Stages Of Succession

Pet Photoshoots

2012-02-27T19:15:00.002Z

Full disclosure: In return for agreeing to review the experience on this blog, I received a free pet photo shoot. The reviews were run by FuelMyBlog.

There comes a time in every proud parent's life (and they don't have to be human babies) when it's time to record one's pride and joy for posterity. When the opportunity for a free pet photo shoot came up on FuelMyBlog I volunteered - it would be nice to have a photo of Jabba done professionally, and I was interested to see how he could be posed in case I wanted to try out a few tricks with my DSLR.

The company is Wish. They are part of a blossoming "experience" industry, and one of the things they offer is a pet photo shoot. At the time of writing its cost has been marked down to £15, usually £50. This includes a 7x5 photograph.

Upon receiving the voucher, I had to phone to activate it and make the booking. However, the main problem with this was that the phone number was only active between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday. I usually work 8am to 7pm minimum, so it was always going to be nigh on impossible to phone them. In fact it was the Christmas holiday (having received the voucher in early November) before I was actually free to phone. And the most annoying thing was that there was no information they asked for that could not have been given online. I could have done this over the internet and been sent the details of the studio that way.

So it was the new year before the studio got in touch with me to arrange Jabba's close-up. The studio in question was The Click Studios in Richmond. Again, the same problem presented itself that I had to call during normal office hours on a Monday to Friday. But somehow they managed to get hold of me at ASE (!) and then after I had finished teaching one afternoon. Jabba's portrait was duly arranged for 4th February.

Despite me giving them my name on a number of occasions, they insisted on calling me Juliet. Eventually I stopped trying to correct them and answered to Juliet each time. When we arrived for the shoot, the studio was crowded - there were at least three full families in there, waiting either for viewing or for their own photo shoot, and so we stood. We at least didn't have to wait very long. Our photographer was absolutely wonderful. She was not a fan of reptiles, but despite her nervousness around him she was professional, talented, and talked to him in a soft soothing voice. The whole shoot took about 10 minutes, and then we were invited in for viewing.

I'm always a little nervous about viewings, having had a bad experience with an unrelated agency a few years ago. I expected to be given the hard sell and sent on a guilt trip. We had none of that - the man showing us the photos accepted that we were just looking for one good photo for the 7x5 image, and he helped us narrow it down to one good one.

Nearly two weeks later I missed a call from them to say the photo was in, we could collect it, but that we should phone them before we come in. I phoned back on the Saturday, but they didn't answer. They also didn't return my voicemail. So last Saturday I phoned in my Teacher Voice. They called back within half an hour and we collected Jabba's picture.

It's a gorgeous photo. The photographer did an excellent job and she is to be commended. However, the experience was less than stellar. Simply the inaccessibility of the companies outside normal office hours (even banks do a Saturday morning) has been enough to deter me from using their services again, coupled with messages from FuelMyBlog pushing me to update them. The cost, were it £50, was a little steep for the 10-minute photo shoot and the photo.

And they have yet to refund my £20 deposit! So I may be writing a complaint letter...

I may use the studio again if I was looking to book a family or couples portrait, but even so, some of the prices look steep. For example, though it was six years ago, I paid £850 for our wedding photographer, including 300 photos and an album. I understand that studios have premises to maintain and so on, but it seems like an awfully big mark-up.

Detail of Jabba's portrait, scanned in badly and used for evaluation purposes.
Picture's amazing though.

Microteaches #7: I Thought Half-Term Was A Holiday?

2012-02-23T22:28:00.000Z

Half-term was last week. I thought I'd have a bit of a break, some time to lie in. Didn't happen. We had an action-packed few days celebrating my birthday, and there were builders in renovating the flats upstairs, which consisted of drilling and hammering very loudly from 8am. There was a frisson of excitement as they managed to drop a heating pipe through our ceiling on my birthday itself, and that of course was it - it was impossible to relax when wondering if any more hardware was going to pitch itself into our flat. I'm so tired that I feel like Steve.

Pissing me off massively during half-term was the article in the Indy stating "Female teachers accused of giving boys lower marks". The paper itself is available here. Sadly I don't understand enough of the statistical metrics, and indeed didn't have much time to read in detail, to be able to comment much beyond the executive summary. But the basic gist seemed to be that boys assume that their work will be marked lower by female teachers so they don't try as hard. Girls assume their work will be marked higher by male teachers so they try harder. And while female teachers confirm the boys' beliefs by marking girls more leniently, the male teachers mark boys more leniently.

So what is going on there? I don't feel that I do mark boys' work more harshly. I sometimes think I do the exact opposite. Male colleagues of mine are exceptionally hard on the boys, and on many occasions I've had blazing rows with them to try to save my boys' places on courses. If anything I allow boys more leniency than girls to compensate for my colleagues. I am but a single data point though. And to be fair, my style of teaching mostly involves revealing increments of cleavage in return for coursework.

Professional Pob impersonator and all-round fucking moron Michael Gove has delivered another slap in the face to teachers by saying "If you [teachers] love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well" (from Huffington Post). This is in the context of expecting us to stay longer during the day and take shorter holidays.

