My kids left today....

[Blandmum]

....the sixth form biologists and gave me a card.

It said that they thanked me for teaching them, that they were about to diffuse all over the UK, carrying out allopatric speciation, but there would always be a place for me in their right atria. They pointed out that the card had a large surface area to volume ratio and had been made from sustainable forests that had been coppiced and pollarded.

Fair brought a tear to my eye!

At least I taught the little buggers something

brilliant

Brilliant!

But coppiced and pollarded?

actualy what they said was 'coppiced or pollarded, I can't remember which is which' which made me laugh! And I was typing at haste

They were so sweet and I'm going to miss them

Nice work on the surface area to voume ratio. I was forever drumming that into my classes, and have also received cards with that message!

I did cry when I said goodbye to my last A level class. Of course I was 8 months pregnant at the time, but they were still surprised. They bought me flowers, chocs and an outfit from baby gap and carried it all down to my car for me. And it was after I'd kept them behind for a last extra revision lesson.

God, I miss teaching...

(Must remember the toerags)

BRILl MB what a fab post!

becky, it is my ongoing joke with all gcse and a level students that the answer in biology is almost always 'large surface area'

RBC structure
Villus
Root hair
Shape of animals ears
Reason for multi cellular organsims
Micro villi
Alveoli, the list just goes on!

They love it!

allopatric speciation, please?

(Wish I'd had a science teacher like you, mb )

Don't mb! You're making me so nostalgic. Need to finish this course first!

species developing because they are geographicaly isolated from each other. So a chance mutation in one population, isn't 'spread' to all other of the species. So say if two colonies of frogs of the same species become divided by a mountain or ravine, a change in one popluation is not seen in the other. Eventualy they become too different from each other to breed and produce fertile offspiring (the definition of a species btw)

This is where I used to find that the students who took A level Biology coped best with their A level Geography course - colonisation of species and all that!

beckybrastraps - my last tutor group were fab too, in fact I'm going to a wedding of one of them in a couple of weeks. They will all be willowy 22 year olds, I've had 2 children.... still it will be lovely to see them all again, especially as I taught the groom a few years before too

LucyCampCat - how lovely! I can hardly imagine my lot as "grown ups".