Article By: J. Janovy, Jr.
When CPBS opened, in 1975, there was an old, green, upright
piano downstairs in the lodge. Once and a while students played on it but
eventually it disappeared, probably removed by the first director of CPBS, Dr.
Brent Nickol. During the 1990s, the School of Biological Sciences revised its
curriculum, removing both BIOS 112 (Zoology) and BIOS 109 (Botany) from the
list of courses applicable to a degree, and began requiring Cell Structure and
Function (BIOS 203) and Biodiversity (BIOS 204) as core majors’ courses.
Because of the academic politics involved in these decisions, I volunteered to
teach the spring section of BIOS 204, which I did for about 10 years. BIOS 204,
Biodiversity, was changed to BIOS 103, Organismic Biology, for a variety of
reasons (and BIOS 203 was changed to BIOS 102). One of those last semesters
when I taught BIOS 204, however, there was a student in that class named
Jillian Detwiler, from Rapid City, South Dakota. The Detwiler Piano is named
for Jill.
During those years in BIOS 204, students wrote four papers,
all being three double-spaced pages plus bibliography, without once mentioning
money, health, agriculture, politics, sex, sports, or religion. A complete
discussion of writing assignments in large classes can be found at
www.johnjanovy.com/fieltst1.htm.
Here are the papers Jill’s class wrote that semester, well before the Internet
and Google made student writing so boring:
First paper
assignment:
(1) You
will be issued a scientific name. This name represents your personal and
individual study organism for the papers this semester.
(2)
Analyze the taxonomic and phylogenetic information available in the original
scientific literature on the genus of this organism, i.e. in the journal
articles published over the past century. In particular, be sure to
address the question of whether the taxonomic information is of any value in
answering phylogenetic questions. Convince me that you have learned how
to use Biological Abstracts and the Zoological Record, and that you have
actually read and understood some original scientific papers.
(3)
Remember, this paper is mainly an exercise to teach you how to use (= find,
read, and understand) the literature of biological diversity and how to write
in taxonomic and phylogenetic terms.
(4) The
paper must be three full pages of double-spaced typing, 12-point font, 1”
margins, plus at least 5 original journal article references (4th page) in the
correct format (see Blackboard for editorial policies).
Second paper
assignment:
(1) Answer
the questions: Who are these scientists that did the research and wrote the
references you cited in your first paper?
Under what circumstances did they do their research and produce their
papers? What can you infer about their daily lives from reading the materials
and methods sections of those papers you cited? Can you envision doing similar
kinds of research as an undergraduate honors thesis?
(2) For the
literature cited section of this paper, add another five references from the
book and journal literature. Your bibliography pages should contain your
references from the first paper, marked with an asterisk (*), then five
additional references. You may also cite up to five web sources IN ADDITION to
the real library resources. If you cite web sites, then also add a paragraph
indicating why you chose those sites, based on the advice given by the
library’s web site link to use and evaluation of web resources.
(3) The paper must be three double-spaced typed pages. All
the format rules still apply (see the Blackboard site for this course).
Third Paper Assignment:
(1) Define
and explain the term “conceptual problem” as it applies to biodiversity (100
words or less).
(2) Determine
the three major conceptual problems that have yet to be addressed concerning
the FAMILY of organisms to which your genus belongs. Explain exactly why these
problems are conceptual ones, rather than practical or economic ones.
Illustrate your answers with at least five additional references from the
original literature or from books on the general subject that includes your
genus, making sure to mark with an asterisk (*) the references already used in
your first two papers. It's okay to refer back to the papers used for your first
two papers.
(3) The main
body of the paper must be a minimum of three double-spaced pages with one inch
margins. The bibliography is extra.
Instructor comments on
paper number 3 (from Blackboard):
Here is the assignment, all with some expanded commentary:
(1) Define
and explain the term “conceptual problem” as it applies to biodiversity (100
words or less).
The first thing I would do is
simply look up “conceptual” in your dictionary. The second thing I would do
(I’m NOT being sarcastic here!) is to look up the word “problem.” I find that
very often students, including graduate students who should know better, simply
fail to address the question that is asked, and instead try to answer questions
that were not asked. So it’s important to know what a conceptual problem is,
and it is very important for you personally to decide what a conceptual problem
is relative to your genus and its relatives. Here are some examples of
conceptual problems, problems that were or could be addressed in various ways,
some of which we are now familiar with:
a. Is
“separate but equal” a valid solution to race relations in the United States?
This is a conceptual problem because “separate but equal” is an idea about how
to establish a particular social order and distribute economic opportunity.
b. Are
species fixed entities? This is a conceptual problem because “fixed entities”
is an idea about the fundamental nature of categories we call species.
c. What is
the nature of proof? This is a conceptual problem because “proof” can mean
different things, depending on whether one is dealing with a mathematical
theorem, a criminal case, a historical event (~ a criminal case), a political
campaign promise, or an argument in a bar.
(2) Determine
the three major conceptual problems that have yet to be addressed concerning
the FAMILY of organisms to which your genus belongs. Explain exactly why these
problems are conceptual ones, rather than practical or economic ones.
Illustrate your answers with at least five additional references from the
original literature or from books on the general subject that includes your
genus, making sure to mark with an asterisk (*) the references already used in
your first two papers. It's okay to refer back to the papers used for your
first two papers.
