What’s that purple goo coming out of that big slug’s rear end?
Oww! That crayfish pinched me again! Do I REALLY have to pick up
that cockroach with my hands? This is what I have to listen to
in my lab at the beginning of each school year when high school
seniors are conducting research on neuroscience. A public high
school may seem like an unusual place for neuroscience research,
but the teens I teach are really into it. Let me tell you how we
got started. More than 10 years ago, a major shift at our school
saw many freshmen and sophomores registering for AP Biology
instead of waiting for their junior or senior years. It occurred
to me that after taking AP Biology, some students may wish to
explore neurobiology in greater depth, so I created a class
called Recent Advances in Neurobiology. It’s pretty much like a
graduate school seminar class: students do about 45 pages of
reading homework on various topics in neurobiology, then come in
and discuss everything they’ve read. Half their grade is based
on class pa