Fragments From Floyd

What an ordeal it once was to display a picture of something to a roomful of students. Ever used one of the old-fashioned noisy, heat-pulsing opaque projectors in a classroom? As clunky as that was, it was better than the alternative: holding open the reference book carted over to your lecture room or lab on short-term checkout from the library; walking up and down each row with a swaying motion, left to right so craned necks and squinting eyes could catch a fleeting distant glimpse of it as you spent precious class minutes showing-and-telling, one wee picture after another.

Enter, the current epoch: internet, google, digital cameras, powerpoint and multimedia classrooms. How easy it is now to pull in relevant images (my own stored on my hard drive, from the CD that goes with the text, from so many sources on the net) that illustrate the lecture points! It's almost overwhelming, and more often than not, while surfing my quest for an illustration I get seriously but all-too-comfortably sidetracked in an infinite regression of topical cul-de-sacs. Sometimes the images and text found by serendipity in this way can alter the course of what I had intended to say, and when, having found too good an illustration not to incorporate the new discovery into the conversation in class.

Did you know that there is a group of folks dedicated to the task of moth photography? Take a look at this one of many pages of moth wing details. What a great way to look at variability within a family, genus and species. How apropos to our discussion of variability within a population related to Natural Editing as we're calling it--natural selection, technically speaking. Look at what's on the menu! Look through these plates of moth families at the range from brilliant and flashy to oh-so-drab and cryptically-camouflaged. And yet they have all, somehow, managed to be reproductively successful in their own unique habitats.

And, as browsing fate would have it, here's a HerbalGram resource on "Secretory Structures of Aromatic and Medicinal Plants," complete with some stunning electron micrographs of the microscopic plant structures that are the source for plant tastes, smells and various secretions of medicinal value. Great! I was already planning to carry some scratch-and-sniff plants in on Wednesday this week: sweet birch, spicebush (seeds and stems), sassafras, pennyroyal and maybe the thallose liverworts from under the cliff by the creek. While they're passing around the specimens du jour will be a great time (even though it doesn't fit the original topic for the day) to project on the screen the stunning images of some of the structures that create those aromatic, species-specific smells.

I have a strong sense that I'm learning way more in this teaching process than my students are in their learning process. I guess we'll see: the first test is coming up tomorrow!