Thank God things changed!

I am a coffee lover… I admit it. One day, walking with my wife around Wheaton, we found a quaint coffee shop and sat there to enjoy what ended up being a very good latte. My wife and I love to watch people and just imagine (or maybe try to guess) what they do for a living. I'm sure we are wrong 99% of the time but it is fun to imagine nonetheless. Anyway, that Sunday afternoon, as we sat there enjoying our latte, I came across an interesting book about coffee, which I now regret not asking the owner if I could buy it. The book was about interesting stories related to coffee. As I went through the pages, I found the reproduction of the covers of two controversial documents printed in 1674.

This one was a women's petition against coffee!! You got to love the way the cover of the petition was written (see picture). This famous petition was put forth in 1674 as a protest against the perceived ills of the all-male coffee house culture of England. According to that petition, coffee had turned men impotent, as clearly -and boldly- stated in on of their paragraphs:

"The fame in our apprehensions can consist in nothing more than the brisk activity of our men, who in former ages were justly esteemed the ablest performers in Christendom; but to our unspeakable grief, we find of late a very sensible decay of that true Old English Vigor; our gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become mere cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on sa sa, with a world of fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first charge fall down flat before us".

Fortunately, science has shown that coffee has a number of health benefits.

Men would not stand silent against those accusations, and later that year the men's answer defending coffee was published.

If women are from Venus, men are… well, from Arabica I guess!

You can read more about the history of coffee and the women's petition against coffee here (please note that the text presented in that petition is very explicit, even for that time) and here. A digital version of the men's answer to the women's petition can be found here.

Have a latte... is good for you!

Teachers… Renaissance people all!

Those in the teaching profession, whether it is in Elementary or Higher Education, continuously reinvent our teaching methods. If you are like me, I'm always changing and tweaking my teaching methods, lectures and their delivery, and most importantly for me at least, learning new ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. The subject I teach, Microbiology, is not the easiest for a freshman to understand, unless it relates directly to his or her daily life; if they can 'see it happening' every day, it suddenly 'clicks'.

How to make somebody understand about microbes when they can't be seen unless we use a microscope? Which then brings us to the actual understanding on how to properly use (and care for) a microscope. It is quite a challenge sometimes to teach a student not to rely on memory alone to learn a subject. For that I use countless metaphors, analogies, and examples that can be taken out of a daily commute… such is the beauty of Microbiology… it happens around us 24/7!

Believe it or not, and don't ask me why, my course doesn't require a prerequisite other than Rhetoric. Although I'm currently working on changing that, in the meantime I have to deal with students with little or no biology background. If all my students would be in the same situation, without any biology background, then it would be easier to deliver the course at one same level. However, I do have students with more than one general biology course, and that makes it a bit more challenging to deliver a course that is not so esoteric for beginners or boring for students with more biology background.

Ultimately, we find ourselves learning more than just our discipline to keep our courses 'fresh', interesting, engaging, challenging and worth our students' time and money. We do, indeed, become renaissance men and women.

How do you reinvent yourself every semester? What new tricks do you learn (and where)? How do you improve upon your own teaching methods? I'm always looking for something new and exciting to try in my class, so leave your comments and suggestions for everyone to see.

I hope you had a great holiday and have a great semester everyone!

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