Foram practical with new team

This year the annual foraminifera practical, associated with the fieldtrip, would be quite big. We had 33 students! That is quite a lot. And there are not many people in the School who can recognise the critters. In the olden days, it had been Katrien who would help me in that session. She had covered James’s teaching in the past, which included this practical. But she had only learned to recognise the forams for that purpose, and didn't really use that knowledge for anything else.

This year, two things happened; firstly, Katrien was unavailable, and secondly, there was increased teaching contribution from a guy who was normally only involved in research: Mike. And his PhD work had involved foraminifera. Since then I had the impression he had strayed quite far away from them, but it was a lot more exposure to the critters than Katrien ever had. So I asked him if he was willing to step in.

To my surprise, he was quite keen! Normally if you ask someone to take on an additional task they are quite grumpy about it. But he was glad; he said because of his contract and its circumstances, he had felt a bit apart from everything else. Being involved in teaching was actually something he was embracing. So that's great! I have a foram buddy, and he feels part of the team. Everybody wins!

I didn't want this to get exhausting. So although we had the lab until 3 PM, I told the students to stop picking forams at 11 AM. The picking is not the hard work. The identifying is! And I always insist on every single foram identification to be checked. And that was all just Mike and me.

Quite a lot of students didn't have an awful lot of forams. But that is life! Some of the samples are even barren. And with the picking over, the identification help, plus ID checks, followed. That is hard work; as soon as you are finished with one student, you see three arms in the air from students who also want their identifications checked, but I think we did it. And we were done by approximately 1 PM. Good for me! Then I could walk out to have lunch. And then I went back to retrieve the stuff that had to go back to my office rather than to lab storage.

I think it went okay! I have not yet compiled the database. The actual practical went okay, with students not being too impatient about the suboptimal staff/student ratio. And Mike was on good form. Let's do this again next year!

A foram