During our very first lab session she said, "If you can't make it to our Tuesday night lab, I also teach identical sections on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Please feel free to make up your time then. If that doesn't work, e-mail any other professor teaching this lab and ask to sit in their session. I will not mind at all." I think she has this perspective because, as I've come to find out, she was/is a non-traditional student herself. She, too, attended this same school a dozen years ago while raising a child and continues to work now toward a PhD. She knows how difficult it is to balance a family, work, and school all at once.
In other classes, lab instructors have allowed for the making up of only one session this way. It's nice to have a semester where that isn't a problem. Consequently, I've made up three sessions this way already this semester and one of them was a lab practical.
Going to these other lab sessions has allowed me to meet a few students who attend during daytime classes. They are, generally speaking, um ... an interesting bunch. Let me explain.
I have heard several professors allude to enjoying teaching nighttime or Saturday morning classes because the students in those classes are more mature, tend to be extremely dedicated, and take their classes seriously. I hadn't given it much thought until meeting these other students. Now I know of what these professors speak.
In the first make up session I attended, I sat in an empty seat at a lab table with three other students. The table held a dozen agar plates for that day's experiment. One guy immediately picked up an agar plate, opened it, and began sniffing the agar. When the professor explained that each plate should be labeled a certain way, he again took off each lid and began writing on the plates. And he's one of those people who, when concentrating hard, sticks his tongue out. A lot. With the agar plate about 2 inches from his face.
I was cringing the entire time. One does not remove agar plate lids until absolutely necessary. One does not place agar plates near one's face. Ever. Hello, contamination, anyone?! I didn't want to say anything though, because I was crashing their lab group. Instead, I sat and cringed and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. Finally, a TA noticed him and told him politely to stop immediately.
Later, during that same lab, another guy at the table sterilized an inoculating loop in heat, then set it down on the table top. A minute later he picked it up and was about to use it without sterilizing it again. I stopped him, saying that it had to be sterilized. He said, "But I just did that." I replied, "Yes, but then it touched the table again." He rolled his eyes at me. I just stared at him until he put it back into the heat. Geez.
This past week I attended a different lab session so I could take my first practical exam. Practical exams are not group activities and they usually require moving about stations which are set up around the room. Where one sits is completely irrelevant. I sat down at a table with one other guy and two empty seats. He gave me A Look and said, "Um, actually, someone already sits there." I said, "Oh, really? Hm. Thanks, but I don't think it really matters during a practical." Sure enough, it didn't matter.
I hope this kind of student either, a) is not majoring in biology or medicine or chemistry or anything else requiring precision, or b) if they are, they learn the importance of sterile technique and letting little things go. And no, sterile technique is, most definitely, not a little thing.
Anyway, my professor rocks. In addition to understanding the difficulty I am facing as a student/worker/parent, she is funny and has an effective and engaging teaching style. This is her last semester teaching here and I'm sad that I won't have the opportunity to take any more of her classes.
And, because I don't have any other way to end this post, here is a photo of Ceratopteris cornuta. It's a type of aquatic fern. It's the fern we were studying during the lab session where that one guy sullied our agar plates and that other guy almost sullied our specimens of Ceratopteris cornuta.
The purpose of the lab was
to sow spores from this fern onto several agar plates using a serial dilution
process. We were looking at the relationship between total number of
spores and gender distribution of spores. Did you know that this
particular fern germinates male and hermaphrodite gametophytes? They do.
The hermaphrodite gametophytes release a pheromone called antheridiogen
which signals as yet ungerminated spores to become males. When there are many spores in a given area, there are a high number of them which are male. This is because the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves if necessary but that isn't desirable. What is desirable is having plenty of males around for cross fertilization which brings about genetic diversity. Science is pretty cool.
