Mary C. Henry

Global EVI Summer 2000. Image credit: NASA MODIS Gallery We are technically about to start week 4 of the summer around here (!), but I feel like I am still trying to get in gear. The REU students have arrived and I think we have another excellent group. We assign our student-mentor teams into research clusters. Sometimes these clusters work collaboratively and other times we are grouped by a common interest. I am part of the “Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology” cluster with four other faculty and three other students (in addition to mine). We meet in our clusters about once a week during the summer and discuss research articles and what progress we are making on our projects. My student will be working on part of my USDA grant to map Amur honeysuckle. She will do some field work, but will spend a lot of her time learning about and using remote sensing and image processing. For students who do not have a strong background in remote sensing, I usually start...

Miami University has a summer research program for undergraduates in Ecology, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. Our REU Program was recently renewed for a third three-year term (2009-2011) and this year’s students will be arriving next week. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor from a range of departments like Botany, Zoology, and Geography. I will be working with a student this summer- the fourth student I have advised for REU. I am also now on the steering committee for our REU program, so I was involved in writing the proposal for the renewal, selecting student applicants, and helping with other planning. I am always impressed with the students that participate in our program. My three former students are all in graduate school now (the student from last summer will be starting this fall) and I have even been able to publish with one of them (a...

Almost every semester in every class, I determine grades partly based on “participation”. Usually, this is largely based on attendance, but students are also assessed on contributing to class and/or completing in-class assignments. For most students this amounts to “free points” and I often consider eliminating it from the grade completely. However, I like to know who is attending class and that can be tricky in large lecture courses (my GEO 121 course enrolls about 90 students). I also don’t like to feel like I am holding students captive. How many students will show up if it is left to their discretion? College students are legal adults, so if they want to skip class, they can deal with the consequences. It can often be disruptive to have uninterested students in class, since they talk to their friends and text during class (despite me asking them not to). In the fall, I am thinking of doing an experiment by not monitoring attendance in GEO 121. Stude...

Spring semester 2009 has just ended and I am trying to catch my breath. Grades were due this past Tuesday, then I spent two days helping with Miami-Talawanda Science Week. Robbyn Abbitt (our GIS Coordinator) organized the program for third- and fourth-graders to visit extreme places using Google Earth . The kids seemed to enjoy it- especially at the end when they got to search for their houses and look at Disney World (the 3-D buildings are REALLY cool!) I am collaborating on a proposal and have a manuscript to review, in between fielding emails from disgruntled students! It may be summer, but it’s no vacation!