Letter to Incoming Biology Student

Dear incoming biology student,

First off welcome to Saratoga High! I am Jeffrey Xu; at the time that you'll be reading this, I'll be a sophomore on my first day of school. As a freshman, I have taken English 9, Trig-Precalculus H, Journalism, and obviously, Mr. Orre's biology class. Aside from academics, I play the piano, play badminton in Saratoga's varsity team, and eat lots of food.

Honestly, on my first day of school, I wasn't worried too much about classroom procedure, but rather, that I wouldn't end up with a lot of friends in my classes. You're probably in a similar situation. I wouldn't worry about it too much, think of not ending up in the same class as your friends an opportunity to make new ones.

Mr. Orre is a strict teacher. For late work, most of the time, he just gives a zero, unless it is a vodcast. Vodcasts are nightly homework assigned for your learning purposes, so there's no reason to discourage turning it in after it's late, so Mr. Orre gives full credit for late vodcasts. I suppose if your after school life is very packed, you can do the vodcasts at a later date, but make sure you do them before the end of the unit!

In my opinion, the tests are the hardest category in biology, and I really wouldn't worry too much if you don't meet your expectations on them. Instead, try to make sure you do well on labs and let labs and projects carry your grade. You will have a biology notebook in this class, but it is almost more like a textbook. You must be highly organized, with a table of contents, and there will be notebook checks before every test to make sure that you have kept yourself organized.

One of Mr. Orre's biggest pet peeves is people not following easy directions and making what he calls "rookie mistakes." Make sure you always turn papers into the correct turn in box, and not the handout station. Also, he is big on cleaning up after labs. If you don't clean up well, you will have to stay in for precious tutorial time. Finally, always make sure to do your Check For Understanding quiz (CFU) online after you watch your vodcast, as Mr. Orre will sometimes turn these in for a real grade. I speak from experience so don't make the same mistakes that I did!

Overall, I actually really enjoyed this class and learned a lot. In my studying for the SAT II Biology subject test I was taking, I found that this class actually helped quite a bit. I like the fact that it relies on the student to be more responsible for their own learning, taking good notes instead of just being fed information by a teacher. Next year, I am taking Chemistry Honors, as recommended by Mr. Orre. So yeah, on top of what I already said, take advantage of this flipped classroom, keep yourself organized, and get the points on labs and projects that you should be getting.

Oh right, here's my biology blog. I'm actually pretty proud of it: http://jeffyx.blogspot.com/

Good luck,
Jeffrey Xu

Pig Dissection Lab Write-up

I think the purpose or essential question was to find out if dissecting a pig can help identify internal structures and organs learned in class. This dissection definitely related a lot to this class because we had already learned a lot about the different organ systems in the human body, and finding those internal organs in a pig, a fellow mammal of the humans, helped us to further understand the function and importance of these organs and organ systems.

My favorite part of the dissection was, to be honest, scraping off membranous material to uncover important organs, because it just felt satisfying. 

I do think this dissection was a valuable experience because it really practiced hands-on skills as well the skill of teaching other people via a video, just like Mr. Orre! 

This was a pretty fun lab, perhaps the most fun lab of the year--besides the hunger games lab obviously. I had already learned a lot of knowledge regarding the digestive, circulatory & respiratory, nervous, and endocrine systems, but I felt that it was pretty hard to grasp when everything seemed pretty abstract and far away, but this lab really brought everything to real life. 

Above is the video of our tutorial.

20 Time Individual Reflection

This is my first time talking about 20 Time on this blog, so let me explain what it is. The idea behind this is that employees or students or anyone, can take around 20% of time out of their normal working hours to instead work on something else, something special and interesting to them, a passion project. In Google, these so-called passion projects led to ingenious inventions such as Gmail, Google Shopping Express, and many other world changing inventions.

For my 20 Time project, I investigated a phenomenon that affects many teens schoolwide, and probably worldwide. I did experiments about procrastination. I chose this as my research interest because procrastination is also something that affects me, and is often times my biggest adversity. In doing research on how to combat procrastination, I was actually able to help myself battle it.

You can get to my 20-Time blog right here: http://jeffrey20time.blogspot.com/

What I planned to do was to test various procrastination-combatting tips/methods and test it on some of my peers and myself. I thought that in this relatively large amount of time, I would be able to get a control experiment finished as well as perhaps 20 or so methods. That was rather optimistic of me.

