My first semester as an assistant professor at Florida Gulf
Coast University was busy (it’s now the second semester and I’m just getting a
chance to blog about the first), but it went pretty well. The classes I taught
were:
Marine Ecology- An upper level undergraduate elective with
31 students. This was my big lecture course, and the one that required the most
preparation and grading. It was fun getting immersed in marine biology topics
that I had always loved but which hadn’t been part of my own research. I spent
late nights making slide presentations and writing test questions about deep
sea hydrothermal vents, whales, coral reefs, sharks, sea turtles, barnacle
sexual behavior, etc. My students were mostly junior and senior environmental
science or marine science majors. There was a wide range in their readiness for
the class, but they all managed to pass with at least a C. One weird-but-good
teaching technique that I got from another FGCU professor was to give the
students a lot of hard study questions with no answer key, but to select their
test questions from the pool of study questions.
The best part of the semester was when we took a snorkeling field trip to the Florida Keys Marine Lab in
early November. We spent all day on the boat, visiting some shallow nearshore
habitats, and a nearly-pristine offshore reef with water as clear as the sky. A
photography student, Samantha Oliver, came with us and took a lot of cool
pictures:
Current Topics: Seagrass Ecology- The other two classes I
taught were short “discussion” courses, where the students had to read a
scientific paper about seagrass each week and then we would talk about it. One of
the two classes was a graduate course with two students, and the other was an
undergraduate course with 18 students. The grad student course pretty much
taught itself, but I kind of struggled to get some of the undergraduates
motivated. In the undergrads’ defense, they hadn’t known what the course was
going to be about when they registered because it was just listed as “Current
Topics: Biology, Instructor: Staff” and they assigned me to it at the last
minute. If that happens again I’ll be loose with the topic and not try to stick
with just seagrass.
Besides the courses I taught, I also sat in on a rigorous
computer mapping (
GIS) class taught by another professor in the Marine and
Ecological Sciences department. That was to better qualify myself for research
funding in the form of government contracts for seagrass monitoring.
Environmental monitoring contracts typically require maps and
spatially-explicit data analyses among their “deliverables.” It was good that I
took the class, because I now have a grant now to do a year’s worth of seagrass
monitoring in the Caloosahatchee River Estuary, and I’ve recruited some of the
hotshot snorkelers from my Marine Ecology class to help with that. The project
is related to something called the “Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan,”
which aims to improve the health of estuaries and wetlands by restoring more
natural patterns of freshwater flow from central Florida to the
everglades.
There’s a lot more that happened in my first semester, too,
but I don’t want to go on and on about it in my blog. My strategy for blogging
this year will be to have more frequent but shorter / sloppier posts about
whatever is on my mind at the moment.
Happy New Year.
2 comments:
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Have a nice day!
Great informative blog post. My compliments to the photographer.
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