BMC Biology 225: Biology of Plants

How the chapter club works

1. On the Tuesday before your chapter-club meeting, Iπll give you and everyone else a list of concepts and general questions relating to your topic. You should spend the week trying to become familiar with the concepts and working out answers to the questions, but donπt worry if there are things you donπt quite understand or questions you canπt quite answer. Thatπs good. Just be ready to toss these to the rest of the group.

2. While preparing for your presentation, use the Stern textbook as well as any other resources you find useful. The Stern book is good but imperfect, and I suspect Iπll be posing plenty of questions whose answers are nowhere in Stern.

3. On the Monday before your chapter-club meeting, youπll meet with me for about 15-30 min. Weπll go over anything you want to go over, but mostly weπll talk about how to lead discussion, your ideas on how to present the material, etc.

4. Your chapter-club meeting will be on a Tuesday. You'll be completely in charge of leading discussion, but I'll be there to help you out. You may make a regular presentation of the material, you may play Socrates and teach by asking carefully chosen questions, or you may come up with something else. The important thing is that you encourage lots of informal conversation about the concepts and questions included in your topic, and that everyone feel that she has a clear understanding by the end of the day.

5. On Thursdays, I'll go over any concepts and questions that are left over from the previous Tuesday, and we'll discuss the week's take-home assignment.

6. You'll be graded on your participation in the chapter-club discussions. It's fine if you have to miss one or two discussions, as long as you find out from someone (not me) what was discussed. Absence from more than two discussions will probably affect your grade.

7. Your participation grade is based on how often you talk, how well prepared you seem to be (for each discussion, not just for the one you lead), and whether you appear to be trying to push the discussion's boundaries beyond the presented material. If you're a shy person, you'll have to speak through your shyness to get a perfect participation grade.

A few things to keep in mind from my experience with journal clubs

The chapter club is modeled on journal clubs, those reading-and-discussion groups ubiquitous among grad students and professors everywhere. Journal clubs vary in quality, but I feel pretty confident making a few generalizations:

1. Bad journal clubs are macho my-brain-is-larger-than-yours competitions among their participants. In these clubs, the only questions people dare asking are so obscure or difficult or highfalutin' that their purpose can only be to say, "Look how smart I am," or, "Look how stupid that person is." We won't do that.

2. In good journal clubs, everyone feels free to ask elementary -- even stupid -- questions.

1. Ask questions not only to clarify points for yourself, but also to make sure that all the important points have been articulated clearly for the group. Think of the conversation as being about saying out loud everything that needs to be said, and saying it well.

2. If one or two people are annoying the rest of the group by seemingly refusing to understand some basic point, accept the challenge to articulate that point even more clearly. That is, be a professor as well as a colleague.

3. But what about smart, interesting questions? A good journal club ends up asking a lot of questions and drawing a lot of connections that go beyond the scope of the presented material. If all you get out of the chapter club is the same collection of facts which you could've gotten just from reading the textbook, then the club has completely failed you.

1. Think about and then bring up connections between what's being presented and concepts and questions raised elsewhere in the course, in other courses, or in other parts of your life.

2. Maybe something being presented will seem to contradict something you understand from elsewhere. Bring it up. Scientists believe that nature must be consistent, and resolving apparent inconsistencies is consistently a source of deeper understanding.

4. Like everything else at BMC, the success of the club depends on your active participation. You'll get knowledge and understanding from the club, but you must also contribute your own knowledge and understanding.

1. Read up on the topic, even if you're not the one who's presenting. Have your own understanding of the concepts and your own answers (or near-answers) to the questions.

2. Speak. You're taking without giving if you don't speak upãand anyway you won't learn as much as you think you will.

Take-home assignments

1. On most Thursdays I'll give you a take-home assignment. Usually it'll be a somewhat open-ended question or a set of measurements or observations to make of plants around campus. Often I'll ask you to draw (yes, with a pencil or something) some plants or plant parts which you'll find on campus or nearby. Sometimes I'll ask you to work with a partner, and sometimes I'll ask you to work by yourself.

2. We'll spend most of the time on Thursdays discussing the take-homes as a groupãwhat the point is, what some useful strategies might be, what might be some pitfalls.

3. I'll give you specifics for each take-home, but in general you'll turn in either a set of measurements or a paragraph or two describing what you did and what you found. If you worked with a partner, both you and your partner must turn in separate reports or measurement-tables.

4. Take-home assignments are due one week from when they are assigned. There will be no extensions, but you may turn yours in up to one week late with a one-point penalty. I won't accept anything more than one week late.

5. Turn in your assignments on paper, not by emailing things to me. Hand them to me in person or slip them under my office door.

6. You don't have to do the assignment that is due the Thursday after your scheduled chapter-club meeting. Just turn in a note reminding me that you're exempt that week.