Well, Govey, this week went as follows. On each morning I've been in at 8am - this is the earliest I am allowed to enter the premises. If I could go in at 7:30am I would. On Monday I left at 6:30pm when the college shut. On Tuesday I left at 8:45pm, yesterday at 7:45pm and this evening I ducked out early at 7pm. Tomorrow is a training day so I might get to leave at 5pm. Twelve-hour days are nothing unusual. On Tuesday and Wednesday I had to sit down at my laptop when I got home and work for another three hours. During half-term most of us went into work on at least one day of our holiday, and I will have three days taken out of my Easter break for revision purposes. So I would like very much to know what more Gove would like me to do.

This term is all about coursework, and my A2s are starting to complain that they're not doing fieldwork. They were the ones who moaned like buggery about having to do so, and now they're having to live with doing lab-based research projects. It's going to be an absolute disaster. The AS students are doing better, and some of the more interesting topics I've seen are on ageing, cirrhosis of the liver, Kawasaki disease, conservation of gorillas, testicular cancer and equine colic. We're going on a trip next week, so if you hear that a constituent college of the University of London out in Surrey has burnt to the ground, you'll know that was my lot. I predict it will be a matter of minutes after the coach pulls out of our car park before the strains of "Stop the bus I want a wee-wee" are heard...

FML.

ATP Means "A Tent Pole"

2012-02-03T21:24:00.000Z

The A2s started respiration this week, and by this morning we were onto oxidative phosphorylation. They didn't care much for the gorgeous diagram I had up on the IWB, and they asked me to draw it out for them. So I did.

Put it this way - they'll never forget what ATP synthase looks like, will they?

Fortunately they were all on the ball with the comments, and we had such gems as:

"We're going to be shafted in this exam!"

"I feel like a bit of a knob..."

"Miss, stop dicking around!"

Was tempting to say "Don't feel intimidated, lads, it's only 10 nanometres long!", but one of them was already regretting his decision to apply for biochemistry degrees at university, so perhaps it was just as well I didn't.

"Why Didn't You Become A Doctor?"

2012-01-21T20:13:00.000Z

Students are curious creatures. They ask a lot of questions. Many of them are personal. I answer questions about why I don't have children, because I like to show them that it's possible to have a happy and complete life without having children (many of them say they didn't realise that not procreating was an option). I tell them what university is like, including the fact that I partied a lot and nearly failed at the end of my first year. Some things are out of bounds - I refuse to answer questions about sex or drugs.

For all that though, there is one question I hate receiving, and someone from every single class I teach asks me every single year. Sometimes twice. "Why didn't you become a doctor, miss?" I loathe it. It makes me feel utterly inadequate, and I feel quite hurt by it, though I know that isn't the intention. It seems to be quite common, though usually directed at nurses, according to some of the 120,000 hits for the phrase - I bet it makes them feel like shit too.

The truth is that it never figured in my plan. From a very early age it was dinosaurs that I obsessed over. I always wanted to be a palaeontologist. I had a variety of science-themed toys growing up, including a Fisher-Price doctor's kit, but also a Salter's chemistry set, an electronics kit and a microscope. Grandpa was a GP, and I loved his study, complete with a skeleton, sphygmomanometer, and loads of textbooks. His three children all went into the medical profession - my uncle became a consultant radiologist, my aunt a theatre sister, and my mother a radiographer. It was all very interesting, but it wasn't for me.

I could have become a PhD doctor rather than a medical doctor. I tried it twice. The first one didn't work out. The second time coincided with the worst personal ordeal of my life, the start of my teaching career and the beginning of my PGCE - something had to give and it was the PhD. It has been suggested more than once that I am not intellectually capable of postgraduate study, and that's probably true.

So having "failed in the real world", I am a lecturer in an FE college. Don't get me wrong - I think my job is amazing. I get to spend my days helping students to feel as enthusiastic and passionate about science as I am. I am, for some of them, the only adult who shows an obvious interest in them and their well-being. In retrospect, if I had done a PGCE immediately after graduation rather than seven years later, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, stopped myself from getting so much into debt, and Paul and I would probably own a house by now. I am proud of my job - I'd do it until I drop dead. My parents are proud of me. My husband is proud of me.

But the thing that is implied by "Why didn't you become a doctor?" is that being a doctor is the ultimate career. It doesn't matter that I have the chance to provide the biological foundation for 30 years' worth of medical students - doctors are better than teachers. Teaching is taking a bit of a pounding at the moment by the government, the media and the general public. It seems it has a similar reputation among my students. They share the same thoughts as the lawyer in Taylor Mali's "What Teachers Make" - what's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?

Most of these kids are from families who all want their children to become doctors or engineers. So they've just grown up with the view that if they're good at biology they become doctors, and if they're good at physics or maths they become engineers. Because I'm good at biology (hey, I'm the teacher!), then I should have become a doctor. Their question is asked innocently, but the implication is still there, that in some way my career choice is a consolation prize to becoming a doctor. I got into Cambridge University - I probably could have got into a medical school somewhere. If that had been what I wanted.

Students who want to have children are able to understand why some people may not want to have their own children. So why the lack of empathy for someone who genuinely never wanted to be a doctor? Why imply that I'm defective?

Cutting Up Students - For Science!!

2012-01-16T21:50:00.001Z

Though it isn't on the Edexcel specification, I like to teach my students the difference between a light microscope and an electron microscope (not always obvious for them...), and then the difference between scanning and transmission electron microscopes.

