Short Rant
Can I bitch for just a moment?
Good.
You'd think that people in a general micro lab class, after having it ground into their heads for the nth time that transferring organisms from a plate or slant to a slide doesn't require a really thick smear, would get it. Maybe even just barely, but they should get it. There's a good reason for keeping the amount of transferred organisms to a minimum, and it has everything to do with being able to clearly see individuals.
Seriously, they get a morphological unknown, a list of organisms it could be, a key that narrows things down based on a variety of differential stains and physical characteristics, and all the tools to make it happen. That's about the time someone speaks up, wondering what the hell they're seeing through ye olde 'scope, and you go take a look just to be helpful.
Folks, the key splits things first into the "gram positive" or "gram negative" categories, moves on from there to morphology and then further into the other differential stains... acid fast, capsule staining, etc. There are rods, spirals and cocci... nowhere on the list is there a slot for "unidentifiable gram negative clump".
That's all I have to say about that.
11 Package(s) of Returned Poo:
Guess it's time to start teaching them serial dilutions. Once they've had to do three dilutions to get 'scopable organisms and see that their partners didn't have to do any dilutions and are already packing up to go home, they'll catch on quick.
Yeah. And get out of the left hand lane if you're going to drive so slow.
;)
I routinely have students in my GOB (general/organic/biochem) lab who, despite me telling them repeatedly, cannot figure out to hold Pasteur pipets the correct way: tip down, not bulb down.
I was wondering where those students end up. Now I know. :)
Ah, undergrad lab teaching. Yes, such fun.
Indeed, the flies will die if you leave them on the Carbon dioxide pad while you go outside to talk on your phone. Then, shockingly, they won't reproduce, and you won't get the offspring from the crosses you need.
Rick, that's just bizarre. Have your students not encountered gravity, and the tendency of liquids in a gravitational field to, you know, run downhill?
Careful, shygetz, actual use of serial dilutions for something reasonable, by unreasonable people, will probably quickly lead to homeopathy.
Rick, that's just bizarre. Have your students not encountered gravity, and the tendency of liquids in a gravitational field to, you know, run downhill?
Ahh, but gravity is "just a theory" ... like evolution. So it doesn't apply to them. :)
In all seriousness, though, I think it simply doesn't occur to these students that rubber bulbs are made of organic compounds just like the ones they're studying in the classroom - and that means the rubber bulbs will react.
So they notice (as much as some students notice *anything* they're working on in lab) that the liquid goes into the bulb, but they just don't connect that with their liquid suddenly coming out of the pipet brown instead of clear.
Rick, that's just bizarre. Have your students not encountered gravity, and the tendency of liquids in a gravitational field to, you know, run downhill?
You think that's bad? I had a prof for my fluid dynamics class who thought that fluids flowed from low pressure to high pressure - and proceeded to argue with us about it for 10 minutes in front of the chair of the department.
He got fired.
-Garrett
He got fired??? That's wrong! Of course liquids flow from low pressure to high pressure, due to the four-part quadrality of space-time in the vicinity of a pressure-delimated interface.
Does your department dare deny the power of TIME CUBE!?!?
Kill them.
Kill them all.
With an axe.
Before returning to research,I taught Medical Micro to nursing students. Now, you can't expect them to be the most sciency of students, but their gullibility could be shocking.
Anyway, early in the semester, to get them familiar with bacterial ubiquity, I had them survey anything on campus. Invariably, they'd head straight to the restrooms (never occurs to people that these are the most routinely disinfected areas on campus).
So, when their colonies grew out, and they would do a gram stain on it, they would immediately ask me to look at it and they would ask "What is it?"
My comeback was always "Oh, it's Neisseria gonorrhoeae. I see it all the time coming from the bathrooms."
Then I wait for their faces to blanche before explaining what you can or cannot do with a gram stain.
Good times.
Now that is some funny shitte, Spirula.
Ahhh the mental image...
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