I didn't realize that for each individual method, large amounts of testing was required to ensure accuracy of results. After I realized that just testing 1 or 2 methods took almost a month to complete, I readjusted my goals and thought that testing 5-10 tips in total was an achievable but also quite challenging goal. I finished testing 7, which I am pretty happy with. Another roadblock that came my way was that when I would tell my peers what methods to try out while doing homework, sometimes they would forget to use them or do something completely different! So I fixed this by creating a Facebook group chat (teenagers always are on Facebook these days) and I communicated with them through this helpful medium.

I made a data spreadsheet documenting the different times of finishing homework for me and my peers and you can help yourself in your procrastination by looking at some of these tips. The link is right here

One thing I learned from this project is that although people share many similarities in working habits, they are way more differences. Some of the methods I tested, I expected everybody to improve their working efficiency, but instead, some still were slower. Also, for the methods that I thought were probably not going to make a huge difference or be a burden on doing homework, they actually were able to drive some of my peers to finishing their homework hours earlier!

I also picked up some soft/process skills. Cutting up the workload and time management were quite important for me. Sometimes, I would fall behind schedule due to limited time at school or other groups pestering me to help them, but I would always go home afterwards and find time to catch up and get ahead.

If I could change this project in any way, I would definitely make it larger scale. The only people I was able to document in my studies were just me and 4 of my peers that took part in the experiment. Perhaps next time, I could do polls and surveys on the SHS Facebook group and allow for a broader scope of views on procrastination.

I learned something about myself along the way. I tend to work much better under deadlines. Towards the beginning of the project, I was lagging pretty behind in terms of goals, but as deadlines approached, I was much more insistent on my peers to finish their tasks and would almost work on 20 Time at home on a daily basis. It turns out, this worked well, as I finished about a day early compared to most of the other students in the class.

I'm not sure how I could continue this project in any way, but one thing is for sure. I will apply what I learned from this lab as much as I can in my life. This way, I'll be much more effective at finishing schoolwork and be able to put in more time to other things that I enjoy doing, going beyond just school, and sports. In my opinion, being effective at getting work done not only enhances your work ethic, but allows for a more enjoyable life.

Unit 9 Reflection

The title of this unit was: What on Earth Evolved? As you can probably tell from the title of this unit, we learned about the different groups of organisms that evolved on Earth and the order in which they evolved. So starting off, the most primitive life on Earth began with unicellular prokaryotes like bacteria and archaea. Some may argue that viruses are living, but they don't have many of the characteristics of life.

Then, there evolved the domain Eukarya, when prokaryotes began living inside each other as symbiotic organelles. In the domain Eukarya, there were four kingdoms, namely: Protista, Animalia, Fungi, and Plantae. In the kingdom Animalia, we humans belong to the phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Primates, and so on. We are considered one of the most recently evolved organisms. A good way to see how new traits evolved and created new groups is a phylogenetic tree. Below I have attached an image of one regarding all the organisms within phylum Chordata.



One of the major projects in this unit was the What on Earth Evolved? presentations. My presentation went quite well, and I attribute my success to the fact that I practiced a lot in front of the mirror, my parents, my brother, even my dog! I got feedback from the mirror by making sure my posture was good, and that I didn't sway. My parents gave me helpful feedback by suggesting certain topics I should include in the presentation to make it more engaging and interesting. This made my presentation not only get a good grade, but I was able to enjoy the process of presenting something that was quality. In the future, I will always make sure to overprepare for such presentation, as the payoff is always worth it.

The link to the actual slideshow can be found right here. The topic of my presentation was the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Although the Geologic Timeline assignment was a Unit 8 assignment, we only completed it during the beginnning of this unit, so I would like to attach the link to my reflection right here. If you really think about it, the Geologic Timeline actually ties in quite a bit with taxonomy, because it shows us the huge amount of time that Earth was inhabited by only unicellular organisms, and how long it took to evolve complex organisms, and that we humans only occupy a tiny sliver of time compared to life on Earth.

This unit has definitely helped me grow as a person. Being put in front of a classroom of 30 students and presenting really pushed my out of my comfort zone. I feel a lot more comfortable now speaking in front of large audiences. However, one thing I still struggled with this unit was trying to pay better attention to other people's presentations. I need to improve my active listening so I can learn more.

Here is a photo of a chart I made for the taxa observation of organism to help me better understand common characterstics.

Geologic Timeline Individual Reflection

3 of the major events of Earth's history include the Cambrian Explosion, the Permian Extinction, and the Cretaceous extinction. The Cambrian Explosion was highly significant and is often referred to as the most significant evolutionary event on Earth due to the rapid appearance of many animals with mineralized, fossilized remains. The evolution of skeletal structures that leave behind fossils is essential to the study of fossils. The Permian Extinction is highly significant because it was the largest extinction event in all of Earth's history, with 96% of all marine species becoming extinct. The Cretaceous extinction is also very significant because without the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals would have never radiated and humans would have never came to be.

