SC-214
kbonham | February 18, 2013[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first-time college instructor]
One of the biggest challenges in organizing this class was figuring out how to incorporate readings into the class material. Since I wanted to give the students a firm grounding in evolution as a way to understand infectious disease, one of the required textbooks I assigned was Carl Zimmer's excellent introductory textbook The Tangled Bank.
Unfortunately, I felt I only had a couple of days to give…
kbonham | January 13, 2013[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor]
In my first lecture, I used Powerpoint (well, technically Keynote), but I personally like chalk-talks a quite a bit more. Never mind the fact that classrooms never seem to have chalk boards any more, I like taking the time to write out important points, draw diagrams on the fly and connect with the material a bit more than just clicking through to the next slide. My students did not agree. My…
kbonham | December 22, 2012[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor]
Most of this post was written back in September, when it still seemed possible that I would be able to teach the class, write the blog and do science. Please forgive any anachronisms that I failed to purge.
Last time, I talked about what science is and why it's awesome. This is the first half of lecture 2, which was originally given on 11 September, 2012.
Lecture 2a (reading: Zimmer - The Tangled…
kbonham | December 21, 2012I disappeared for a while to teach a class. At the outset I had grand plans - Not only would I design the course from scratch, give the lectures, and grade the assignments, I would also write up all of the lectures for the blog and maintain my same level pf productivity in the lab. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that in order to accomplish this goal I would either need to give up sleeping or find one of those time-warp thingies from the 3rd Harry Potter book.
Neither of those options seemed reasonable, and so this blog, and indeed my productivity in lab suffered quite a bit.
The…
kbonham | September 10, 2012[This fall, I'm teaching a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor]
Lecture 1
That was a scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail, demonstrating the lighter side of the plague. Who knew there was a lighter side of plague? Of course the darker side is easier to envision. This is a graph showing estimated human population over the last millenium. That enormous dip during around 1350 is not a result of people having less babies - as much as 10-20% of the entire human…
kbonham | August 28, 2012
For the past 3 years, I've had the opportunity to spend a week in a house on a beautiful lake in Vermont. Usually, this week is a chance to completely unplug. I take some photos, buy a bunch of books from Northshire and read them, and lounge around. On this past trip however, I received and e-mail that was equal parts wonderful, exciting and terrifying, offering me an opportunity to teach a course at Emerson College.
The course is SC-214 - Plagues and Pandemics. From the catalogue:
Infectious diseases are a leading worldwide cause of human death. This course will describe and discuss the…