Wow, this is a fairly difficult
assignment! This sounds about like something I would ask a PhD candidate to
accomplish! Obviously I’m asking you to stretch your minds, step up a notch in
your intellectual sophistication, and act like the student from hell. However,
to be brutally honest with you, about all I’m asking you to do is try to think
and write like the undergraduates I have known at UNL who have gone on to very
successful careers, most of them in the health professions. Just as obviously,
there is a whole lot of flexibility in this part of the assignment, and when I
grade the papers, I’ll simply ask: are there three problems, do these problems
address ideas, and are some papers cited to support the student’s claim that
the problems are actually problems? I chose the family level to give you some
additional flexibility by enlarging the subject. This part of the paper is
really nothing more than an upscale version of the question sets you’ve been
producing in lab all semester.
(3) The main
body of the paper must be a minimum of three double-spaced pages with one-inch
margins. The bibliography is extra. This part of the assignment is fairly
self-explanatory.
When I look at the grade roster
of this class, I discover that nearly half of the students have an 85% average
or higher. In any other class at this university, such an average would
indicate either an unusually brilliant group of students or an unusually easy
class. I’m not completely convinced this class is all that easy, and from
reading your last exam answers, I’m not convinced that as a group you are
thinking like an unusually brilliant group even though your grades suggest that
is the case. So all I’m trying to do with this third paper is bring your
independent thinking habits up to the level of your grades. Remember the
pedagogical theory of this particular biodiversity section. I ask that students
do activities that are in and of themselves educational, I try to design
activities that accomplish the educational goal of producing students who have
the biodiverstist’s habits of mind, and I allow a
whole lot of individual freedom to accomplish the task in your own individual
way (thus each of you get a different genus). I’m asking that you be a
biologist for a semester, instead of take biology for a semester, and I’m
giving you as many options for succeeding as there are human beings trying to
succeed.
Fourth Paper
Assignment:
For the last paper this semester, you are to use the
resources in the Sheldon Gallery and in the Sculpture Garden that is spread
across city campus.
(1)
Critically evaluate the illustrations used in the taxonomic literature about
your genus (one page maximum), providing commentary on the quality of
illustrations, the media used, and the visual communication techniques
employed.
(2) Pick
five pieces from the Sheldon or the Sculpture garden in at least three media
(oil, watercolor, photography, collage, sculpture, etc.) and tell how a study
of those pieces would help you in communicating specific information about your
genus (two pages minimum). As an aid in doing this, assume you must give an
hour’s presentation to our class and need to find creative ways to keep your
fellow students awake, alert, and vitally interested in the subject.
(3) There
is no need to find additional bibliographic references unless the ones you
already have do not allow you to answer (1) of this assignment. Be sure to cite
in the text those that you do use, however. In the literature cited section,
also list the artist, date, medium, size (if given), and ownership of the
pieces of art you use in (2), and cite them by name and date as you would a
scientific paper. If you wish to describe any of these pieces, then do it in
the literature cited instead of in the paper itself.
On the basis of their writing, I called in a number of
students to ask about their future plans. I had been doing this for decades,
making sure that students had set their career goals high enough when their
performance in my classes indicated they had potential for magnificent careers
in a variety of fields. One of the students I called in, because her writing
was so insightful, was Jill Detwiler. During the conversation, I suggested,
very strongly, that she attend CPBS and take Field Parasitology, which I
taught. Field Parasitology always seemed to go better when I recruited at least
a few serious students out of the freshman classes, and Jill was a first-year
student at the time.
Jill responded by telling me that she was a double major,
piano performance and biology, and that she had to practice several hours a
day, so she couldn’t come to Cedar Point. I asked whether she’d come to CPBS
and take my course if we bought her a piano, and she just laughed and said "sure". I was director of CPBS at the time, so right after that conversation I
went into the office of Mary Batterson, who was the associate director (the
position now held by Jon Garbisch), put $50 cash in an envelope, wrote
“Detwiler Piano” on the envelope, and asked Mary to send out an e-mail to
faculty members associated with CPBS, asking for donations. Within a week, we
had $500. Mary called the music store in Ogallala and had the piano delivered.
I told Jill we’d bought her a piano, and she had no choice but to come out that
summer and take Field Parasitology. However, you had to be awake at 2:00 AM to
hear her play. The music was worth staying up all night.
Jill spent that first summer at CPBS, doing her project on
larval trematodes in snails. She spent the next summer at the California
Academy of Sciences, the summer after that traveling around Nebraska working on
parasites of prairie dogs for Nebraska Game and Parks, and the next summer
doing research for her MS degree, which she received at UNL. The major paper
from her thesis is:
Detwiler,
J., and J. Janovy, Jr. 2008. The role of phylogeny and ecology in experimental
host specificity: insights from a eugregarine-host system. Journal of
Parasitology 94: 7-12.
She then went
to Purdue for her PhD, working on the evolutionary biology and population
dynamics of echinostomes with Dennis Minchella, and did her post-doc at Texas
A&M under Charles Criscione. She has just started as a faculty member at
the University of Manitoba. She was the 2012 winner of the American Society of
Parasitologists Young Investigator Award, an exceedingly prestigious honor. Her
complete CV (as of 2010) can be found at
If any of you
can play the piano, I strongly suggest sitting down at the Detwiler Piano the
next time you are at CPBS.
