Fragments From Floyd

Some surprise visitors, friends from our former lives in NC, were waiting for us when we arrived home last night from a little cookout with folks across the county. We had lots of catching up to do, and it took several hours and a couple of glasses of wine to do it. They'll be getting up soon, and the water under our respective bridges will begin flowing again, this time, to coffee.

Now, I'm putting together the final details, uploading chapter notes, and hoping all will go as well as Murphy's Laws will allow today in my first meeting later this morning with 123 biology attendees. Will I find, or help make, some students among them? I have to at least start the term with optimism and hope.

I will play it straight up. No attempts at humor or wit; it falls desperately flat on day one. Day One Freshmen are too intimidated and overwhelmed to laugh, smile or make eye contact with a roomful of strangers. They certainly will not respond to my attempts to get two-way flow going. The silence is deafening. Everyone is alone in their own little bubble of private dialogue. And very little, if any of it, will be related to the syllabus or the topic.

First, in those tense moments before the instructor reassures them, there's the fear that he or she is not in the right room after all. (Being lost, late for an exam, in the wrong course or campus, et cetera is a reoccurring near-nightmare I have occasionally to this day. Do you?) They'll be scoping out the hotties and the hunks out of the corner of their eye. Where should I sit next class to hide as much as possible from the prof, but center ME near the Coolness Center of the class (based on day-one appearances--dress, makeup, swagger--alone) or the babe-section?

It's a science class, after all, so automatically, non-majors (they are all non-majors) will strut a kind of "I'm here because my curriculum said so" attitude, assuming from the first day that this material is unlike any other kind of brain function they've ever done or will ever do or need again, that they're 'not good in science stuff' and that they will be lost by day two. For many of them, what they want out of the class is to get out of the class--survive the semester, do only as much as it takes to make a passing grade, and go on unchanged by anything they (potentially could) have heard during four months.

And, after this awkward, syllabus-intense day is behind us, I will do my very best to make every one of them care about biology--their own, their community's, their planet's. As I will tell them, as college students, they will be among a very small percentage of the world's people who have the opportunity to sit in a college biology class and come away knowing a little of what makes the living world work. It's an awesome privilege, and it carries equally weighty responsibilities. If our young people don't shoulder this work, who will?

So much for my First Day Soapbox. I hear stirring upstairs. We're about to pick up where we left off last night with all of the news from Morganton, our kids-your kids, and the current crop of aches and ailments. I gotta go.