School Starts This Week, Oh No!

I'm sliding out of my sabbatical now. School starts on Wednesday, so I'll be teaching two lecture sections of BYS 119 (Biology 1) and a class of Vertebrate Reproduction. Our enrollment has zoomed up this year, so as of now there are 499 students enrolled in the three lecture sections of BYS 119, up from ~440 a year ago. So think fast!

I'm going in tomorrow to talk to a staffer of our congressman, Parker Griffith. The American Institute of Biological Sciences has organized a lobby your congresspeople week, so I'm going in. The drill is that I'll have about 15 minutes to make a case for sustained and increased federal funding to support biological research and education. Griffith is an M.D., and serves on the House Science and Technology Committee, so he's basically supportive of research. I hope to emphasize a few points such as the National Science Foundation has been level-funded for several years, and is short-handed, so hopefully Griffith will continue to support biology funding NSF at the rate of $6.937 billion in the coming fiscal year, an increase. I haven't done this kind of politicking in a while but I look forward to it.

And on Tuesday morning, back out to Limestone Creek for scarlet shiners. Hopefully the rain from Tropical Storm Claudette won't be bad here over the next 48 hours.