Professor Me: A Role-Reversed Curriculum by Logan

Professor Me: A Role-Reversed Curriculum by Logan - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

If the roles were reversed between student and teacher, I would like to teach a multitude of subject areas. However, the prompt asks for one, so I would be most thrilled to teach high school students about something we already have curriculum for, zoology. Zoology is the scientific study of any organism deemed an “animal,” a definition that requires some thought when animals like sponges and the genus Trichoplax are looked at. I learned about sponges in my own zoology class, and found their abnormality amazing. However, I had to learn about the other main member of the Parazoa subkingdom myself through extended learning. While I personally am glad I was able to find this out myself, I'm sure others would like an opportunity to learn about Trichoplax in an educational setting.
The class I envision is a yearlong course, unlike my own experience; I only had one semester. This allows for a full 50% increase in content available to learn. We would begin with a general introduction, much as my own did. I even used my old zoo notes to create a practice PowerPoint concerning basic zoology and taxonomy.
This would lead straight into unit one, “Origins of Animals and Parazoa.” This unit would, obviously, explain the origin of multi-cellular, heterotrophic life, as well as meet with the most simple of animals, the lowly sponges and Trichoplax. The second unit I had in mind would be “Jellyfish, Relatives, and Planula-Like Animals,” which would introduce just that. It would cover the phyla Acoelomorpha, Bryozoa, Cnidaria, and Ctenophora. The third unit, scheduled to start around October, would concern “Microscopic Animals,” and would introduce a multitude of creatures, without getting too much information on any one. The fourth unit, “Flatworms & Nematodes” would be an aptly named unit, going over non-annelid worms. The next unit would be “Annelids,” which are the segmented worms. I have a bias towards this group, as my biology teacher had my partner and I create an extensive presentation about them. The rest of the semester would include units such as “Mollusks and Brachiopods,” “Crustaceans,” and a special small subject about miscellaneous species we hadn’t hit like velvet worms, thorny-headed worms, peanut worms, and many other worms.
The second semester would focus primarily on deuterostomes, which are animals that, embryonically, form an anus before a mouth. Everything covered in semester one were protostomes, which do the reverse. This fact would be addressed in unit 1. The first unit would be “Echinoderms and Hemichordates,” which includes starfish and sea lilies, and acorn worms. Hemichordates would be featured at the very end of the unit, leading straight into the sub-class of “Chordata.” Studies from this point in the semester onward would be chordate-oriented, save for semester final review. The units included from that point on would include “Non-Vertebrates,” “Varieties of Fish,” which would explore the different classes of animal, vaguely related, that are assembled into the term “fish,” as well as units like “Amphibians” and “Reptiles.” After learning about reptiles, the next unit would be about non-avian dinosaurs, the various types that fell extinct 65 million years ago. After that unit, there would be “Birds,” and finally, “Mammals.” The final project for the class overall would be a large, poster-style life web, showing the relations between different species we learned about over the entire course.
This subject of zoology is important to me personally; my childhood was massively affected by animals. For example, I was the proud owner of a colony of 40-something hermit crabs in my youth. I read books, and constantly asked my father about animal trivia. I was ecstatic upon finding out I had the option to take a zoology class, and my biggest regret is not being able to have experienced a second semester. Of course, forensic science was very interesting as well, so it’s not all bad. I enjoy reading about science in my free time, and I loved the dissections of my zoology class. My zoology teacher, I’ll call her Mrs. T, was a great teacher, and the exact type of teacher I'd want to be during my zoology course. I'd want her patience, most importantly, her ability to withstand the normal nonsense one gets by being a teacher. I'd also want her sociability, her ways of making the class accessible and actually fun. There were a few students that were not interested early on, and were just taking the class as their required science credit. By the end of the semester, though, she had everyone giving it a good amount of effort. At the end of the day, I'd want to inspire an excitement for the sciences inside of every student, like my own science teachers did for me.