Biology

At times, when pushing my daughter to do better in biology, I feel like a bit of a fraud. The truth is, I don't think that I could have done the work she is asked to do at the level that she's asked to do it. I only know of two kids who can do it. One is a studying freak, who studies all the time (no kidding; she has been known to take the breaks in band practice to open a book and start studying it). The other is a kid who grew up in a family that cherishes the ecology and has frequently had multiple animals in the house at once (not all of whom were locatable). She's taking college courses in biology while still in second year of high school.

But other than them, I think most kids are doing well just to get a glimmering of what's being asked of them in that course. I come to this conclusion after spending the last two hours reading one chapter in her biology text, including the notes that she's been given. Actually, its more of a 'study guide', but, like a street with missing or burned out streetlights, not all of the notes are clear. Sometimes, you have to guess. At least one phrase from her notes -- adaptive radiation, if you're curious -- doesn't appear in the vocabulary, doesn't appear in the glossary, doesn't appear in the index, and doesn't appear in the text of the notes. Is it in the text of the book? Yeah, possibly. They again, maybe not. My daughter says that this instructor is known for mentioning something once and then putting it on the test. I assume that 'mentioning it once' means ' he spent fifteen minutes on the concept' and not 'he spent thirty seconds on the concept in between two other much longer ones'. Though I suppose that's possible, too. And some of the things he likes to mention - and test on - aren't in the text or the notes. You didn't write it down? You're screwed.

In any event, I Googled the phrase, read the notes in Wikipedia, and thought oh, they're talking about the finches' beaks thing. Okay. But is that clearly stated in the text? Well, I just looked, and I can't find it. Then again, the text isn't what I'd call clearly written. Part of that is because they're trying to weave multiple concepts in and out, but part is because they seem to like to tease you with a little info, and then go back to it pages later. So just because you found a reference to the concept doesn't mean you found all of the references to the concept. And sometimes they like to say that you really need to understand a concept first that, to my eye, you only need to understand a little bit. Tell me again why knowing how gene sequencing works helps in understanding natural selection? (I didn't make that example up, by the way.)

So maybe she really is trying. No, that's not fair. I believe she is; I believed it before starting this little odyssey. But now I think that trying harder won't hack it, because I'm doing that right now -- and, myself, I noticed that the deeper I got into the text, the thinner and more sporadic my notes got. I was getting overwhelmed. Is this part key? Is this phrase important? And I'm not under any pressure to know it. I can forget it all tomorrow and that's cool. But she can't. She has to be able to regurgitate it for a test, and not just the stuff that's obviously important, but the stray stuff that, you know, he just mentioned once.

Hoo,boy.