The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2313 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

“I think I’ll wait to change my course for a few more weeks.”

“I’m afraid you’d have to if you wanted to hear my lecture on evolution and natural selection. I can’t do it this close to Easter, the fundies would see it as provocative.”

“Fundies?” she queried.

“Fundamentalists.”

“Oh, the Pompey Taliban,” she said and sniggered.

“Pretty well. It’s sad that people who have no interest in expanding youngsters’ minds seem to think they have a right to protest at something they take no part in.”

“You sound irritated by it.”

“I suppose I am. I’m probably just as intolerant as they are but in the opposite direction. I want to make science inclusive, they seek to exclude anything that challenges them.”

“Do you believe in god?” she suddenly asked me, blushing as she did.

“I’m increasingly sceptical—so I guess that counts as a no.”

“I’m not sure,” she said still blushing.

“That’s not a bad place to start your search.”

“You’ve done that, haven’t you?”

“Just a bit,” I smiled.

“And that led you to believe less?”

“You could say that, but each of us has to walk their own path to make their own discoveries. Some find positive evidence of deities, I didn’t.”

“Does it matter?”

“Probably not in the greater scheme of things.”

“Doesn’t that imply there is a god planning it all?’

“I suppose it could be seen that way though it wasn’t intended. You see, I believe all sorts of things have a form of consciousness which would include such articles as magnets, which receive and react to energies from another magnet and attract or repel them. It’s wrong insofar as it’s all done without consciousness being involved yet an inanimate object reacts to another—isn’t that similar to a very simple organism and doesn’t it tend to indicate how many of these things happen. We know unconsciously because we have bits of these things inside us. Pigeons have small particles of magnetic material in their brains, we don’t know if it helps them to navigate, or not.”

“So how come we don’t see them hanging by their heads to bridges and other metallic structures?” she asked tongue in cheek.

“Aluminium isn’t magnetic.”

“They don’t use aluminium for bridges do they?”

“I doubt it.”

“Oops, look at the time, I must get some lunch—thanks for the pep talk.”

“Here you are your ladyship, one tuna wholemeal roll.”

“Thanks, Hilary.”

“Did you realise that as soon as they were asked by someone from biology for a tuna roll, they asked if it was for you.”

“No, how d’you mean?”

“They saw my ID and asked if the roll was for lady dormouse? When I nodded they said, ‘we’ll add extra salad then’.”

“I didn’t know that—not sure what I feel about it.”

“Enjoy it, you’re a celebrity.”

“I don’t want ‘Hello’ poking about in my dustbins or wanting to film my bathroom.”

“Why would they?”

“It’s what you see celebrities doing these days, trying to get one up on their rivals by showing off their designer bogs and waste disposal showers.”

“Cathy, I suspect you might be exaggerating.”

“Not by much.”

She gave me an old fashioned look and we both ended up rolling about laughing.

“You mean you don’t have a designer bog?” she pretended to be disgusted.

“Well I presume somebody designed it, but not of note.”

“You mean it’s not a Crapper special or at least from the drawing board of WC Fields?”

“WC Fields? He was a film star cum comedian, wasn’t he?”

“So I believe,” agreed Hilary.

“Wasn’t he the first one to talk about liking children but he couldn’t eat a whole one?” I suggested.

“I have no idea, but he might well have been.”

“The mammal survey beckons,” I said with little enthusiasm.

“Don’t forget your tutorials.”

“What tutorials?”

“Those who can’t wait for Xmas.”

“What?”

“Easter, then,” she blushed a deep pink colour.

“What are you on about?” I asked her.

“Your students who feel they would benefit from a one to one with you but aren’t prepared to wait until after Easter.”

“We’re giving students a choice these days?” I asked incredulous.

She gave me chapter and verse adding, “Pretending to.”

“Pretending to what?”I asked.

“To give them a chance to convict themselves.”

“You’ve lost me, go back to what happened after, ‘Once upon a time.”

She laughed then controlling herself she explained what she’d meant. It was to do with some students claiming they had commitments and thus were leaving early, often omitting key assignments which were due to be marked before next term.

“How many d’you think are struggling?” I asked.

“According to the grapevine, about twenty.”

“Could you get me their names?”

“I can but try, what are you going to do with them?”

“See if we could get some extra tutorials in for them.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to drop them?”

“Easier yes, but we’d lose funding and they might never finish a degree thereby wasting a year or so of their lives.”

“Who’s going do the tutorials, you can’t do them all.”

“I’ll have to see who’s a available—if we’re short—and I suspect we might be, would you be interested in helping one or two? I’d have to check there was money in the pot to pay you, but in principle—would you?”

“I don’t have my master’s yet.”

“This isn’t formal teaching, it’s sort of mentoring—you’ve got a bachelor’s in biology, so you’ve done the basics, that’s what I suspect is causing so many problems. I’m going to suggest we stop packing the courses with non science students.”

“That’s going to lose you some funding.”

“It will also make teaching the rest of them much easier. They’ll get better degrees so our averages will rise, instead of the others scraping through with bottom twos and threes.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“To doing some mentoring?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Thanks, Hilary, you might have helped me stop some giving up.”

“Doesn’t it just postpone it, won’t they leave during or after year two?”

“No, because then they do ecology and that’s easier to understand than the biochemistry and classification.”

“Cheryl came out of your room with a spring in her step, what did you do to her?”

“Do to her? I did nothing but merely pointed out the history attached to the theory of evolution by natural selection and suggested she might find it interesting.”

“What? It’s as dry as dust.”

“If you’re a biologist it is because the arguments are rather one sided because the evidence supports evolution, but if you’re a generalist then Clarence Darrow’s defence in the Scope’s Monkey Trial, is quite interesting. I’m thinking of borrowing the Spencer Tracey film, Inherit the Wind.

“Oh, I haven’t seen that, when was that made?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied so we checked on Wiki and found it was made in nineteen sixty, years before I was born, in fact over fifty years ago.

“How did you come to see it?” asked Hilary.

“Someone at Sussex saw it advertised on television and taped it, about thirty of us went and saw it down the union. It’s as much about McCarthyism as Darwin but I’m hoping it might show that biology is more than just test tubes and microbes.”

“Won’t it suggest that if they want a more exciting life than that they should switch to law?” Hilary offered tongue firmly in cheek.

“American law maybe, British law is as dry as dust but someone has to do it.” I thought back to my experiences with the fostering of Mima and Trish and was very glad that someone had done it, especially that judge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherit_the_Wind_(1960_film)