Letter to a Biology Student

Hi, my name is Siyona Suresh, I am a freshman in high school, and a sophomore when you will be in this class. I am 13 years old and interested in no particular subject really, and not particularly gifted in a specific subject either. This year I took Biology, Algerbra 2H, English 9, Intro to Engineering, Spanish, and  Geo/Health. Outside of school my interests are classical dancing, and spending quiet time with a book. When I first entered this classroom, I was nervous, it was my first day in high school and I didn't really know what to expect. But throughout the year I have learned a lot, and I will share what I have learned with you.

This class is a little different than most classes, it's what is called a flipped classroom. This means that instead of listening and taking notes on lectures at school, you will be doing it at home. Every night you will get a vodcast for homework, and that will be a video lecture for you to do that night (These take around 30 minutes to do). Now that you know what the class is about, lets talk about what happens in the classroom. When you first enter the classroom, write your homework down, take out your homework from the night before, and start working on the DO NOW which will be posted on the board. Typically throughout the class, we will be working through a lab, as we already listened to his lectures at home. There is no need to worry that much about quizzes and tests, because it is all multiple choice, as long as you have gone over the vodcasts you will be fine. Another thing to talk about is the blog and notebook you will be working on. Your notebook will contain all the vodcasts we do and the DO NOW's and will also have a table of contents in the beginning to refer back to. It is good to make sure your notebook is always up to date because there will be a notebook check at the end of every unit where you will get graded on how well your notebook has been kept. Your blog which is on the website blogger.com is where you will do lab write ups, and reflections of the things you have learned. I will put a link to one of my favorite blogposts at the bottom of this page.

Next, I think it is important to establish that Mr. Orre has pet peeves, and you should be aware of them. After finishing a lab, be sure to clean up your work space and leave it exactly as it was before or you are in for trouble. Another pet peeve is that when he tells you to work on something, do not do anything else, for an example if he tells you to get out your computer to write something up, don't pull up your grades and ask him about it. To do well in this class, you should do every vodcast because ultimately that is what is going to be on the test. Three mistakes I can share with you so that you can learn from them are: Don't ignore the CFUs (tiny not-graded quizzes you will take after every vodcast) because the questions on the CFUs will more than likely be on the quiz. Don't tune out Mr. Orre's voice on vodcasts or put him on mute, because although it saves time you will never really learn much without listening and paying attention. Lastly, don't slack of when you get class time to do homework, because you will regret it when you go home and have to do a bunch more homework. I think if I had learned these three lessons earlier on in the year, I would have had a much smoother year in first semester. But now that I have learned and am doing these three things, my grades have improved and I have definitely become a better student overall.

Overall I would have to say that this class was not one of my favorite classes, but it was definitely a good learning experience. It was interesting to experience a flipped classroom for the first time, and learn what it was about and how it felt like compared to other classrooms. I definitely learned a lot about bio, and will be taking AP Bio later on in high school. Next year I have plans to be taking Chem Honors because I think chem will be a fun class, and a completely different and new field of science to explore. Biology is a fun subject to explore, and as long as you remember my three key tips and keep and open mind, this year should be fun and exciting!

Link to my Blogpost: Siyona'sBlogpost

- Siyona Suresh

20 Time Final Blog Post

For my 20 Time Project, I tested the placebo effect to see if it actually works. To do this I created 15 general knowledge questions, and gave one group of 6 people a positive feedback about the test before they took it and another 6 people negative feedback. For an example for the positive group, before the test I said, "This test is a very basic general knowledge quiz, nothing to worry about. Everyone who takes this test passes." I wanted to see if the people who received negative feedback did worse on the test than the people who received positive feedback. After testing I found that the people who received positive feedback did better, but it wasn't a drastic difference, they only did slightly better. Here is a picture of the graphs I made of my data:

 As you can tell from the graph, the differences are subtle, but they are there. I think that if I had maybe taken a bigger group of people, or more questions I would have gotten a more dramatic difference in my data. So if I could do my project again that is probably what I would change.

