Notebook

The Biology notebook should be a spiral notebook, with at least 70 pages, reserved entirely for Biology. The student should not use the notebook as a source for homework paper, as a notebook for any other subject, for doodling or for writing notes to friends. They should never tear out a page.

We will be using this notebook for classroom notes and as our research journal. In class, we will be covering note-taking skills and observation techniques. Some of these techniques are required, such as placing the dates in the margins, while other techniques such as the "L" outline technique are optional but encouraged.

Students are required to account for each weekday of any week for which there is at least one class day. If there are no notes for a day, they should put the date in the margin, write "no notes" and give a reason:

(examples: "No Notes - Labor Day", "No Notes - took evolution exam", "No notes: All-school assembly", etc.).

If they miss a day's notes for any reason, it is their responsibility to obtain someone else's notes and transcribe them into their notebook. When they do this, they should date the page in the margin, give the reason why they weren't able to take notes and state who gave them the notes:

(example: "Absent due to illness. Notes transcribed from Bill Jones.")

The notebook will be collected once each nine-week period for a 30-pt grade. The students should keep a neat, orderly notebook, follow directions, take a complete set of lecture notes and make lots of observations. Most of the points will be derived from their original observations made both inside and outside of class.

Waiting For The Train

The things I've seen in Normal, Illinois.

Some Word Roots and Terms

trans- A prefix that means "across".

-port A suffix that means "to carry".

-scribe, -script Suffixes that mean "to write".

Potential

The term "potential" in general refers to what is possible but has not yet been accomplished.

In class, we define potential as "total possibilities" and discuss how biologists use this word differently than educators.

To an educator, a student's "potential" is "their maximum achievable improvement in knowledge, attitude, skills ability, etc.," and it is the goal of the modern facilitator to "help students reach their potential, or maybe their full potential, or, best yet, their fullest potential (depending on the teacher's inclinations towards hyperbole)."

In biology, "potential" refers something that cannot be achieved, either because it is a list of conflicting possibilities (such as potential predators) or because it is a possibility that is dependent on impossible circumstances (such as reproductive potential).

The reproductive potential of a species is "the maximum rate of reproduction of the species under constantly ideal conditions for that species." Darwin's Theory, in reverse Polish notation, states that since all species have the potential to reproduce more offspring than the environment can sustain, any species that reproduces genetically variable offspring will have those offspring filtered by that environment so that the majority of offspring that survive the environmental filter to reproduce will have a similar genetic makeup that helped them to escape that filter. The combination of excessive reproduction, genetic variability and environmental filtering thus causes a species (or reproductively isolated populations of a species) to slowly change (i.e., evolve) over time in response to their environment.