blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla

NPR’s Science Friday had a great interview with evolutionary biologist, Martin Schaefer (Associate Professor, University of Freiburg, Germany) about his current research in bird evolution. The radio segment was pitched perfectly for AP Biology — a re-cap of Darwin’s finches, genetic variation in the population, natural selection, geographic and reproductive isolation, and more.

Here’s the summary from the Science Friday Web site:

“What does it take to change a species? New research details how people putting out birdfeeders may have influenced the evolution of a species of songbirds. Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers describe how one species of European songbird, the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), has been split into two reproductively isolated groups in fewer than 30 generations. One group migrates to the southwest, the other to the northwest, overwintering in either Spain or the United Kingdom. The researchers found that the northwestern-migrating birds, which take advantage of birdfeeders in the UK, had developed rounder wings and longer, narrower bills than the southwestern birds.”

Listen here to find out more.

Kim Foglia

But the study of biology was taken to a whole new level for me this year; it got downright personal. In December, my digestive system started to disagree with me daily and I thought I was battling run-of-the-mill midlife gastric problems (acid reflux, etc.), but I was quite unexpectedly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

There is nothing to grab a biology teacher’s attention more than an attack from within. And I find there are two people in my life living this crisis — the woman who is fighting for her life and the biologist who is watching what a body does when parts of it falter. I have never looked at the human body so mechanistically before. We are a finely-tuned machine with little tolerance for failure in any of its parts. Constrict a bile duct and watch your skin turn yellow from the backed up waste products of your liver. During radiation treatments my hemoglobin count plummeted and I was reduced to a tired, wheezing old woman who couldn’t walk up the school stairs without pausing every few steps, legs aching. But a transfusion of whole blood rejuvenated me overnight like they had changed the oil and tuned me up. Amazing what a little more oxygen will do for this machine! And natural selection takes on a whole new meaning once you contemplate a personal internal battle between your working cells and your cancer cells and you hope your selfless, cooperative, follow-the-rules cells win the competition.

After taking care of my immediate health needs and the emotional needs of my own teenage children, I realized my biggest challenge was how to tell my students. I struggled with this. My administration didn’t want me to and came up with every argument they could: it is a private matter, it will be too upsetting to the students, we would have to alert parents first, and then finally suggesting that I explain it without using the word “cancer” to which I could only reply, “Doh!”. If I didn’t personally explain this to my students what would clarify my frequent absences, my loss of hair, my increasing weakness. It was obvious to me, we (my students and I) had to tackle this together as we did the challenge of our coursework. After that it came easy.

For my AP class, I interrupted the current lesson and started a brief chat with, “OK, you know that I have been sick. I’m going to tell you what is up. We are only going to talk about this for a couple of minutes because we have work to do, and I get tired of talking about it all the time anyway…” After I finished I gave my students an opportunity to ask questions. After one student asked if this runs in my family and I told them about a genetic study I joined to investigate that, another student spoke up about how she was going through genetic testing because so many women in her family had breast cancer. This prompted another student to talk about the recent diagnosis of his grandfather. It really was a moment. A couple of weeks later another student from class came to me privately to tell me his own story of battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a child and to assure me that there was always hope. I was honored that he shared such a moment with me… I was moved to tears by his generosity.

For my 10th grade class, I found a teaching moment to segue smoothly into the discussion. At the end of the mitosis lecture after I explained how cancer was mitosis gone awry, I was able to turn to the class and say “And this is a battle I am fighting now…” and then talked about the treatments I was undergoing.

I have found that this matter-of-fact approach has allowed many students to feel comfortable enough to come to me and talk about how cancer is touching their lives now. I am startled at how many there are!

So now, I am fighting the fight… dancing with Patrick Swayze… reserving judgment with Ruth Bader Ginsburg… and hoping beyond hope that I am not ready to join the teaching ranks with Randy Pausch. I can do nothing else but use the personal lessons of my life as teaching moments for my students.

September 2009 update: After getting a good response from chemo and radiation treatments, in late July 2009, I underwent a Whipple procedure at Sloan Kettering (NYC) to battle my pancreatic cancer. I think it may be interesting to biologists to see how they re-do the plumbing in your digestive tract during such a procedure. If you think so, please check this resource at the Mayo Clinic. I have spent the last two months recovering from this daunting surgery and my body is still trying to figure out how digestions works with this new geography. I started work full-time along with the rest of my faculty in September and will be undergoing chemo through the Fall as a preventative against this usually persistent cancer. So right now, I count my self amongst the lucky 15% that survives pancreatic cancer and look forward to the opportunity of discussing my Whipple experience with my students when we learn about the digestive system!

Kim Foglia

Like many of you, when I started teaching AP Biology years ago I organized it by domains of scale:

• The Domain of BioMolecules
• The Domain of Cells
• The Domain of Organisms
• The Domain of Populations
• The Domain of Communities & Ecosystems

I did it that way because I was taught that way and the textbooks were organized that way. But I became disenchanted with it because I felt like I was merely marching through the material instead of making connections between domains. So I started mixing it up — teaching principles and then teaching a unit that highlights a body’s application of that principle (form and function) — like teaching osmosis and then teaching kidney function as an example of osmosis.

