Sad day..

Today, I came into my apartment, and saw a gecko...under my clear shoe mat... where I come in the door...and he is dead. It's not Jeffrey, he's a different color. But he is so small! And he's not moving, even when I lifted the mat off of him and tried to get him to run away. Sad...

I've discovered that the labs I teach take up at least half of my work week--whether it it preparing for the lab, teaching the lab, grading the homework, preparing quizzes and homework, or answering inane questions about the lab. Today we were preparing for the Osmosis and Diffusion lab we have for tomorrow. First of all, this is a lame lab. I need to make it exciting somehow! There is a ton of time where you are sitting around, waiting for something to happen. Ugh. Last week there was some down time and I talked about the life cycle of malaria, and parasites that live in the sand, and African sleeping sickness for a while and terrified all my students... But I think those things are cool! They seemed interested...but also frightened. This week I have to think of something cute and fuzzy to talk about... tardigrades maybe? Oh inverts. I love you. None of that charismatic megafauna for me. Only the little spineless creatures wiggle their way into my heart.

Anyway, it took three hours today to figure out that the lab we were going to be doing for tomorrow is terrible and doesn't even work! Because someone forgot to read the instructions! WHAT?! Hasn't this been taught before? Where's the professor? What was he thinking? Oh well, we fixed it--but really, every week, I only get through lab on a hope and a prayer because EVERYTHING could go wrong. I hope the students can't see how tenuous my hold is on any type of order or understanding of things. Last week in my second lab, all the paramecium were dead! I had to scramble to find some live ones for them to look at! Thankfully I found some and regained some composure, but it was close. I don't want to let my students down. Also, I have one student who refused to kill her paramecium because she felt bad--she wants to be a marine biologist. Nu-uh. Lady, you better reconsider. Science is about looking at dead things. Seriously. You can't be a scientist if you can't kill a paramecium. Now I know that sounds callous, but seriously, they're gonna die anyway and you kill them everyday without knowing it! And yes, it is different when they have eyes that are looking at you, and of course there needs to be a reason to kill it that will lead to some beneficial research, but we all learn to do it. And you need to if you're going to study this stuff. When something dies needlessly (like my gecko friend) I'm sad, but for the sake of research, I understand. Whoa, this is getting into a whole controversial area I wasn't planning to talk about. I need to go to bed soon anyway so I can prepare for tomorrow's fiasco of a lab.

Also, I've been watching "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"--Hilarious. And super offensive. I love it.