Letter to a Biology Student

First of all, you have to check out this video. It pretty much sums up all of biology class. Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap3QcPH6saA

I am Sandhya, a current freshman and I am 14. The classes I took this year are Journalism 1, English 9 MAP, World Geo/Health/DrEd, Espanol 2, Alegbra 2 Honors, and Biology. My interests in school are writing, science, math, english, and Spanish. I play the piano, sing, and play volleyball.

On the first day of class, I had this expectation that biology and just freshman year in general would be super hard. If this makes you feel better, it wasn't.

Mr Orre expects you to do your homework (the vodcasts) and the CFU's. If you pay attention to them and do the CFU's, you will be fine and you'll meet the basic expectations.

Here is a typical day in class. You come in, and get out your stuff. Then you will do a "golden moment" of mindfulness, and then you look at the board and do the DO NOW. Then, in your groups, you'll recap the vodcast and later Mr Orre will review it as well. The rest of class you could either be working on labs, blog posts, or projects.

Homework is a vodcast every class and sometimes unfinished work such as lab conclusions and projects. For example, I am in class right now. If I don't finish writing this now, it becomes my homework.

Tests are all straightforward and multiple choice. You will have to set up a notebook to use for the rest of the semester to have all of your vodcast notes and DO NOWs. You will also be required to keep a blog of all of the major things you'll do over the year in biology. My blog is called the Brilliant Biology Blog.

My favorite blog post is linked below:
http://brilliantbiologyblog.blogspot.com/2017/01/pglo-lab-conclusion.html
It's the pGLO lab, which was really fun because we got to make bacteria glow!

Over the year, I am now better at reflecting on myself, being mindful, and assertive.

Another project that takes up a lot of class time is the 20 TIME project. For this, we got to choose something we are passionate about and devote an entire project taking up the whole semester to that. Here is the link to my 20 time blog.
http://notjusttrash.blogspot.com/

Mr Orre's pet peeves include not cleaning up after a lab, talking while he's talking, not participating in mindfulness, not doing the CFU's, not doing the Do Now, not doing the Relate & Review, not having your notebook set up properly, etc. Its fairly simple to get a good grade- do the required work and CFUs, and study moderately- I wouldn't stress. As long as you put in the work and do the vodcasts, you will have a good grade. For tests, use the CFU's and Do Nows to study.

The most frequent mistake I made was publishing a blog post but forgetting to submit it in Canvas. I highly recommend that you don't forget this last step or your grade will suffer. Also, always do the CFUs because sometimes Mr Orre actually grades them based on participation.

Overall, biology is an interesting subject and some of the labs were very cool. I enjoyed doing labs such as the Pig Dissection, the pGLO, and the Hunger Games labs. I'm not sure how exactly I felt about the blended learning because it involved a lot more work at home than an ordinary class would, and it is hard to watch long videos distraction-free. I would rate this class as a 6/10. Next year I'm taking Chemistry Honors because I think I will really like the subject and I plan on going into a career involving science.

Remember, biology is not as scary as it is made out to be by science teachers in middle school. As long as you do your work and study, you'll be fine. Good luck!

~Sandhya

Pig Dissection Blog Post

Our Pig Dissection Video aka Jemimah the Baller!

The real deal (GOTTA WATCH!) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW1REKnDW6E

The purpose of the pig dissection was to see how the organs and systems of the body work together to maintain homeostasis. By dissecting the pig, we were essentially looking into ourselves, to learn how our own bodies work. In this unit we learned about the different systems in our body, the organs within them, and how homeostasis is maintained. In this dissection, we got to see the organs of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and endocrine systems. My favorite part of this dissection was cutting open the heart because it was really cool to see the arteries and veins. I think the dissection was a valuable experience, because I now have an idea of what my body would look like inside. It also helped me understand where all of the organs are located in the body. 

20 TIME Reflection: Not Just Trash Project

I chose to do my 20 Time project, the Not Just Trash Project, because I'm concerned about the direction we are heading in. Americans make so much waste compared to the rest of the world and it is going to hurt us in the long run. I wanted to inspire people with cool project ideas of how to convert trash into cool items. I want people to know that there are ways around throwing away everything.

My original plan was to create a blog and post frequently on it tutorials of converting trash into cool items. I thought of different ideas to convert small and large items into cool stuff and made a plan for my blog posts.

Getting the project started was slow because I had to make a plan of what I would do. Once I had the plan, I made some posts and did a lot of research. My project evolved from just the blog and posting tutorials, to also raising awareness about political issues relating to this topic. Overall, I think I now have a good foundation for the blog.

The challenging part was figuring out what to do in class. Unfortunately, my project made me do a lot at home and not much in class. I should've picked a different idea for 20 time because for this project, I needed time at home.

Through this project, I learned skills such as planning and scheduling. My project required a lot of pre planning and thought. I learned to plan in advance and put together a well thought out plan to look back at later on. I also learned that I needed to create a schedule for myself. This helped me be more productive.

Unfortunately, it was very hard getting viewers to my blog. I don't have many channels of outreach that I could use. Because of this, I'm not continuing my blog because no one will see what I post. However, I think this project has taught me to be more clever and reuse my own trash. I now know what it takes to actually create a blog and get an audience to it, and how hard it must be to actually be a successful blog.

I will still be encouraging people to reduce their waste and find ways to convert their trash into something useful.