Light microscope, at the Science Museum, London, June 2010
So a light microscope is great because entire cells can be seen in colour, but of course we don't get to see details of organelles. The transmission electron microscope (TEM) is ace for this, but you only get one slice through a cell at any one time, so the image may seem rather abstract.

Even for apparently bright A-level students, that concept is rather complicated, so I like to use a more visceral example. It's good to pick the one student who's really been pissing you off all lesson, probably talking while you're talking or something. Bring them up to the front and get a 1m ruler. Hold it diagonally across their body from shoulder to waist (trust me, you do not want to take any other angle). Then ask the assembled, if now rather amused, masses the following:

"If I were to take a sword and cut a slice through this student at this angle, which organs would I pass through and what would the surface look like?"

An animated discussion will now ensue as the students come up with increasingly bloodthirsty ideas about which organs will be visible.

Transverse section through L1, from Gray's Anatomy
Once they've discussed the many and varied ways in which the victim could be made to suffer, follow up with:

"Would this give you a good idea of the human body overall?"

Hopefully the unanimous response would be "no". So then, they can exercise their higher level thinking skills and come up with a way of getting an idea of the structure of the whole from thin slices. Some of them might even be aware of the Visible Human Project, which did just that. Or, perhaps more in keeping with how a TEM actually works, they could come up with a ballpark figure of how many other students would have to be sliced through at different angles to build up an image of the whole human body...

Incidentally, Google really should be clever enough to exclude all images of the popular US drama "Grey's Anatomy" when I'm looking for the anatomical textbook "Gray's Anatomy". And there should be an "assume user is not a bloody idiot" option, so that it doesn't say "Showing results for Grey's Anatomy. Search for Gray's Anatomy instead?".

Change The Algorithm

2012-01-08T14:39:00.000Z

I'm in recovery from the brilliant ASE conference in Liverpool, so while I collect my thoughts, consider this, spotted on the Taylors Coffee website.

If you were looking for Hot Lava Java, the coffee that goes up to six, why in the name of Flying Spaghetti Monster would you be remotely interested in decaffeinated coffee??

Time to rethink the advertising, or at least the algorithm used to suggest other products.

Retweeting

2012-01-02T20:03:00.001Z

It seems that every few months now someone gets their knickers in a twist over teachers' use of social media. This is usually due to some wazzocks spoiling it for the rest of us. With the emphasis on some. I've discussed this before and at some length.

This time it's Jim Docherty of the SSTA telling us:

"First thing is don't bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn't help."

No chance of that, Jim - I only have a social life for a couple of days at Christmas and Easter, and for a week or two in the summer! But how patronising. Then, there's:

"Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general."

This, of course, would make it very difficult for teachers to contribute to #SciTeachJC, #ASEChat and #UKEdChat. Not to mention the sheer quantity of useful links, advice and resources I've been able to exchange both ways with other teachers.

As ever, Tom Bennett is a voice of reason, and his rules should be required reading for teachers setting up their first blogs or Twitter accounts.

For my part, I maintain a degree of anonymity. My Twitter account has never been associated with my full name, and though the bio bit is fairly obviously me, it still has to be found first. I block the college, and deliberately do not link to the college's website. Former students are most welcome to follow me (and be followed) once they have left the college, and I love chatting to them via Twitter, e-mail and text messages.

As for this blog, you won't find it via a search for my married name. You will find my profiles on Academia and LinkedIn. And they go to my personal website, but there's no link to the blog. Some students find out my maiden name - I don't conceal my former identity - but I don't go into the classroom and shout it out. Actually, very few people ever google me, least of all my students. Should they find this blog, then they will find the majority of my complaints directed towards politicians and the general public. Some individual interaction with students is mentioned here, but they are always given full anonymity and treated with great affection.

And, though I admit I am very fortunate in this regard, my online activity, so long as it does not bring the college into disrepute (or involve illegal activity), is contractually protected. This is, I think, an advantage of working in FE where most lecturers are industry professionals with additional careers within their industry. As with most codes of conduct and guidelines, everything there is to say about one's online presence can all be distilled into one easy motto.

Don't be a dick.

Nekkid Lady Backbone Sculpture

2011-12-30T23:01:00.000Z

This week I've been earning back the car's new exhaust by tutoring on a course. I've walked through Cavendish Square each morning, and noticed an interesting sculpture.

It's a human spine. Cavendish Square is noted for the presence of the Royal College of Nursing, and it is next to Harley Street, the street for private medical practices (though I do occasionally offer a "quack quack" under my breath passing some of the clinics...). So I had a closer look.

There are 24 vertebrae there, corresponding to the seven cervical, twelve thoracic and five lumbar vertebrae. Three curvatures can be seen (perhaps a little kyphotic!), the dorsal surfaces are facing left and the ventral surfaces are facing right. But hang on a minute, those are funny looking vertebrae - I mean, my mum's had as many back operations as I've had margaritas, but even her spine is in better nick! Time to find out what's going on here.

Oh. OH. Right, it's art. Let's make a spine out of decapitated female torsos. Umm. Oh look, there's a plaque to go along with the sculpture.

