The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.
This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:
Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.
I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.
This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:
6 comments:
Awesome Adam! I'm happy for you. Behavioral ecology was one of my favorite classes in grad school---it explains a lot of shit about a lot of things.
I didn't dissect a single thing in undergrad biology classes. I took one lab where we worked with rats, but I knew that was what we were going to do before I signed up for it. I'm not sure where the whole "biology = dissection" thing came from. I loved my behavioral and ecology classes. I'm glad you've discovered it, albeit late :)
1) I vividly recall Motsay giving us like a 30 minute lecture before getting into the "evoutionary" part of the high school bio curriculum basically telling us that it was "OK" for us to study evolution because the pope said so, and because god could have imbued the human lineage with a soul at some point so studying evolution didn't mean we had to be godless monkeys. I have no recollection whatsoever of subsequently learning anything substantive about evolution.
2) I hate to tow the line here re: the whole biologists and dissections bit but goddamn do I dissect ants ALL THE TIME. I mean it's a real massacre.
The high school biology class I took involved lots of dissections, each more gruesome than the last. After that I just assumed that there was lots more of it and never wanted to do it again.
haha, that's funny; i'm jealous of your high school dissections :) i did a worm in freshman bio, and that was it. i think i got to do a fetal pig on my own at the end of AP Bio, but it wasn't official. i wanted to take a proper anatomy class my senior year, and dissect a cat, but i wasn't able to fit it into my schedule. (you'll be interested to know that when i took AP Bio, we had a heavy evolution module, but it was at the discretion of my teacher; however, starting the year after me, AP Bio started officially testing evolution, so it's part of the official AP curriculum.) in undergrad, the only people i knew who did dissection were the people who were in the kinesiology department; i think they did a sheep. in the life sciences college, though, it was all micro or macro physiology and evolutionary and molecular biology. it makes me sad that you didn't know that, but it's good you're enjoying it so much now. and dissecting a human trumps all of that, so i'm very satisfied now. and now i miss the evolutionary stuff again. :)
i remember doing a worm, a frog, and a fetal pig freshman year of high school. it was an honors class in a private high school so maybe we had it a little "better" than other schools, although i of course don't consider more dissection better.
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