Unit 9 Reflection

This unit was about how we classify life, and the evolutionary relationships of life's forms. We learned that taxonomy divided organisms by domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. The domains are archaea, bateria, and eukarya. Within eukarya, life probably started out as marine life, and eventually transitioned into land species, starting with the tiktaalik that could do a push up! Eventually, life evolved into amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.



We also did the What On Earth Evolved Presentations. I thought my presentation went pretty well because I didn't read off the slides as much as I expected myself to. It was a fun experience over all because it was nice to hear information from other classmates rather than only the vodcasts. I think an area I could have done better in is speaking without filler words and "ums" and "likes". I really worked on that a lot for this presentation, but I should do that even more.  Link to my presentation is here.

It was really interesting to learn about all of the different organisms, especially the invertebrates. I didn't know that most of the invertebrates we learned about even existed. For example, the echinoderms, platyhelminthes, cnidarians, etc. I want to learn more hox genes because they seem very interesting and somewhat mysterious. I also want to learn about archaeopteryx because it was the transitional species between dinosaurs and birds. I also want to learn more about archaea, and the latest research.

archaea growing in a hot spring.

Over all, this unit was really interesting to learn about the vast diversity of life on our planet.
Link to previous reflection
Link to geologic timeline showing animal diversity on earth

Geologic Timeline Reflection

Three of the major events in Earth's history are the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, the appearance of prokaryotic cells 3.5 billion years ago, and eukaryotic cells 2.1 billion years ago. The extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period eradicated over 1/2 of the Earth's population, including but not limited to the dinosaurs. The appearance of prokaryotes and eukaryotes was important because there are many organisms now that are prokaryotes or eukaryotes including humans. These events are important because without them, the species that exist today wouldn't exist today. 

The majority of Earth's history was the Archean era and the Proterozoic era. What surprised me was how recently the dinosaurs existed. As humans, we feel they've been gone for so long but in the scale, they are very close to us. 

In such a short time, we've caused so much destruction to our planet with climate change and global warming. The earth has been around for 4.6 billion years, yet our impact has been the biggest.

I want to know about life during the Archaean period more. It seems so strange that there once was a world with barely any animals or even eukaryotes. How long is the Earth estimated to continue to have life?

Here is a segment of our timeline.

Unit 8 Reflection

This unit was about evolution, and how we, amongst many other species came to life on Earth. One of the main themes of this unit was natural selection vs. artificial selection. Artificial selection is how breeders, for example, are able to breed so many types of dogs with very different traits. Natural selection is what Darwin observed, which eventually weeds out undesirable traits in a population, eventually making the better traits more common.

 From there, we learned that evolution is the change in allele frequency in the gene pool over time. There is lots of evidence supporting evolution, but to me, the piece of evidence that stands out are the similarities in embryos. For example, the Hunger Games lab helped illustrate evolution, as the allele frequency of the species changed over time. 

The rise of new species contributes to evolution when members of a population are reproductively isolated. Other than natural selection, some other factors that also affect evolution are genetic drift, gene flow, mutations, and sexual selection. 

The best theory as to how life started is that first, macromolecules were formed, leading to protocells, eukaryotes, and eventually sexually reproducing organisms. The timeline of the Earth is broken into eras and periods, during which, the Earth and life underwent many changes and 5 mass extinctions.

I thought this unit was very interesting because I like to understand how humans came about, and the origins of life. I would like to learn more about vestigial structures and some examples because its really cool that there are evolutionary left overs. I also want to learn more about the age of the dinosaurs. 

On being more assertive, in the survey last month, I found out that I am slightly aggressive. I've been trying to give people in my group a chance to do what they want more because I usually take charge.
Image result for evolution gif

Hunger Games Lab Conclusion

1) In this lab, we saw natural selection in action, when we competed for survival and reproduction of an organism with 3 phenotypes: the stumpys, the knucklers, and the pinchers. Over generations, the allele frequency changed, simulating evolution.

2) The pinchers were the best at getting food because they could quickly and efficiently grab large amounts of food. 

3) The population evolved because the allele frequency changed. At the beginning of the lab, both of the alleles' frequencies were 0.5. By the end, the "A" frequency was 0.35 and the "a" frequency was 0.65. See the graph below. I apologize if you have to turn your head to do this.

4) Some of the events in this lab were random, such as the dispersion of food. In some areas, there was a greater concentration of food than in other areas. This affects the population by killing off certain phenotypes. Other events were non random, the more desirable traits continued to thrive throughout generations.

5) The results would have been different if the food size was different. For example, if the food was huge, it would be hard to pinch it. This is why organisms usually eat food that isn't too much bigger than them.

6) The results would have been slightly different, because the knucklers wouldn't exist, but the pinchers would still dominate. 

7) Natural Selection causes and contributes to the process of evolution. Organisms with more desirable traits tend to survive (which is natural selection), and over time, species evolve. 

8) In order to survive, people in this lab cheated, by grabbing food, and taking away food from others. Although for humans, cheating is considered morally wrong, in nature, organisms will do whatever it takes to survive. Thus, cheating plays into this. This changed the allele frequency in that those who cheated, got more of their alleles in the population. 

9) Evolution acts on populations, not individuals, and creates new species. Natural selection acts on the phenotype. For example, if a heterozygous individual had the same phenotype as a homozygous individual, natural selection would still act upon them both the same way. 

10) Has there been much natural selection in modern humans (homo sapiens)? How?