I suggest that, while you read that, you grab your cheek with your thumb and forefinger and pull it in and out really quickly. That'll give you the appropriate auditory accompaniment. In that it will sound like a load of pretentious wank.

It's apparently been there since May. I'm not someone who goes crazy over art. I stood in the final hall of the Tate Britain Watercolour exhibition earlier this year shrieking indignantly at Paul: "It's a teaspoon. A fucking teaspoon. Covered in paint. For fuck's sake!" And at the Royal Academy summer exhibition I nearly took the Pink Pen of Doom to Tracey Emin's "Me Too - Glad To Hear I'm A Happy Girl" to correct "your" to "you're".

However, if pretentious arses want to produce a load of shite and get paid to do it, then more power to them. I just hope the funding for Westminster's City of Sculpture has not been diverted from other budgets. I really feel that the arts must continue to receive funding (and we happily pay for RA membership to contribute in a small way to this), but what makes me uneasy is that this festival is in aid of the 2012 Olympics, and an awful lot of money has already been siphoned from more needy budgets into this yawning black hole.

Happy Solstice

2011-12-22T16:03:00.000Z

Jabba Claws is not renowned for his time-keeping, but he would nevertheless like to take the opportunity to wish you all a Happy Solstice, along with any other festivals that involve eating lots and leaving out waxworms for gecko visitors.

Remember, he watches you intently when you're sleeping, and he runs and hides in his cave when you're awake. And if you've been extra good this year, then he might leave you a festive Yule log in Poo Corner on Christmas morning.

Christmas Presents

2011-12-19T21:32:00.000Z

It's difficult to escape the topic at this time of year - teachers all over the world must be comparing their Christmas presents from the students. For a couple of years I watched as my colleagues got bottles of wine, chocolate, "best teacher" mugs and even £200 (!). And though I know there is not a vastly well supported correlation between "number of presents" and "quality of teacher", it nagged at me.

This year, however, my students went to town. A2 students bought me spirits - a litre of Baileys and a litre of tequila (they know me very well...). One gave me a necklace she'd asked to be sent over from Kenya. There's a nice little box of Ferrero Rocher too. I took part in my BTEC students' Secret Santa, and received a gorgeous perfume set from one lad who managed to keep his identity secret for about half a millisecond. And then I had this:

This had me in tears in the staffroom. Hand-drawn and painted by one of my AS students. It's hanging up at home now.

As sickly sweet and sacchariney it is, of course the thing I've found most touching has been what has accompanied each present - "thank you for all your help". In a line right out of Hallmark, the knowledge that I have helped these students in some way, through proof-reading personal statements, writing UCAS references, advising on university choices, counselling through personal grief, and spending one-to-one time with them on biology, chemistry and physics work, is the best Christmas present of all.

Though the booze definitely helps.

The Sound Of A-Level Revision

2011-12-11T19:44:00.001Z

Back in October I announced that I had set up an Audioboo account under the name "BioLecturer" with the intention of producing short podcasts of the specification points for the AS and A2 Edexcel criteria.

I have, after two full days of shouting into my laptop, completed Topic 1, Topic 5 and Topic 2, in that order. So I'm alternating AS and A2 topics. I have Topic 6 to complete, which may not be so great as it's the only one I haven't taught this year (though I did teach it for the previous two years so it should be okay).

Listen on audioboo.fm!
So you can listen to my dulcet tones if you're really interested. A number of the teachers on Twitter have already given the links to their students, so I hope that they're already getting some mileage out of them. I'll see my AS students on Tuesday and the A2s on Wednesday, so I'll have a chance to tell them then.

As so often happens, I expect to receive nothing but criticism from the students for missing bits out or not being quick enough uploading, or not getting it done over half-term. I put all my notes up on Moodle, along with copies of the handouts, worked homework answers after they have had feedback, past papers and useful links to extra resources. However, if I'm two days late putting the notes up, I get complaints. Clearly I've spoilt my students...

Pride Before A Fall

2011-12-06T21:08:00.001Z

As has happened so many times in the past, the happiness always seems short-lived. The pride I felt yesterday at my achievements has had the edge taken off it with what I think was a crappy observation today.

I had high expectations for my group, AS Biology. I love teaching them - they are usually the most eager to learn, well-behaved and happy to answer questions. They're a dream group. We were recapping on pedigrees and genetic diagrams, doing some practice papers and then moving on to looking at cystic fibrosis, the big Topic 2 case study. It was the sort of lesson they were used to, which for that group gets results.

The observer arrived halfway through (I knew it was a middles-and-ends obs). And all hell broke loose. The enthusiastic students morphed into a barely controllable bunch of australopithecines. They would not be quiet while others were speaking, and suddenly seemed to have the attention span of a hyperactive squirrel. So suffice to say I don't think it went well.

Now, I've had crappy observations when I've had feral students refusing to learn (the second group of BTEC students per year is usually the worst behaved, as we fill up one group at enrollment then add in subsequent groups, so the motivation and ability decreases as the group numbers increase...). I've had groups where my attempts to induce learning have failed miserably (the A2 action potential lesson was memorable in that regard), and where students have said the most bewildering things (another A2 asking, in all innocence, whether the SEM image of a stoma was the female external genitalia).

