Why Have You Ever Met Someone Who Changed Your Life?

Have you ever met someone who changed your life forever? I have. When I first started as an undergraduate, I had no desire to study biology. At that time, most biology-associated classes I experienced were in a typical lecture setting. While they were relatively easy for me, they were not exciting nor did they motive me to learn more. Biological science, for me, was simply something theoretical and too far away from real life. However, my ‘Evolution’ and ‘Animal Behavior’ professors completely changed my ideas. Both of them were enthusiastic teachers who included all kinds of activities in classes. For example, after watching ‘Eight Legged Freaks,’ a creature-feature involving giant spiders, we discussed physiological constraints for the
I therefore tend to use a lot pop culture references when giving the introduction of my topic to spark interest and help them relate to the material, and then I usually follow up by asking students to provide insights from their personal experiences or what they haven seen on news that is pertinent to that topic. For instance, the first fetal pig lab only required the teaching assistants to cover all the organs and their functions. I twisted my lab a bit by showing my students a short clip of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ at the beginning and asked them to imagine themselves as surgeons. I then assigned each pair of students a separate real-life disease case and asked them to identify the particular organ associated with it during the dissection. I wrapped-up the lab by having a ‘health care meeting’ for each group to present the case of their ‘patients’ and possible treatments. Often through this process some students in the crowd might say ‘oh, my brother/my aunt/myself dealt with such health problem before as well!’, and that usually facilitates some further discussion among the whole class. If a subject seems too far away from daily life, which is what I had originally thought about biology, it is harder to motive students to learn, and I truly believe that it is the teacher’s job to help students see the connection (which then facilitates their learning of the
As a student, I found the best way for me to familiarize myself with a method or the material was to apply the method myself and to explain the material to someone else. That is exactly the reason I always encourage my students to form their own study groups at the beginning of the semester, and also why I proposed to let the students from our ‘Evolution’ class present their term paper research in lab sessions. This builds on the term paper they write for the lecture portion of the class, but allows them to both see their classmates’ projects and present their own