A happier note

From lab yesterday - I am going over tree identification and having the students work with herbarium sheets.

One of the International students: "Ma'am, please? Why do several of the species names have an "L." at the end?"

Me: "Oh, that's called the authority name or the author citation. It's shorthand for the name of the person who named and first described that species. "L." is for Linneaus."

Student: "Oh! I remember him! You taught about him in the first week! Wow, we are still using some classifications a person came up with in the 1750s."

Me: "Yes, we are."

Student: "That's *cool*."

Yeah, it's that kind of interaction that makes this gig worthwhile.

****

Later on she looked at me and said, "How do you know SO MUCH STUFF?!?!!"

I resisted the impulse to say, "I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive" (she's a non-trad student, so that could be slightly false - I've been doing botany seriously since about 1991 so that's 25 years, and she could be a bit older than that) but I did say, "I've been doing this for a long time."

Which is true, but also, I have a freakishly good memory and I seem to have a particularly good visual memory (important for things like plant identification). Also, I just work really hard at stuff and especially in my schooling-years I didn't have a whole lot else I was doing (didn't date much, didn't have a full-time job) so I could really focus on studying.

But yeah, it always makes me feel a little good when a student looks at me and goes, "Wow, you really know a lot." Usually it happens during the plant-identification labs; I guess people don't learn the plants like they once did. (Or maybe most people never did; my mom is a botanist so I learned what goldenrod (as a genus! I still have trouble separating some of the species) was, and what sweet clover was, and what the different common trees were, and, perhaps most importantly, what poison ivy was)