However, the thing that's got me troubled this evening is the general observation by myself, colleagues and my former PGCE tutors that if a group likes their teacher, they tend to behave better than usual in observations, and if they don't like them, then they act up to get their teacher into trouble. I got an inkling today that the latter might be the case, and that has shaken me a little, especially given my high regard for this group. Teaching isn't a popularity contest - if the students do well in their exams and go on to higher education or training, then objectively it doesn't matter if they hate me.

But it matters on a personal level.

Three Masters' And A Cert Ed...

2011-12-05T19:55:00.001Z

In my mission to collect as many degrees as I can, I have added a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) to the array of qualifications I have. I graduated today at Royal Festival Hall, along with loads of the friends I have made over the past two years. Paul was there to support, hold bags and generally be a rather dashing cheerleader. He also took a few photos of me looking like a right wazzock:

A gin and tonic, a walk across the stage, a handshake and two glasses of prosecco later, and we were standing on the balcony overlooking the Thames.

I went into college this morning all dressed up. Most of the comments from the Year 1 BTEC group were along the lines of "You look really professional Miss" (which rather implies that I don't normally...). However, the Year 2 lot, mostly young men, were a little more appreciative, saying they didn't think they'd be able to concentrate on work, that they wished I'd go graduating a bit more often, and pretending to warm their hands on me (!). Thank goodness they're all adults...

Back to work tomorrow in sensible jeans, t-shirt and flat-heeled boots, to disappoint hormonal boys.

Marking Hell

2011-12-02T21:05:00.000Z

It's that time of the year. The paperwork is building up as coursework deadlines loom. This is for all of you teachers in a similar situation. And a further reminder to my students who think they have it bad having to write an essay a week for me. Yeah? Well, I have to mark 24 of them. And that's just one class...

Two weeks till the Christmas holiday starts...

Strike Three! And Being A Versatile Teacher

2011-11-30T14:58:00.001Z

I'm on strike today as a member of UCU. My husband decided he couldn't walk past his colleagues on the picket line today, and so despite being on a fixed-term contract and therefore not likely to be able to benefit from union membership, he signed up for UNISON. We stood side by side on the picket line this morning outside college, and I think my students were highly amused to see me there. My hope is that they've seen that, having spent the week explaining why I'm striking, I'm not all mouth and no trousers.

I've been plagued by a black dog for a few days. In my previous jobs I'd have found it impossible to do any work, and would have been mindlessly surfing the net. That isn't an option anymore. Everyone's experience is different, and some find teaching makes it worse, but it's been a life-saver for me. I have to walk into that laboratory and teach, and I have to deal with the students, and I have to get them comfortable enough with the topics that they can cope with the exams and advance to university.

Coming out of the funk, I decided I would call the black dog Fenton. Mainly because when Paul and I see it running wild in my mind, we both sit there and cry "Oh Jesus Christ!"...

I got pissed off with the BBC News - in a story on MPs anger as science proposals are 'rejected', there was the following quote:

A survey published by the Wellcome Trust on Tuesday found too many newly qualified science teachers lacked the specialist knowledge they needed to teach the subject effectively.

The research showed that half of trainee science teachers are in fact biologists, who often struggle to pick up chemistry and physics knowledge during their one-year post-graduate teacher training courses.

I've looked at the Wellcome Trust press release, and I fail to see where they say that us biologists struggle with physics and chemistry knowledge. Seems like crap journalism to me.

I'm unimpressed with the accusation levelled at biologists. Mainly because, in my department, I am by far the most versatile of the teachers. Sure, I teach A-Level Biology, and the BTEC Level 3 Physiology, Genetics and Plant Sciences units. But I also have to teach units at level 3 (KS5, sixth form, or 11-12th grade for the colonials) on law, media studies, politics, philosophy and psychology. At level 2 (KS4, 9-10th grade), I regularly teach chemistry and physics. And I do a damn good job.

I've been tutoring AS Chemistry - my inorganic chemistry is a bit rusty, but my organic and physical chemistry is pretty fresh still. I've also started tutoring AS Physics to the same student - one of my biologists who is really struggling. I can't remember much of my quantum physics, and I rather suspect it has changed a bit in the 13 years since I studied it. However, projectiles and viscosity don't change very much, and in the space of two hours I achieved more than a colleague had in six weeks. I'm pretty sure I am just one of a large number of biology teachers who are very happy with chemistry and physics. Maybe there are biologists who shy away from maths. There are certainly physicists who find biology repulsive and respond viscerally to the thought of teaching it - every physics teacher I work with is like that. But I also know physicists who love to teach the other subjects too.

Maybe I'm lucky because I did Natural Sciences. I got to study aspects of all the sciences, and to develop a holistic view of the subject. I've done more chemistry and mathematics than pure biologists. In doing HPS as a second year subject, I learnt about philosophy, and some of the more interesting "How Science Works" bits of the course. The stress v strain and viscosity calculations I did in geophysics are beyond anything the A2 physicists have to do. Yes, at the moment I'm bragging. Because teachers are degraded and reviled at the moment, and now the BBC is trying to say biology teachers in particular are rubbish.

I'm one of many science teachers comfortable teaching any aspect of science. As Taylor Mali says, the miracle is education - I'm just the worker.

