Sevoo's Education Page

I've completed my undergraduate career, and while the Real World has not made me miss school, it's given me some interesting perspectives on education, and it's made me realize just how much teaching and learning goes on outside of the classroom. The thing I miss most about school is having time to write poetry.

As a volunteer at a Berkeley junior high in 1995, I felt that the biggest challenge I've faced has been not how to communicate information to the students, but how to motivate them to listen, to ask questions, to find something they find interesting, and to stay interested. I've found a few resources for teachers so far, such as Engines for Education from The Institute for the Learning Sciences.

Course Descriptions

• MCB 135G, the Biology of Cancer. Here I have made available the notes for the final third of the course.
• MCB 111, Structural Biology. These notes did not lend themselves well to html, but a list of topics covered in the course is available.
• Ethnic Studies 190, Towards a Queer Cultural Studies. The reading list is available.

Virtual Learning Spaces

Science, one of my longest-standing interests

• The Exploratorium. Their real-life facility taught me so much in the few hours I spent there. The online version is nowhere near as good as the hands-on displays, but it's open around the clock and you don't have to pay the $9 (or however much they're charging these days) entry fee.
• The 7.001 Hypertext Course Materials page provides a basic introduction to biochemistry, complete with notes and quizzes. I wish this had been available to me in 1992.
• Full of sounds and graphics (both animated and still), the NetBiochem pages span a whole variety of biochemistry topics.
• The Primer on Molecular Genetics is a textbook-like resource geared towards people using the web as an aid in the labratory.
• More extensive than it looks, the Microbial Underground has been around for years, and while it's no longer regularly updated, the material that's already there is in-depth and interesting.
• One of the most advanced online courses I've encountered is An Introduction to Molecular Virology, which, despite being theoretically biased and geared toward students who probably have far more experience in the field than I, has fascinated me since I found it.
• The Weather Unit is a huge compilation of lessons a teacher can use in a classroom, for for grades 2-4. It is part of the Collaborative Lesson Archive (once called the Thematic Unit Archive), which looks has lesson plans available for many more subjects and many more grade levels -- The Weather Unit was the first one at the site.

Literature, another one of my longest-standing interests

• Literary Research Tools is a meta-list of links all over the place, from classical to modern, including literature, criticism, and theory.
• For those of you who, like me, have been wondering what the hell the Beat Poets had that made them Beat Poets, the Literary Kicks page is a fascinating explanation and exploration of this genre.

Resources for Educators

• Stephen R. Savitzky has made available a list of Interesting Places, with lists for kids (which he compiled for his then-10-year-old daughter), and parents, and more recently, musicians, software, and information.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory has made a page of Mega-Mathmatics for students, parents, and teachers at an elementary level.
• The Globewide Network Academy is a worldwide non-profit consortium of educational and research organizations.

General Educational Stuff

• Trib.com is an online newspaper, one of the very early ones. Why is this under educational? Because one can learn a lot about the world by watching it.
• Speaking of news, the first section I go to when I get a newspaper is the business section. Sam Sternberg provides a catalog of news sources which are mostly business and economic oriented, and are available free of charge. The information on Sternberg's site is quite old, though, and has not been updated recently.