7. Take-home assignments receive 4 points if excellent, 3 points if pretty good, 2 points if adequate, 1 point if bad, 0 points if nonexistent or more than a week late. I'll ignore the worst non-zero grade when calculating your final grade.

Independent projects

1. At the end of the semester you'll give me a 5-7 pp. paper answering a question of your choice. That's 5-7 pp. double-spaced Times 12-point with one-inch margins, and not counting illustrations and references.

2. The question need not have anything directly to do with anything we've done in class, but it must have something to do with plants. The topic may be scientific, social-scientific, or humanistic.

3. The question must not have a purely factual answer, like "What genes have been implicated in early flowering in Arabidopsis thaliana?" Nor may it be a purely subjective question, like "Which flowers are pretty?" The question must require critical thinking and some scholarly research on your part.

4. I discourage but do not forbid you from choosing a question that requires you to do your own experiments or theoretical models.

5. I would like to approve your question before you begin work on the paper. I encourage you to have your question approved by Fall Break.

6. The last two days of class, you'll present your project to the group. The paper itself is due at 5:00 pm, Friday, Dec. 10. Hand it to me or slip it under my office door. Do not e-mail it to me. I will not accept a late paper without an extension from your dean.

Botaniblog

1. We'll all be contributing to a course blog called the botaniblog. The botaniblog's URL is http://bmcbotany.typepad.com/, and you'll receive information via email on how to use Typepad (http://www.typepad.com/) to post.

2. The botaniblog is viewable by anyone in the world with WWW access. To protect everyone's privacy, everyone (except me) will be posting under a pseudonym. Your pseudonym will be the scientific species name of a plant or algal species of your choice.

3. You must post at least once every week. If you miss weeks, you cannot make it up by posting two in the next week.

4. Your posts may be of three types: news posts, observation posts, and principles posts.

1. A news post connects something discussed in class or elsewhere on the botaniblog to some current news item.

2. An observation post connects something discussed in class or elsewhere on the botaniblog to a botanical observation you make on campus or in your travels. For these posts, please consider uploading scans of drawings.

3. A principles post either proposes a general botanical principle or discusses one that's already been proposed on the botaniblog.

i. A botanical principle is a useful rule which explains or describes otherwise separate-seeming botanical phenomena. Example: organ longevity is positively related to the energetic cost of its building material.

ii. To propose a principle, you must articulate it and give at least two examples.

iii. To discuss a proposed principle, you may argue for it, argue against it, or refine it. Grounds for arguing against a principle include uselessness, narrowness, and wrongness.

5. Your botaniblog grade depends only on your posting at least once a week. It won't depend on the quality of your post, as long as it's really a principles post, a news post, or an observation post.

Exams

1. There will be two exams. The midterm will take place during class on Thursday, Oct. 21. The final will be a self-scheduled exam, to be taken during Exam Week.

2. Both exams are open-textbook, open-note, and both exams will be pretty easy.

3. The material covered by the exams is the material from the chapter-club discussions. What we learn from the take-home assignments and from independent projects will not be examined.

Other things

1. The recommended textbook is KR Stern, S. Jansky and JE Bidlack. 2003. Introductory Plant Biology, 9^th ed. McGraw Hill, Boston. Don't read it. Instead, use it as a reference and starting point. The material covered in the course overlaps with the material covered in the book, but the book covers thing which we won't touch, and we'll discuss things that aren't even mentioned in the book.

2. I'll set official office hours after discussing times with the group. You can always e-mail me (twong@brynmawr.edu) to set up a special time. Or, stop by my office. If my door is open, I'm probably free to talk. My office is Park 251.

3. If you need accommodation of any learning differences, please have Stephanie Bell, the Coordinator of Accesibility Services, provide me with the necessary paperwork. Stephanie's office is in Canwyll House, and her phone extension is 7351. If you need an exam accommodation, I need the paperwork by Sept. 30.

4. Your final grade will be 25% final, 25% midterm, 25% take-home assignments, 20% participation in chapter-club discussions, and 5% botaniblog entries. The chapter-club discussion that you lead counts as much as any other chapter-club discussion.

5. Of course, the usual rules of academic honesty apply: don't cheat or plagiarize, cite sources responsibly, check with me if you're unsure about anything. If you witness another student apparently engaging in academic dishonesty, the BMC Honor Code obliges you to confront her about it.

6. Practice safe computing. I won't accept any excuses that have to do with crashed computers or problems with e-mailing or uploading files, so back things up often and in more than one physical location.

7. Botany is all about observing and describing nature. Keep your eyes open as you walk around campus or in your travels. If you see something interesting somewhere, jot down a description or make a quick sketch so you can share it with the rest of us.

Last updated 8/31/2004 by Ted Wong.