Caring For Students

2011-11-19T16:51:00.001Z

One of the more hurtful comments I see from time to time about women who do not have children is that we are incapable of empathy. It is a ridiculous assumption, but it's bandied about more times than I care to recall. This week has been a physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting reminder of why such assumptions are bollocks.

By the time I start teaching most of my students, they are already 18, so there are rarely any safeguarding issues. Students can therefore come to any member of staff and talk about things in absolute confidence. For many reasons - I'm one of the younger lecturers, I teach biology (making me a target for all health-related questions), and I have a reputation for being available for students out of teaching hours - students confide in me more than any other member of staff, often including their tutors.

So at the moment I'm supporting three students through some major personal difficulties. I've held up the next class at the door letting a student say what they need to say or seek advice. I've extended deadlines or forfeited homeworks altogether. I spent over two hours helping one student get to grips with AS Chemistry, though it's over 13 years since I did it myself.

On the flip side of this, I've had to discipline two A2 students for plagiarism. They say they were so worried about not having any homework to hand in to me that they resorted to copying a friend's. I had to explain to them why I was so much harder on cases of plagiarism than other teachers - that I had been a direct victim of a minor case of it, and that I had seen it cause major problems for friends. I spent an hour with these two, them licking their wounds and accusing me of hating them. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Sometimes truly caring for students means having to tell them off when they do something unacceptable, to impose sanctions on them, and to punish them if needed. Sometimes caring is giving up your free time to help them, or even just sitting there quietly with them while they sit there quietly. Sometimes it's buying Hill & Holman's "Chemistry In Context" and Muncaster's "A Level Physics" so you can fill in the gaps left by your colleagues. Not bad for someone with a barren, nulliparous womb...

The hardest thing is not losing myself. Everything I'm doing at the moment is nurturing, mothering, caring. I look after the students. I look after my garden. I look after Jabba (always able to cheer me up when I'm shattered). Paul thinks that photography might be the thing that allows me to be just me and do something for myself. The macro lens I've asked for as a Christmas present will help.

Some have said I'll worry less the more experienced I become. But I don't really like the thought of worrying less, of caring less. Though I am absolutely exhausted, and find myself lying in bed unable to sleep, thinking about these students, I think I would be a worse teacher if I didn't take such personal responsibility for their well-being.

NPG WTF

2011-11-17T08:42:00.001Z

There have been two articles resurfacing (as it turns out) in the press. One of them is an opinion piece by the Chancellor of Buckingham University (link - it's so awful my college has blocked it "because the content contained prohibited words and/or phrases"). It talks about female students being a "perk" for male lecturers and professors. Read the Guardian article on the subject - it isn't blocked for porn.

The other is a short fiction article in that bastion of hyperbolic science Nature. It's entitled "Womanspace" (or there's the PDF). It passed without much comment when it was published - just goes to show no one reads Nature for the short stories. It was only when two responses were published in today's correspondence section that women in science started to prick up their ears.

Anne Jefferson has written a brilliant response: Dear Nature, You got a sexist story, but when you published it, you gave it your stamp of approval and became sexist too. And this is it - Henry Gee (@cromacrox if you're interested...) is the Senior Editor of Nature. He approved the publication of this story. He even had the nerve to gloat afterwards:

I'm amazed we haven't had any outraged comments about this story.

Well you got them now, Henry. And you probably think it's going to drive more and more traffic to you, and that there's no such thing as bad publicity. My husband @panderson1979 has suggested that a campaign to the advertisers might hit Nature where it hurts. There's a whole hashtag, #womanspace, devoted to it already. I imagine the author, @edrybicki, is waking up to some interesting replies this morning.

I commented to a friend on Twitter that so much sexism seems to be as a result of a few men thinking they're being funny. And I imagine Ed Rybicki thinks it was rather funny. And I imagine Henry Gee thought it was also funny and a jolly good wheeze. Henry Gee has prided himself on striving for equality in academia, and especially tackling institutionalised anti-semitism. Yet he approves a discriminatory fiction story because it's discriminatory against a group of which he is not a member. He would not have published a story entitled "Jewspace". One could not get away with writing the sentence, and Henry would not publish it:

"But the answer is clear: Jews can access parallel universes in order to find things, whether they do it consciously or not."

The article would be offensive if "blacks" or "gays" was substituted in for "women". From "Blackspace":

"I said, only half-joking: 'Well, blacks seem to be able to do that - maybe they’re getting into spaces we poor guys can't?'"

And from "Gayspace":

"Gays, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish."

Just to be clear, these are unacceptably discriminatory sentences. So why would Henry Gee allow these things to be said about women in his journal?

It is hard enough to be a woman in science, and sexism is rife in academia. Sexism and the enabling of sexist behaviour is one of the many reasons I am "just" an FE lecturer, when I could have been a PhD. I fear for my female students' welfare as I send them off to university each September, and hope that their enthusiasm and optimism for their future isn't eroded away too quickly.

Update: As well as Anne's post linked to above, also look at The Biology Files and Science Sushi, who have further thoughts. And for an editor and publisher's take on this, look at my awesome husband Paul's Open Letter to Nature. Paul is fortunate enough to be 50% of one of many couples that proudly show the 1950s stereotype to be utter fiction...

