stupid torn ligaments (woes of a virtual teacher)

image from flickr under creative commons license

I took a tumble at work on monday and wrecked my ankle. Torn ligaments or so slightly offensive hospital nurse tells me after squeezing my legs over and over because of suspected achilles tendon issues. I didn’t enjoy it

So I’ve been virtual teaching via blogs, email and later today a wiki. I miss darting around the lab getting enthusiastic, but it’s been fun sitting with nice coffee, my feet up and watching Frasier while going through the fine points of protein folding with the AS students. Who last weeks were told they had to submit their homework without it being a written document. It’s given at least one interesting result,

I don’t think I could (or would want to) get used to this though.

Aberystwyth

Photo’s uploaded to flickr – about a third of them! I really must fork out for the upgrade. I plainly need more room!

We had fun, the students are having trouble accessing their blogs at the moment, but when they sort that out I hope there will be a bit more action there.

just post something already!

Photo by Chaparral [Kendra] under a creative commons license

So it’s the summer holidays technically, although the boss wants some work emailed to him by Monday, it’s technically kick back time. I’ve slept so much since end of play on Friday that I might have qualified for hibernating.

Under some sage advice I’m not going to be over-working through my holidays as well. Although, I will be doing some stuff, probably not as much as I had planned when I was thinking about this last term.

One of the things that has been set up for the A2 students over the summer was coursework blogs. So far, there’s not a lot going on with them. Only one or two students are doing any updating. I won’t lose hope yet though. I’ll keep on cheerfully blogging in the hope they catch up. All else fails, enthusiastic emails should shame them into at least token posting.

Sigh.

My sense of humour might not be what I thought it was

Mitosis from thesciencefloor on Comiqs

I’m not sure how often I’m supposed to post to this, or even if there is a ’supposed to’, for now I’m going to assume this new blog is my play ground for all the new ttp toys, and mostly, to the delight of the BTEC students, we’ve been playing with comiqs. One group is going to recreate either William Withering or Edward Jenners early forays into medicine. One student is particularly excited by taking photographs on his camera of his friend re-enacting having cowpox pus plastered on his arm. I, personally, am a more than a little grateful that it is a homework task.

 The other group, interestingly, are going to try to represent hormonal control of blood sugar. This isn’t at all an easy task, but already they’ve been coming up with some wonderful ideas. For representing homeostatic balance we’ve discussed the stasis field around the star ship enterprise, a tight rope walker, the scales of justice and rather bizarrely a ballerina hippo….

It can all look as out there as they like, as long as the science is right, I’m one very happy Biology teacher.