Title: Re: paleonet Suggestions for intro paleo
lab
At 5:38 PM -0400 10/18/02, Jennifer Stempien wrote:
If you have any teaching ideas or
suggestions, fond memories of your first
paleo intro lab, or moments that hooked
you I would like to hear them.
Jennifer,
The suggestions that you have gotten so far have been along the
lines of "how to avoid dealing with taxonomy". I agree
that week after week of it gets stale and I admit that there is too
much of that in my paleo labs at present. But I don't think that
it should be dispensed with entirely. Taxonomy provides you with
the opportunity to teach students to be systematic about their
observations and to really see something, as opposed to
glancing at and moving on.
One thing that I have started to introduce is the idea of
constructing binary keys as a way of organizing one's observations.
It breaks down observation and identification into a step-by-step
process and more or less recreates how taxonomy was done in the first
place. Each student does not necessarily come up with the some
key, but several of them often work.
I start the students out in one of the university parking lots,
looking at cars, trucks, minivans, SUVs and motorcycles.
Students find the actual fossils to foreign at first and are
overwhelmed by the idea of classifying these totally unfamiliar
objects. Automobiles, on the other hand are pretty familiar
objects, but many students have either not actually taken a close look
at them or they have not "brought to consciousness" the
process by which they tell one automobile from the other.
Once they understand the idea of the binary key, I have been
asking them to construct one for some of the more diverse phyla that
we look at so that they can get a handle on what characteristics are
used to distinguish among the various orders. I don't generally
expect them to recognize much below the order level.
Bill Chaisson
--
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William P. Chaisson
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of
Rochester
ph 585-275-0601
Rochester, New York 14627
USA
fax 585-244-5689
http://www.earth.rochester.edu/chaisson/chaisson.html