A Coincidence

2011-11-12T21:02:00.001Z

When two or more palaeontologists are in the same room, it is inevitable that one will suggest going for an alcoholic beverage of some description. So when real cider-lover Dave Hone stopped by for a chat and to inspect the gecko, I suggested we hit the Red Lion, home to real ales, real cider, the European pork scratchings mountain, and Eddie the cross-dressing dog. And, it would appear, pterosaurs:

It's a model of the Pterodactylus gargoyle on the front of the Natural History Museum, part of an exhibit by a local artist, Mac, who had died earlier that year. Shown, of course, with Dave for scale.

There was another Pterodactylus closer to the bar, but it was wearing a pink feather boa and wasn't so exciting (or maybe we'd just had too many pints by that point). Still, something of a fortunate coincidence to be able to take a pterosaur palaeontologist to a pub with a few pterosaur models kicking around.

Things I Learned From My Students #10: Somebody's Watching Me

2011-11-10T23:15:00.001Z

I haven't done one of these for a while - nearly a year in fact. The two weeks since half-term have been absolutely mad, but that at least means some more ammunition for this.

So here's what I've learned from the little sods recently:

The words "turgid" and "flaccid" are hilarious.
I can still just about pass for someone in their late 20s.
Everything can be expressed as "bare", "sick", "peak", "long" or a combination of any of the previous.
It is a matter of some concern that a woman with my qualifications should be a teacher in an FE college.
We have a child's skull in our anatomy collection.
I can use this fact to extract homework from the younger students.
Students may think they want to be surgeons, but they recoil in horror at a horse dissection and the autopsy scene in "Contagion".
Apparently a 31-year-old, married, female biology teacher needs to be told the location of the G-spot.
If your physiology class contains mostly boys, then at some point each week someone will ask about masturbation.
The question biology teachers are asked most frequently is "What does this rash mean?".
Supposedly mature students returning to study still think it's appropriate to refer to "poo" when writing about the digestive system.
If one student misses the day of the presentation, they can have an extension. If half the class misses the day of the presentation, half the class fails.
It's surprisingly difficult explaining to students how a Placebo Band works.
No one teaches these kids how to draw graphs at KS3 or KS4. As a result there are 18-year-olds drawing graphs in biro without a ruler on 20% of the page.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

A Word From Our Sponsor

2011-10-31T08:00:00.000Z

The resident gecko on Stages Of Succession would like to wish you a very happy Samhain, and feels that an appropriate way to celebrate such an occasion is to give him lots of waxworms.

In fact, in the traditions of the festival, if you treat him with waxworms, he won't crap all over your hand.

Boo! Using Audioboo In Teaching

2011-10-30T19:07:00.002Z

I joined Audioboo a short while ago. Paul has already used it for brief extracts and short stories, and as he's often the leader technology-wise in our household, I saw what he was doing with it and thought about how I could use it in my own role.

Last year, a dyslexic student asked me if there was any resource for A-level biology that he could listen to. I was able to refer him to Examstutor, but I don't know how good the podcasts are (oh if I had time to listen to podcasts!). I wondered if I could use Audioboo to make my own revision bite-size podcasts.

The result was the BioLecturer Audioboo feed. I've only done a few so far - the aim is to get AS Topic 1 sorted before the end of this week, and then move on to A2 Topic 5, then AS Topic 2 and A2 Topic 6.

Listen on audioboo.fm!
With the caveat that you can all say "I think you'll find it's a bitmore complicated than that" about everything in the specification, I'd be grateful for feedback, listens, comments - if I've got something wrong or if there's something the students might find interesting associated with the boo, please leave a comment on my profile.

Museum Shop Items

2011-10-29T21:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Paul and I went into London to see the "Private Eye: The First 50 Years" exhibition at the V&A Museum, followed by the "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" and "After Hours" at the Natural History Museum. All were excellent, of course.

However...

Being an advocate of avoiding stereotypes, especially for younger children, I was distinctly unimpressed to see this in the V&A gift shop:

The "Good Things for Girls" pack contains a skipping rope, colouring pencils and a knitting doll. The "Good Things for Boys" pack contains dominoes, juggling balls and a boat. Now, to my mind, there is no reason why boys can't enjoy skipping, colouring and knitting, nor why girls wouldn't appreciate dominoes, juggling or sailing a toy boat. However, they have been neatly packaged into the "traditional" roles.

I do bang on about this, but I have real trouble with an organisation that advocates itself as an academic institution (there are strict eligibility criteria for the use of the .ac.uk domain), which happily sells items that do not promote equality of opportunity for all children.

On a different note, there were no gender issues at the NHM, but there was a nice bit of taxonomy-fail:

Echinoids being confused for trilobites? Crinoids being confused for ferns? I think someone had a long day.

As an aside, we saw the newly-refurbished dinosaur gallery at the NHM. It's still dark, still dingy, still impossible to take a photo of an entire skeleton, still utterly inferior to pretty much every single dinosaur hall I have ever seen at a museum (I'm sure someone made a point about this a few weeks ago but I can't find the blog post to credit them). I don't know what they did in the refurb - there were a couple of new panels, and a bit of new CGI. The science is still mostly good, but bland and uncontroversial enough that it's good for a few more decades I suppose (!). It wouldn't even need so much high-tech stuff - just specimens, clean, well-lit, accurately mounted, with information about them. Or is that not enough of a money-spinner these days?

