Sunday, September 6, 2015

The Detwiler Piano - A long and meaningful story for teachers.



HANDOUT TO A CPBS SEMINAR AUDIENCE, AUGUST, 2015:
 
The Detwiler Piano – A History
J. Janovy, Jr.

When CPBS opened, in 1975, there was an old, green, upright piano downstairs in the lodge. Once and a while students played on it but eventually it disappeared, probably removed by the first director of CPBS, Dr. Brent Nickol. During the 1990s, the School of Biological Sciences revised its curriculum, removing both BIOS 112 (Zoology) and BIOS 109 (Botany) from the list of courses applicable to a degree, and began requiring Cell Structure and Function (BIOS 203) and Biodiversity (BIOS 204) as core majors’ courses. Because of the academic politics involved in these decisions, I volunteered to teach the spring section of BIOS 204, which I did for about 10 years. BIOS 204, Biodiversity, was changed to BIOS 103, Organismic Biology, for a variety of reasons (and BIOS 203 was changed to BIOS 102). One of those last semesters when I taught BIOS 204, however, there was a student in that class named Jillian Detwiler, from Rapid City, South Dakota. The Detwiler Piano is named for Jill.

During those years in BIOS 204, students wrote four papers, all being three double-spaced pages plus bibliography, without once mentioning money, health, agriculture, politics, sex, sports, or religion. A complete discussion of writing assignments in large classes can be found at http://www.johnjanovy.com/fieltst1.htm. Here are the papers Jill’s class wrote that semester, well before the Internet and Google made student writing so boring:

First paper assignment:

 (1) You will be issued a scientific name.  This name represents your personal and individual study organism for the papers this semester.

 (2) Analyze the taxonomic and phylogenetic information available in the original scientific literature on the genus of this organism, i.e. in the journal articles published over the past century.  In particular, be sure to address the question of whether the taxonomic information is of any value in answering phylogenetic questions.  Convince me that you have learned how to use Biological Abstracts and the Zoological Record, and that you have actually read and understood some original scientific papers.

 (3) Remember, this paper is mainly an exercise to teach you how to use (= find, read, and understand) the literature of biological diversity and how to write in taxonomic and phylogenetic terms.

 (4) The paper must be three full pages of double-spaced typing, 12-point font, 1” margins, plus at least 5 original journal article references (4th page) in the correct format (see Blackboard for editorial policies).

Second paper assignment:

(1) Answer the questions: Who are these scientists that did the research and wrote the references you cited in your first paper?  Under what circumstances did they do their research and produce their papers? What can you infer about their daily lives from reading the materials and methods sections of those papers you cited? Can you envision doing similar kinds of research as an undergraduate honors thesis?

(2) For the literature cited section of this paper, add another five references from the book and journal literature. Your bibliography pages should contain your references from the first paper, marked with an asterisk (*), then five additional references. You may also cite up to five web sources IN ADDITION to the real library resources. If you cite web sites, then also add a paragraph indicating why you chose those sites, based on the advice given by the library’s web site link to use and evaluation of web resources.

(3) The paper must be three double-spaced typed pages. All the format rules still apply (see the Blackboard site for this course).

Third Paper Assignment:

(1) Define and explain the term “conceptual problem” as it applies to biodiversity (100 words or less).

(2) Determine the three major conceptual problems that have yet to be addressed concerning the FAMILY of organisms to which your genus belongs. Explain exactly why these problems are conceptual ones, rather than practical or economic ones. Illustrate your answers with at least five additional references from the original literature or from books on the general subject that includes your genus, making sure to mark with an asterisk (*) the references already used in your first two papers. It's okay to refer back to the papers used for your first two papers.

(3) The main body of the paper must be a minimum of three double-spaced pages with one inch margins. The bibliography is extra.

Instructor comments on paper number 3 (from Blackboard):

Here is the assignment, all with some expanded commentary:

(1) Define and explain the term “conceptual problem” as it applies to biodiversity (100 words or less).

The first thing I would do is simply look up “conceptual” in your dictionary. The second thing I would do (I’m NOT being sarcastic here!) is to look up the word “problem.” I find that very often students, including graduate students who should know better, simply fail to address the question that is asked, and instead try to answer questions that were not asked. So it’s important to know what a conceptual problem is, and it is very important for you personally to decide what a conceptual problem is relative to your genus and its relatives. Here are some examples of conceptual problems, problems that were or could be addressed in various ways, some of which we are now familiar with:

a. Is “separate but equal” a valid solution to race relations in the United States? This is a conceptual problem because “separate but equal” is an idea about how to establish a particular social order and distribute economic opportunity.

b. Are species fixed entities? This is a conceptual problem because “fixed entities” is an idea about the fundamental nature of categories we call species.

c. What is the nature of proof? This is a conceptual problem because “proof” can mean different things, depending on whether one is dealing with a mathematical theorem, a criminal case, a historical event (~ a criminal case), a political campaign promise, or an argument in a bar.

(2) Determine the three major conceptual problems that have yet to be addressed concerning the FAMILY of organisms to which your genus belongs. Explain exactly why these problems are conceptual ones, rather than practical or economic ones. Illustrate your answers with at least five additional references from the original literature or from books on the general subject that includes your genus, making sure to mark with an asterisk (*) the references already used in your first two papers. It's okay to refer back to the papers used for your first two papers.

