More agreement

Coturnix says:

Teaching Biology without Evolution...
...is like teaching English without verbs. What is left are nouns and adjectives. DNA, enzyme, long bone, ductus arteriosus, pretty bird. Rote memorization. The reason why my (adult education) students are afraid of and bored with science to begin with.

I am starting my biology lectures tomorrow. I have no control over the syllabus. The pages and chapters on evolution were removed from the syllabus. Sorry, but I am starting with evolution tomorrow night. I cannot speak English without verbs.

And I agree. Having had the same experience about rote memorization, I couldn't agree more.

More like this

I just got the teaching schedule for Spring, so I decided to follow up on last week's post by putting, under the fold, a series of short posts I wrote when I taught the last time, musing about teaching in general and teaching biology to adults in particular. These are really a running commentary…
Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the…
Scottish linguist Geoffrey Pullum's take-down in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the venerable Strunk and White Elements of Style has received some notoriety. It's Elements' 50th anniversary this month, but Pullum isn't celebrating in "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice." I have a copy of…
This is what I do and this is how I think about what I do (from February 13, 2006)... I teach Biology at a community college, but not on the main campus. Instead, I teach at a satellite campus dedicated to adult education. Those are all accelerated courses, which means that classes meet for about…

I tried writing that post without any verbs, but it made no sense...

And, yes, I talked about evolution tonight. Just a little bit tonight (more on scientific method and some basic cell and DNA stuff to get them started) - a whole big lecture next week. I used the confusion of the switch between two editions of the textbook to make "typos" in the syllabus and assign all the evolution chapters for next week.