UCAS Applications: A Vignette

2011-10-27T22:25:00.000+01:00

It is a Monday morning. My Year 2 BTECs have just had their tutorial, and are working on UCAS applications. As most of the students are ahead of their deadlines for my unit ("Physiology of Human Regulation and Reproduction"), I give them the option to stay in the classroom, where there are some computers, or go to the library (translation: bugger off to the common room for an hour). A handful of students remain, and as I know they are planning to apply for biology-based courses at university, I offer to help them.

I look up from my marking to see one of the boys staring wide-eyed at the following website:

"Tarquil," I say (names changed to protect the guilty). "Why are you looking at that website?"
"Yeah, Miss," says Tarquil. "Jocasta told me I could do this as a job."

I look over at Jocasta. She works in a local coffee shop at weekends, and is always keen to upgrade me from a small to a medium latte. She's a bright one. I start giggling. "Jocasta, did you really tell him that?"
"Of course," says Jocasta.
"Good girl," I say. "Extra tip for you next time I'm in the coffee shop."

***
A week later, I come in and Tarquil is looking at this website instead:

I make eye contact with Jocasta. She winks.

Microteaches #6: What Day Is It?

2011-10-26T20:14:00.000+01:00

I don't remember being so tired coming into the first half-term of the year before. I've had to be reminded several times this week what day it is. As I went into college on Monday to do some marking, Tuesday felt like Saturday. Today felt like a weird hybrid of Saturday and Sunday. And now half-term is nearly over. Meh.

So here's some of the stuff I've been favouriting (watch the English teacher I'm married to cringing at the imaginary word...) on Twitter and in my feeds.

There's an uplifting report on women's progress in STEM, reported in the Huffington Post. I'm not overly impressed by the image used to illustrate it - blue liquid in a graduated test tube, being held by a beautifully manicured finger that is no doubt wholly impractical for the majority of scientific lab work.

However, the positive aspect of the HuffPo article is tempered by a LinkedIn study reported in Jezebel that one in five professional women have never had a professional mentor, let alone a female one. Might I still be in academia if I had? Maybe. I know that the day one female professor came to find me, told me she could see I was suffering from depression and that she was taking me for a coffee and a damn good chat was one of the brightest moments of my whole dismal experience in St Louis.

I don't have to enforce a uniform, thank FSM. I know muggins would end up being the one volunteered to tell the girls their skirts were so short one could see what they'd had for breakfast. According to the Torygraph, schools are increasingly banning skirts in favour of trousers to ensure girls don't look like ladies of negotiable affection and incur the interest of prospective rapists. Yeah, right, because no schoolgirl wearing trousers has ever been raped. I remember there being quite a to-do about whether we got to wear trousers at school. My mum, as the wife of one of the deputy heads, went up against the headmaster's wife, and won - trousers became part of the uniform. Didn't stop my chemistry teacher writing up on the board at the start of the lesson:

Sure, dress your lower limbs in pants;
Yours are the legs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance...
Have you seen yourself retreating?
Turns out a large number of the young people caught rioting in August were in receipt of free school meals and/or on the special educational needs register. And yet we're facing the deepest education cuts since the 1950s. Something doesn't quite add up - probably the budget-holder at the Department for Education.

Some oddly familiar psychadelic images from science textbooks have been dug up. Is it any wonder all us biology teachers are a bit weird?

Creationism continues to loom, though I am heartened that the OCR A-level Biology specification quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky (I want to move exam boards for A-level). There is a call for more stringent guidelines on teaching creationism. There may be reason for optimism in the face of Muslim opinion on evolution - this is something I'm following closely, as I'm very much hoping to write up my PGCE research as a paper.

Finally, Kevin Zelnio has issued a call to arms on evolutionary biology and viral marketing - the last thing we want is for creationist websites to be the top hits on Google!

Science Ink: It's Here! (Nearly)

2011-10-23T17:03:00.000+01:00

Everyone who knows me knows I have tattoos. I am fortunate enough to not be remotely required to cover the ink when at work (it is one of the things I love about working at the college), and it gets to be a conversation point. I submitted photos of them to Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium. When he asked for high-resolution versions for a book he was writing on science tattoos, I (along with hundreds of others) obliged.

The result of several years' work is "Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed" (link for British customers).

© Carl Zimmer, used with permission (of course!)
There are reviews on Carl's website. The Americans get it released on Tuesday 1st November - in Blighty we have to wait nearly another week.

Which tattoos went in? These two:

There are more on the horizon. But of course ink is an expensive investment and requires careful saving. I'm also a firm believer that planning, thinking about design and making sure the design is right for and unique to you is the key to not regretting it. A Darwin doodle - the famous "I think" tree - is one I want (though I am aware there are many evolutionary biologists with the same). I want a gecko - not one of my geckos, but a stylised one, just over my shoulderblade. I'd love one on my hip, or snaking up my side, but perhaps that should wait until I've lost a bit of weight - if nothing else it might be a bit cheaper then...

I could look at tattoos all day - I'm fascinated by them. I'm contemplating asking our library to order a copy of the book too (wouldn't that be awesome?), so if it's good enough for the college library it's good enough for your coffee tables. It'll make a great early Squidmas present.