white text that says investigative biology teaching laboratories: inquiry based laboratories designed to promote collaboration, communication and literacy in science

Year: 2015

From the Desk of the Director: Far Above Cayuga’s Waters

I will never forget the moment when as a young instructor I took a polaroid picture of the agarose gel after gel electrophoresis and (going against all protocol) started to shake it so it would dry faster. Sadly, the song on the top of the charts those days was “Hey Ya!” performed by OutKast, so naturally, I started to sing “Shake it like a Polaroid picture…”. I did not know any other words of the lyrics, but that was enough for a few students to approach me after the lab section and express their gratitude:

“Thank you for making us realize that the teachers are humans too.”…

From the Desk of the Director: Tour-guides on a Journey Called Biology

Have you ever watched the campus tour-guides walking backwards, telling cool stories about your university? If a tour group is too big, the people in the back lose interest quickly. Our graduate student lab instructors face a similar challenge: multiple student research groups design, set-up, and analyze different experiments in our teaching labs. It is easy to get too involved with assisting one group while accidentally ignoring others, who therefore do not receive similar guidance on their scientific journey. …

From the Desk of the Director: Popeye the Statistician

Raise your hand if you like spinach. Now, did you like spinach when you were a kid? What changed? I, for example, learned to like the flavor and probably bought into the not so subtle marketing campaign of the Popeye cartoons. Well, the statistical program called ‘R’ is the spinach of the Investigative Biology course….

From the Desk of the Director: Opening a Can of Bookworms

When was the last time you walked into a library to pick up a book? Do you remember the title of the book? Do you remember how many books you left the library with? In the Wikipedia class that I co-teach with two Mann library staff (Ashley Downs and Kelee Pacion), we asked our students to go and find a book in the library, and use that book as a reference for their biology-related Wikipedia entry….

Email us at: biolabs@cornell.edu