Earth's history relative to human history is much more grand than I had first expected. On the timeline extending from one end of the classroom to the other, our little sliver of time is absolutely negligible.

However, despite this short period of time that humans have been on this planet, they have had massive effects. Ice caps are melting, many places are flooding, nature all around us is being destroyed and used instead for industry. At this rate, I feel that the human population will not be able to sustain itself for much longer until we choke ourselves to death.

One question I wonder about is why it took so long for humans to evolve, to come to be. So much of Earth's history involved only single-celled organisms, which seems a bit counterintuitive as multicellular organisms seem more likely to dominate.

Below I have attached a couple photos of the timeline:
 

Unit 8 Reflection

I always like to start off with the title of the unit. This unit was called Constant Change. This makes a lot of sense because evolution is all about how populations are always changing. 

But how exactly does evolution work? There are many mechanics involved in evolution, but one of the main causes is natural selection. In order for natural selection to occur within a population, there must first be variation. Variation is created through mutations and sexual reproduction. Natural selection favors individuals with traits that help them survive better, causing them to better produce more offspring, so that over time, the population begins to look more like these individuals. An interesting lab we did to demonstrate this concept was the hunger games lab. Other factors that can cause evolution include gene flow, genetic drift, sexual selection, and mutations. 

Speciation is one of the causes of evolution. As two populations of the same species have reproductive isolation, they begin to evolve differently based on their different ecological niches. Soon, they become so different that they can no longer reproduce with each other anymore. This is when one species becomes two. 

There is a lot of evidence to back these ideas up. First and most obvious is fossils. Fossils found in the earth can tell scientists a lot about when and what individuals looked like. By carefully studying the differences from fossil to fossil, it is pretty clear how and when a population evolved. Also good evidence is the fact that many organisms that are very different (i.e. birds and flies) can evolve analogous and homologous structures. 

One thing that I wonder a lot about is that although it appears that many populations of organisms like animals and plants are evolving, I feel that the human population appears to be still quite the same as before. Why is that? Hmmm.

Below, I have attached some images that I feel highlight some of the key ideas of this unit:

Hunger Games Final Analysis

1. In this lab, each person had to grab as much food as they could based on their phenotype and try to reproduce by the end of the round. This lab simulated the workings of evolution on a population. 

2. The phenotype which was best at capturing food was the pinchers, because of the fact that they could grab lots of food quickly with their opposable thumbs and index fingers. 

3. The population did evolve because the allele frequency changed. At the beginning, the frequency of the "a" allele was only 48%, but by the end, it had already reached 78%. See the graph below for intermediate changes and you will be able to see the rate of change better.

4. Some events in this lab that were random were the placement of the food, the amount needed to survive, the coin-flipping that would determine the offspring. Some things that were not random were the possibilities of the offspring and the methods that we used to pick up food. This affected the evolution because some rounds had way more deaths than others because of these arbitrary conditions. 

5. The results would definitely have been more different if the food was larger. The knucklers definitely and the pinchers perhaps would have a more difficult time picking up the food in between their little fingers. This can also happen in nature where changes in external conditions can be advantageous for some and disadvantageous for others. 

6. Yes, the results would definitely have been more different. Without incomplete dominance, there would be no knucklers, only pinchers and stumpys. This probably would have resulted in more stumpys initially as the homozygous genotype would still create a stumpy.

7. The relationship between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection acts on the favorable phenotype, allowing it to survive and reproduce better, and as natural selection occurs over longer periods of time, the population will gradually change to look more like these organisms with the favorable trait. This gradual change in a population over time is evolution. 

8. The stumpys, although not necessarily best suited for survival, were very good at strategizing and teaming up. In my opinion, it looked like they only mated with each other to produce "the superior stumpy race." This seemed to cause a bounce-back in the population of the stumpy, and I congratulate them for not dying out. 

9. In evolution, it is the population that evolves. Natural selection acts on the phenotype, as that is what directly affects the organism's ability to survive. To further elaborate, in the case of complete dominance, a homozygous dominant and a heterozygous will have the exact same phenotype, so their ability to survive will be pretty much equal. As you can see, the genotype is not the whole story in this case. 

10. I still have one burning question though: If evolution is by definition a change in allele frequency, then isn't evolution occurring every second (each time an organism dies, the allele frequency changes a bit) and not really a "gradual change over time?"