Fresh approaches in teaching
As she maneuvered a small dish under a microscope, Anna Lea Albright watched a computer screen, carefully scanning the image until she found what she’d been looking for: a tiny, nearly transparent bulb branching from the filamentlike green strands of a plant sample. Called a bladder, the bulb was actually the “mouth” of utricularia, one of dozens of species of carnivorous plants described by famed naturalist Charles Darwin. As William “Ned” Friedman, director of the Arnold Arboretum and Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, watched over her shoulder, Albright carefully focused on a single bladder, and used a digital camera to capture the image. “This is great. This is the bladder here, and these,” Friedman said, pointing toward several nearly transparent hairs sprouting from its edge, “these are the hairs that trigger it. That’s a carnivorous plant. Isn’t that beautiful?” “That’s amazing,” Alright said. For students in Friedman’s freshman seminar, “Getting to Know Charles...