Last week of summer

This week is the last week of summer. Classes start on Monday. So I've been taking advantage of a little bit more laziness. Last week I was in the pollen lab all week trying to figure out how to process pollen. We're trying something we've never done before - using a Schulze's solution instead of performing acetolysis. This means nitric acid instead of sulfuric acid and acetic anhydride. I'm not sure which one I'd enjoy doing more. Using Schulze's solution is easy though. But we were trying to come up with new standardized lab methods for this new procedure. So it took me all week to process 9 samples. (You should be able to process at least 12 in 2 days, normally)

Actually, this week I have been using my birthday present (a sewing machine). I have been sewing a shirt for my husband! I just finished it about half an hour ago. It turned out pretty nice! Sorry no pictures yet... My next project is a bag for my patterns that they will fit in properly, and then I'm going to make an easy skirt for myself and then on to the first pair of pants. I'm very excited about sewing.

So, like I said, school starts Monday. I'm taking 2 classes and 4 thesis credits. The classes are statistics and a vegetation history class. I'm TAing half time for one of my advisor's classes. We have talked about it, but nothing in detail yet. She doesn't seem too worried about this. But I just know I'll have to write a bunch of labs overnight. I think it is going to be pretty easy on me though. We're encouraging a lot of class participation, and I'm not sure how that will go over in a class dominated by freshmen and sophomore's who aren't majoring in Earth Sciences (the class is about Yellowstone "as a scientific laboratory" or something). I had quite a lot of trouble getting people to participate in my teeny geology labs last June. I had 2 labs, one had 4 people and one had 6. At the first lab I said, "I want you all to work together, and talk to each other. Because if nobody's talking it's going to be really quiet in here and it's going to get really boring." Well, in the lab of 6, nobody talked. In the lab of 4, everyone followed my suggestion and worked together. The smaller lab consistently did better, because they would discuss the questions and inevitably someone would know something about it and they got to "teach" everyone else. I had to work a lot harder (I don't mind that though) in the class with 6, answering questions all the time, and they consistently got lower grades. They didn't care to talk about the material with one another. And they had a real problem with creative thinking. Finally on the last lab I had to write a question that said something like, "Just think about this and give me a creative answer, don't worry so much about whether or not it is exactly correct!" They always just wanted to get the right answer, and not care about why or how it was right. So I had to force them to be creative. That was tough!

Anyway, so the Yellowstone lab this semester is going to be interesting. I'll have 2 labs of 15 kids each. Not too bad. I hope some learning goes on.