FHL Day 1

Now THAT'S a fouling community.
The instructor GP shows us how to explore the tire organisms
The lab.
My bench.
The view from the dining hall.


Today was the first day of the inverts course. It's pretty interesting to be facing the tall side of the podium again. Most of the other students are early in their grad school careers- i'd say the weight of students are in the first half of their PhD- decided on their topic but not their project, if that makes sense. There's also someone who's writing a book on inverts- she's a professional photographer, we also have someone from NOAA/NMFS Hawaii, and a student from Moscow University (doing a dissertaion on vestimentiferan worms, and a student from mainland China. I think it'll be a good group.

This morning was sunny and cool. I got a cup of coffee in town on my ride into the labs, and met the lab office staff and finished my paperwork while the kids were having breakfast. The morning lecture (8:00) was on basic zoology from a funcitonal systemics approach. We got an overview of the body wall and coelom formation with a view to it's diagnostic utility- lots of emphasis on coeloms as hydrostats and regions for gas exchange. Big banks of memory being dusted off here. Late morning was all orientation stuff- boat use, stockroom, network, library. Interesting to me as a metaphore for the same functional systemics approach we see in the lab. All animals have to solve the same problems, and all academic institutions have to solve the same problems. So many variations on so few themes...

Met Moose for lunch. He's just back from a workshop on teaching undergraduate science. Again, we're all trying to solve the same problems. Here I have less patience, as so much of pedagogy is jargon which reduces to "be considerate". Not that this isn't worth saying, but one tires of the precious cleverness that goes into restating it. You need to think about what students know, what they need to know, and how to help them from the first spot to the second. Perhaps I only think I do this, and the fact that so many science teacher workshops hit this again means that this isn't what's happening. I'll have to think about this.

Afternoon lecture continued on fxnl systems- Gut, Blood/vascular, Excretory/Osmoregulation. Then lab. The lab space is nice- we all have a compound and dissecting scope, an a rack of seawater tales runs the length of the lab. Today we walked out on the dock and flipped over the tires that serve as boat fended and pulled some of the fouling community off and brought them back to the lab. I ended up watching a scaleworm for ~ 90 minutes trying to draw it and key it out. Then most folks evaporated for dinner and I got the lab to myself for a few minutes to finish my keys.

I went to see the Cowdonnells and try to identify mystery NorthWest berries (which turned out to not be the salal I expected.) and then home to have dinner with Dennis and read my text for tomorrow.