But over the last couple of years, I have been brewing on a re-framing of the course that takes this idea further. I have started to view the material as being divided up between (1) large-scale interactions and (2) cellular processes.

Under LARGE-SCALE interactions I place evolution and ecology, because these are built on long term processes or interactions between organisms or groups of organisms. And I start my course with these because (1) evolution is my guiding principle for the rest of the year and (2) interactions between organisms and populations are easier for students to grasp this early in the year of their intellectual development.

SideNote: Many people have asked me how I teach evolution before teaching genetics. That always makes me laugh because if you think about it, Darwin developed the principles of evolution by natural selection without having been taught genetics himself!

I teach evolution before genetics, because you don’t have to know the nitty gritty of genetics to understand evolution. You only have to know that inheritance happens — and every high school kid knows that s/he looks like one or other of their parents.

Specifically for population genetics, you get to introduce/review some concepts and vocab early on in the course this way too, like you can introduce them to allele, heterozygote, homozygote… but each can be explained in one sentence and I consider that an advantage instead of a disadvantage.
I leave evolution by segueing from speciation into phylogenetics/taxonomy (who has evolved on this earth) and then into ecology (how they all interact).

Then I introduce CELLULAR PROCESSES by discussing that organisms are coordinated masses of cells that must perform a set of shared tasks. And I now organize this unit within the framework that cells have 3 main jobs: (1) to make energy, (2) to make more cells, (3) to make proteins. And for me everything else in the course falls under those functions.

First you have to discuss cell structure to lay the foundation — that includes biomolecules & their behavior, cell organelles, cell membrane, and movement across the membrane. Then we discuss making energy and all the animal & plant systems that have evolved to support that in one way or another:

• MAKING ENERGY
  • Respiration
    • Digestion — taking in fuel
    • Gas exchange — taking in O2 & releasing CO2
    • Circulation — moving raw materials to & wastes from cells
    • Excretion — removing intracellular waste
    • Immune System — protecting an interconnected mass of cells & tissues
    • Motor System — using the energy produced in respiration
    • Nervous & Endocrine Systems — coordinating an interconnected mass of cells & tissues to make it an organism
  • Photosynthesis
    • Gas exchange — taking in CO2 & releasing O2
    • Plant Structure & Growth — highlighting the differences & similarities between plants & animals but how each structure supports making energy or using products

Then we discuss making new cells both for asexual reproduction and for the special case of sexual reproduction & all that extends from those topics:

• MAKING CELLS
  • Mitosis
    • DNA replication
  • Meiosis
    • Genetics

Then we discuss making proteins & that opens the topics that have come from the new DNA-centric world that we live in:

• MAKING PROTEINS
  • Protein Synthesis — transcription & translation
    • Gene Regulation
    • Biotechnology

And that’s where I end the course.

I hope this offers you another perspective than the one dictated by your textbook. I strongly believe that students get a more integrated view of the biological world this way. I feel like it tells a story that both holds their attention and makes sense, rather than marching through a mass of vocabulary as if we are teaching a foreign language.

Maybe someday there will be a textbook that breaks the mold of domains of scale.

Kim Foglia

Kim Foglia and her students at the American Museum of Natural History

It’s been a long strange trip!

Right now, most people know me as a biology educator and one of the handful of mentors on the College Board’s AP Biology listserve. I teach AP Biology and Regents (NYS 10the grade) Biology at Division Avenue High School in Levittown (America’s 1st suburb!), Long Island, New York. I have actually taught biology at many levels over the course of 25 years. I used to teach Introductory Biology at Cornell and also served as the laboratory coordinator for the Cornell Institute for Biology Teachers. I developed CIBT’s popular Lending Library Program in which biology teachers can borrow equipment kits to perform biotech labs in their classrooms.

I am the publisher of the ExploreBiology.com Web site, offering biology teaching and learning resources. I am also the author of the Instructors Guide for the AP Biology edition of the popular Raven & Johnson textbook from McGrawHill.

But it’s been an eclectic path along the way and I’ve tried on many hats. In the 80s, I was a baker running a natural foods bakery outside of Ithaca, NY. In the 90s, I worked for CNN and CNNfn helping launch their news Web sites. In the early 2000s, I launched my own dot-com company developing Web sites for large enterprises. I also returned to the family farm for a while and helped run our flowering perennials nursery.  But I’ve always come back to teaching. That is the only endeavor that left me satisfied and excited on a daily basis.

Kim Foglia & her mother out birdwatching

And I bring this eclectic life into the classroom. I have never approached teaching as all you need to do is walk into a classroom and lecture, then walk out again. I believe a classroom is a setting for exploration and learning, so my classroom is always filled with ongoing projects, lots of plants, interesting critters, intriguing oddities, models, and the occasional out of place tshatshke just to keep the students wondering. My biggest pet peeve about science teaching is approaching biology as a second language — making it an exercise in vocabulary memorization — rather than an approach to questioning how the world works and on the flipside an understanding of interwoven concepts explaining how the world works. And ultimately, I believe if it’s fun to do, it’s easy to learn.

My life is measured in seasons. My interests extend to gardening, birdwatching, hiking, camping, mountain biking, snowboarding, kayaking, and sailing.  Life is rounded out with two growing children, 2 dogs, 2 snakes, a turtle, a bearded dragon, a degu and waaaay too many mice.