a better day

 Today, teaching was better, even though it was my longest day. I did the tree identification lab in my one class and that's one of my favorite things to do. I've had students tell me they learn a fair amount from these labs; in the herbaceous plants labs sometimes I get to see people getting excited when they realize they can start to recognize some of the common plants.

Maybe systematic botany won't be so bad. (I am to teach it more as an identification of local plants course than a grand, sweeping "plant evolution" course, like the one I had). 

I'm still thinking about the class. Have not really prepped any lectures but maybe I start with the labs. I think I want to do some stuff on general nomenclature, and a review of basic anatomy (I can probably do this with branches acquired from outdoors, even in the late winter, for things like leaf scars and buds and all that). And I want to do a flower-dissection lab with as many different flower types as a local florist can provide. And probably a fruit-types lab - I have some "dry fruits" and I can get "fleshy fruits" (including things we think of as vegetables, like cucumbers).

And maybe I do thematic labs for some things - like "common upland forest trees" and "common bottomland forest trees" and "invasives." Though I think for the big families (Fabaceae and Poaceae and Asteraceae), I should probably devote (at least) a week of lab to just identification of those. 

And I do like teaching identification. When I'm up on it - I'm not, currently, and badly need to review things other than the trees and some of the common grasses - I'm pretty good at it and I know a lot of tricks. 

And some of the tricks I share? I like them in part because they feel like continuity to me. They're things that some teacher in the past taught me - probably not original to them, but still, I learned it from them - so I am passing down to my students now things I learned from Mr. Hansen, or Dr. Wagner, or Dr. Barnes (who have all gone on to their reward) or Dr. Anderson or some of the other folks I've worked with through the years - like that persimmon has "alligator skin bark" (it's dark, and blocky, and does look kind of like alligator skin). Or that elm-family members have uneven leaf bases. I identify things a lot by "Gestalt," the general appearance of them, but I think maybe the little details like leaf shape and characteristics of the twigs, and the like, while not really thinking consciously about it, I probably am kind of doing that. 

But yes. The idea of continuity, of passing on knowledge that someone passed on to me some time in the past, carrying on that tradition. The point of this kind of knowledge is that it's meant to be shared, and so that hopefully they can use it and benefit from it - and perhaps someday, somewhere, one of my students will pass on a bit of information I passed on to them, and the chain will continue.

That's one of the reasons I teach, and in the whole pandemic mess where we all spent so much time focusing on the one-inch picture frame that life shrunk down to (keeping everyone as safe as possible, not really thinking about a future because "will there BE a future" was a real question that tormented me) kind of took that away from me; maybe I need to actively think about that and actively reclaim the idea that hopefully in a few instances I'm planting a seed that I may never see the result of.