnel my frustration into proving those awards committees wrong, that they missed their opportunity to contribute to my rising academic star. I know I’m a damn good scientist and a damn good taxonomist, with ideas that will force others to take notice, a work ethic to out-compete my peers, and, most importantly, the drive to become a leader in my field. While the perks which come with NSERC scholarship make life & research easier, I have excelled without them by substituting harder work for financial freedom, and am now better prepared to face all trials I am confronted with. If the awards committee of today fails to see that, it’s their loss, not mine; I’ll find a way, and give my acknowledgement to someone else.

And when I return with Ph.D. in hand and apply to join their ranks as faculty, I know they’ll see a stronger researcher; one who has dealt with adversity; one who has done what was necessary to surpass his goals; and one who has the ability to lead where others follow. I have friends and colleagues who challenge, inspire and drive me, a wife who supports and comforts me, and an ego that won’t lay down and die.

So look out dammit, because I don’t just want to be an entomologist. I will be an entomologist.

Shared Citations – Mendeley as a Social Network

 Entomology, General Information, Life as a Grad Student, Publication, ScienceShare  3 Responses »
Dec 132011
 

Mendeley logoThe first step when starting any new research project is to become familiar with the past literature, and know who did what, and when. This is especially true for taxonomy, where each and every paper published in the past 250 years regarding the description of new species or discussion of the framework for the tree of life for any given taxon is relevant and needs to be examined. This can result in a huge library of publications to keep track of, for which there are a number of options available to the beginning biologist.

One in particular however, has something a little extra incorporated in it; a social network.

Mendeley was developed as a freely available, online, cloud-based reference manager, where individual users add citations & publications to a central repository, which in turn is accessible to all other users for building citation catalogs of their own. There are several benefits to this system, one of which is a recommendation of other publications which may be relevant to your field of research, some of which you may not have been previously aware of. The other benefit is of more use for evaluating the impact of a publication (including your own).

Mendeley Stats

User statistics for Gibson et al, 2011

Because all 1 million current users are building citation lists from the same pool, it’s possible to obtain basic demographics of the people reading your work. Take for example a recent paper I collaborated on regarding PCR primers specific for Diptera phylogenetics. 3 people (other than myself) have added the paper to their Mendeley citation list, with 2 working in the US and one in the UK. While these aren’t groundbreaking numbers, nor the stats overly informative, it’s encouraging to see researchers are noticing the work we did. I would like it if you could see who exactly was reading your papers, as I think it could be useful for finding future collaborators or potential advisors for graduate or post-doctoral work, but I’ll take the simple gratification that our work is being read by 0.0003% of the Mendeley community!

Mendeley has also incorporated several other networking tools, including profiles where you can share your CV, publications, funding sources and contact information (similar to the tools available to LinkedIn users), as well as infrastructure  for sharing publications and holding discussions specific to your field of research in both public and private groups. Being based primarily online, it’s pretty simple to add references to your library using available web browser add-ons, and there are also desktop & mobile clients available which allow you to access your reference library anywhere or while on the go, although I’ve found them both to be a little buggy and prone to crashing (on my iPhone 4S and Windows XP PC).

The central citation database built by the community of users also holds the potential for some interesting data-mining projects, like Roderic Page’s goal of linking species names with the literature containing their original description. If you’re interested in cybertaxonomy, I’d recommend checking out Rod’s blog for more information (it’s pretty cool, but a little on the technical side).

Ultimately, Mendeley is attempting to streamline the accumulation and distribution of scientific literature for researchers. If you’re looking for a reference manager, or are interested in exploring some of it’s capabilities, feel free to look me up; who knows how we might connect!

 

 

Gibson, J. F., Kelso, S., Jackson, M. D., Kits, J. H., Miranda, G. F. G., & Skevington, J. H. (2011). Diptera-Specific Polymerase Chain Reaction Amplification Primers of Use in Molecular Phylogenetic Research. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 104(5), 976-997. Available online (OPEN ACCESS)

Me @ ESA: Field Guide to the Jewel Beetles of Northeastern North America

 Entomology, Life as a Grad Student, Meeting, Publication  2 Responses »
Dec 092011
 

Continuing with my presentations from ESA 2011 in Reno last month, this talk was a part of the Biosurveillance & Cerceris fumipennis symposium and debuts the field guide to jewel beetles (Buprestidae) I’m helping to develop (along with Steve Paiero and Adam Jewiss-Gaines). I also gave a variation of this talk at the Entomological Society of Ontario Annual General Meeting back in October.

This project was originally conceived to assist the multiple groups working with Cerceris fumipennis and bringing in hundreds of jewel beetle specimens, and was funded by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Featuring 165 species of Buprestidae and hundreds of colour photos, maps and other identification tools, we’re in the final stages of preparation before bringing this bad boy to print!

The video capture and multiple conversions robbed some of the quality of the beetle images, so be sure to check out the SlideShare below for slightly better representations. Look forward to seeing plenty more information on this book in the coming months, as well as a sneak preview of some of the more charismatic species!

 

Morgan Jackson – Field guide to the jewel beetles of Northeastern North America

Me @ ESA: CJAI – Putting the Public Back into Publication

 Entomology, Life as a Grad Student, Meeting  5 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

For those who were unable to make it to the ESA Annual Meeting this year, I’ll be sharing all 3 of the presentations I gave over the next week or so. The audio is my actual presentation from the ESA meeting (recorded using my iPhone set on the lectern), which I later synced to screen capture video of the slideshow, essentially transporting you through time & space to ESA 2011! Turns out I’m no David Attenborough or David Suzuki, but hearing myself present was actually a pretty useful tool for how to improve in the future!

This presentation was part of the Citizen Scientists in Entomology Research, and aimed at sharing how the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification is a great place for citizen science projects to publish identification aids specifically for their volunteers.

 

Here are the (slightly modified) slides if you’d like to explore a little further:

 

Morgan Jackson – The Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification; Putting the public back into publication
If you’d like more information on the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification, feel free to explore our published volumes, and if you’ve developed arthropod identification aids of your own, I encourage you to consider publishing them with CJAI!