Cutting Down on Texting:
What an annoying and very distracting habit! Probably one of the things that I find most irritating and that is probably one of my faults; I react strongly to texting in class which may be disrupting in hindsight. So, in hopes to cut down on this poor habit, I decided to take the perch behind class and stare down into what I call, “Texter Alley.” The first students I asked to put their phones away were two girls who ten minutes into lecture, didn’t have the notebooks open! After I asked them to put their phones away they definitely started taking notes and from my observation of their notebook pages, it was the second time they took notes (and it was the FOURTH week of class)! Trudi took to the top of the isle and we both got into the habit of encouraging other students to tell their peers to stop texting. Hopefully this tactic will introduce some peer policing. Not sure if this was intentional or known, but when Dr. Gurung chose the two guys to act out the brain demo, that was seriously in the heart of “Texter Alley.” Immediately all texting in that region stopped which was awesome!
And the Brain, Brain, Brain:
The brain labels and functions is not that all easy to learn and with all the texting going on, how can it be learned for those individuals?! Okay, I promise I am done with the text talk from here on. Like I said the topic of brain function and parts can be pretty dry and dull material but that is not the case for our class. The use of the nerf brain was a great visual learning tool and specifically, using its nerf properties to squeeze the brain down to an animal’s size and then releasing the nerf brain and let it slowly evolve into the fore brain, creating the human brain. Good visual of how that part evolved and its reasoning behind the evolved lobe. I thought the Neuron Activity went very well (despite Josh’s anxiety and nerves) and flowed smoothly. The terms posted on the slide on the overhead helped the students out a lot when defining the different components of the neuron. The video recording worked well in addition to the success of the in-class neuron activity.
Group Engagement number three:
A nice smooth transition from learning the material to using and applying that learned material. I think the numbering off went more smoothly and quickly than the last group activity. While I was walking around, I heard a lot of discussion and cooperation amongst the groups. It seems like from here on out, the group activities will form and work together more quickly than the first two. The students must have caught onto the idea of forming the group quickly in order to have more time to accomplish the group work.
Brain Exercise follow-up:
A brilliant idea to do a follow-up on the previous day’s Neuron Activity for the students will, understand what they were to get out of it and learn more specific information about the process. The follow-up showed how many parts of the neuron and the brain cooperatively work together to do one simple function. There was a lot of information and examples explaining how the sensory system feed information to our brain. The brain is not all that simple and it is crucial to go over the key things to remember about the brain and its functions. I’m sure a lot of the students feel quite overwhelmed with all the brain structure and material so they for one will appreciate.
Nice connection with Attraction:
I really enjoyed all the animal kingdom-mate attraction examples. I felt as if all those examples made the connections nicely for the students. Seems like all the mates that have the most sensory appeal are the most likely to find a mate. What about humans? It doesn’t vary across cultures- this was interesting to me because I know some tribes and bands were they find breasts not to be attractive or idolized like they are in our culture. These bands and tribes see women’s breast everyday (due to their dress) therefore they are just as attractive as arms or necks. So what does determine attraction? -Media. Really interest, thought provoking, and overall great questions with this material. In the end, it is up to the babies to determine attraction – this is just wild stuff!