My elementary class that is studying food chemistry is approaching the end of the unit. The students learned to test foods for starch, glucose, protein, and fat. They built paper molecules showing highly simplified structures for each of these types of molecule and they wrote short essays talking about what foods they would bring with … More Elementary Science: Reflections on Food Chemistry
This morning I got an email from NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) about how science teachers perceive and teach climate change. They linked to a worthwhile article in Science that reports on how American teachers are addressing this topic. The short version is that science teachers are mostly pretty well informed about climate change and … More Global Climate Change
One of the ideas I introduce with middle school and (especially) high school biology students is that our sensory organs and brain work together to create our perception of the world around us… but our perceptions are limited by our equipment and may not always fully or accurately reflect reality. Diving deep into this topic … More Biology: Taste Perception, Evolution, the Nervous System, and Fun
I’ve been poking around online looking for interesting projects involving data analysis, and I’ve come across some write ups of projects involving cemetery demography. There’s a lot of potential here – it’s an interesting intersection of ecology, medical science, and social studies. And, from a practical point of view, the appeal of a biology field … More Ecology, Data Analysis, and Pen Pals
I got this email earlier in the month, and boy, did it put a smile on my face. It might be hard to read, so here’s the text: XXX is literally jumping up and down with excitement tonight about pluripotent cells and the effect of hormones! Now she has your handouts all over her bed … More High School Biology: Success!
Can tissue culture be done successfully in a New York City dining room? I don’t know yet, but I’m going to start working on an answer to this question next week. My feelings about this upcoming lab can be summed up with two words – “excitement” and “trepidation.” The students I’ll be doing this lab … More High School Biology: Can Tissue Culture be Done in a Dining Room?
As part of my SAT-level high school biology classes study of the immune system, the students grew bacterial cultures taken from their bodies. This was an extremely simple experiment and only took a small amount of class time. Each student got two commercially prepared petri dishes with bacterial growth medium, and divided each petri dish … More High School Biology: The Immune System
One of the trends in independent school education that I’m noticing with great interest is the minimester. A minimester (which can also go by a variety of other names) is break during the regular academic calendar when short, intensive courses are offered. I’ve been thinking about what minimester courses I’d like to offer if I … More Minimester Musings: Human Evolution and Paleontology
It might seem counter-intuitive, but keeping some stocks of living organisms around can make materials management for biology classes much easier. One of my favorite tools is a mini-pond that I keep on a windowsill. It is a simple lidded plastic box (originally a small animal carrier) without any filters, pumps, heaters, or artificial lights. … More Materials Management: The Mini-Pond
I recently asked the students in one of my biology classes to create illustrations showing the basics of how the immune system works. I particularly like this cartoon: It’s both visually sophisticated and uncluttered. The student created it at the beginning of our study of the immune system; although it doesn’t go into tremendous detail, … More Student Work: Immunity Cartoon
Ms. Mathisen's Science Class 