Wow, this is a fairly difficult assignment! This sounds about like something I would ask a PhD candidate to accomplish! Obviously I’m asking you to stretch your minds, step up a notch in your intellectual sophistication, and act like the student from hell. However, to be brutally honest with you, about all I’m asking you to do is try to think and write like the undergraduates I have known at UNL who have gone on to very successful careers, most of them in the health professions. Just as obviously, there is a whole lot of flexibility in this part of the assignment, and when I grade the papers, I’ll simply ask: are there three problems, do these problems address ideas, and are some papers cited to support the student’s claim that the problems are actually problems? I chose the family level to give you some additional flexibility by enlarging the subject. This part of the paper is really nothing more than an upscale version of the question sets you’ve been producing in lab all semester.

(3) The main body of the paper must be a minimum of three double-spaced pages with one-inch margins. The bibliography is extra. This part of the assignment is fairly self-explanatory.

When I look at the grade roster of this class, I discover that nearly half of the students have an 85% average or higher. In any other class at this university, such an average would indicate either an unusually brilliant group of students or an unusually easy class. I’m not completely convinced this class is all that easy, and from reading your last exam answers, I’m not convinced that as a group you are thinking like an unusually brilliant group even though your grades suggest that is the case. So all I’m trying to do with this third paper is bring your independent thinking habits up to the level of your grades.

NOTE: The following paragraph represents an export of CPBS teaching experience to a large, introductory, majors’ class on campus:

Remember the pedagogical theory of this particular biodiversity section. I ask that students do activities that are in and of themselves educational, I try to design activities that accomplish the educational goal of producing students who have the biodiverstist’s habits of mind, and I allow a whole lot of individual freedom to accomplish the task in your own individual way (thus each of you get a different genus). I’m asking that you be a biologist for a semester, instead of take biology for a semester, and I’m giving you as many options for succeeding as there are human beings trying to succeed.

Fourth Paper Assignment:

For the last paper this semester, you are to use the resources in the Sheldon Gallery and in the Sculpture Garden that is spread across city campus.

(1) Critically evaluate the illustrations used in the taxonomic literature about your genus (one page maximum), providing commentary on the quality of illustrations, the media used, and the visual communication techniques employed.

(2) Pick five pieces from the Sheldon or the Sculpture garden in at least three media (oil, watercolor, photography, collage, sculpture, etc.) and tell how a study of those pieces would help you in communicating specific information about your genus (two pages minimum). As an aid in doing this, assume you must give an hour’s presentation to our class and need to find creative ways to keep your fellow students awake, alert, and vitally interested in the subject.

(3) There is no need to find additional bibliographic references unless the ones you already have do not allow you to answer (1) of this assignment. Be sure to cite in the text those that you do use, however. In the literature cited section, also list the artist, date, medium, size (if given), and ownership of the pieces of art you use in (2), and cite them by name and date as you would a scientific paper. If you wish to describe any of these pieces, then do it in the literature cited instead of in the paper itself.

The follow-up:

On the basis of their writing, I called in a number of students to ask about their future plans. I had been doing this for decades, making sure that students had set their career goals high enough when their performance in my classes indicated they had potential for magnificent careers in a variety of fields. One of the students I called in, because her writing was so insightful, was Jill Detwiler. During the conversation, I suggested, very strongly, that she attend CPBS and take Field Parasitology, which I taught. Field Parasitology always seemed to go better when I recruited at least a few serious students out of the freshman classes, and Jill was a first-year student at the time.

Jill responded by telling me that she was a double major, piano performance and biology, and that she had to practice several hours a day, so she couldn’t come to Cedar Point. I asked whether she’d come to CPBS and take my course if we bought her a piano, and she just laughed and said
“sure.” I was director of CPBS at the time, so right after that conversation I went into the office of Mary Batterson, who was the associate director (the position now held by Jon Garbisch), put $50 cash in an envelope, wrote “Detwiler Piano” on the envelope, and asked Mary to send out an e-mail to faculty members associated with CPBS, asking for donations. Within a week, we had $500. Mary called the music store in Ogallala and had the piano delivered. I told Jill we’d bought her a piano, and she had no choice but to come out that summer and take Field Parasitology. However, you had to be awake at 2:00 AM to hear her play. The music was worth staying up all night.

Jill spent that first summer at CPBS, doing her project on larval trematodes in snails. She spent the next summer at the California Academy of Sciences, the summer after that traveling around Nebraska working on parasites of prairie dogs for Nebraska Game and Parks, and the next summer doing research for her MS degree, which she received at UNL. The major paper from her thesis is:

Detwiler, J., and J. Janovy, Jr. 2008. The role of phylogeny and ecology in experimental host specificity: insights from a eugregarine-host system. Journal of Parasitology 94: 7-12.

She then went to Purdue for her PhD, working on the evolutionary biology and population dynamics of echinostomes with Dennis Minchella, and did her post-doc at Texas A&M under Charles Criscione. She is now a faculty member at the University of Manitoba. She was the 2012 winner of the American Society of Parasitologists Young Investigator Award, an exceedingly prestigious honor (plus a $2000 check).

If any of you can play the piano, I strongly suggest sitting down at the Detwiler Piano the next time you are at CPBS.

JJ