Evaluating myself on this project, I think I did a good job. I spent my class time effectively by researching for the project, learning more about the effect so I could effectively plan an experiment around it without the use of pills like most placebo experiments are conducted, prepping the experiment (such as writing the general knowledge questions), and analyzing my data. I would give myself an A because I think I worked hard throughout this project and produced the results as well. Here is a link to my previous blog on my 20 time : http://iisiyonaii.blogspot.com/2017/03/placebo-effect-research.html

Pig Dissection Reflection

In this lab, we dissected a pig and learned about its anatomy, its different parts and what they look like. From this lab I was able to see what the different organs and body structures actually look like, and apply what I had learned from the vodcasts about the different systems such as respiratory and digestive systems in the dissection. For an example, I was able to see the heart and lungs which were part of the respiratory system, and also the intestines, stomach, and esophagus which are all part of the digestive system.
This dissection relate to me and my body, because a lot of the structures in the pig are similar to the structures in a human body and also my body. So by doing the pig dissection I was able to learn a lot about myself and how my body functions on a day to day basis.

 Video for Pig Dissection:

20 Time Individual Reflection

For my 20 time project, I decided to test the placebo effect to see if it really works. The reason I chose this experiment is because I had read about the placebo effect in the book Chomp by Carl Hiassen and wondered if the placebo effect was a real thing that could actually have an effect on us. I decided that 20 time was the perfect place to test this and find out, because it was something that has interested me ever since I read that book. My goal at the end of this project was to find out if the placebo effect really did work. After researching about the effect a bit in the beginning stages of 20 time, I made the hypothesis that it would work, but only to a certain extent (there would not be a huge change).

Initially my experiment was to give one group of students who say they are extremely tired in the morning a caffeine pill and the other group of students a placebo pill which had nothing in it. However I quickly realized that I would probably not be allowed to give people pills as part of my experiment as that is not allowed. My second experiment was to gather a group of 10-20 students and give them a general knowledge test. However before the test one group was told that it was easy and they shouldn't worry about it, and one group was told that it was very hard but they should try their best on it. I thought that with the positive feedback in the beginning the students would do better on the test and with the negative feedback the students would do worse.

To test my experiment, after church I gathered a group of 12 students who had volunteered to participate who were in the 8-11th grade. I put 6 of them in one room and 6 of them in another room and administered the tests with the negative and positive feedback. After they left, I tallied up how many questions each person got wrong and found that the effect did work to some extent. There was a difference between getting positive and negative feedback before the test, but it was not very drastic. The people who had gotten the positive feedback had done slightly better.

I think this project was a success in that I learned a lot about the placebo effect, and I was able to explore something that was interesting to me and learn about it.  I learned a lot of valuable lessons and soft skills; the most important one being time management. Since we were only given a short amount of time each week to work on the project, I had to learn how to split up how I spent my time efficiently. I also came up across different articles with conflicting information, so I learned how to find which article was really credible and which one wasn't and which information was actually accurate. If I had a chance to do this project again, something I would do differently is spend less time researching and more time doing. I spent the majority of time in the beginning of this project researching when I could have progressed further with my experiment. I think I spent too much time preparing for the experiment when I could have started earlier.

Although this experiment was very interesting, I don't think I will be continuing it. This is because my only question was to know if the effect worked and I accomplished that through this experiment. However, I will share this with others because I found the fact that our minds can play simple tricks on us fascinating, and I think it will be fascinating to others as well.

Link to my last 20 time post: Click here

Unit 9 Reflection

In this Unit I learned about how organisms are classified. I learned about the different taxonomic levels--from largest to smallest--Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and species. Then we went more into depth about what were the different domains and kingdoms, and what species could be classified into them. There are three domains, Archae, Bacteria, and Eukarya. Eukarya is split into 4 kingdoms, protista, animalia, plantae, and fungi. Animalia is a multi cellular heterotroph. Plantae is a photosynthetic organism. Fungi is a consumer that feed on either dead or decaying organic matter. Finally, Protista is anything that doesn't fit into the other three kingdoms. Inside these kingdoms, you can find many phylums. For an example in the Plantae, some of the phylums are angiosperms and gymnosperms. Gymnosperms are cone bearing plants and angiosperms are flowering plants. Once you keep grouping things together into smaller and smaller groups based on similar characteristics, you finally get a species. In this Unit we also learned more about evolution and how these organisms came to place and how they all became such different species. We learned that life started from unicellular organisms and gradually multicellular, and when these organisms started to adapt to their environments they developed different features, and thus new species were evolved. These species, continued to evolve with some of them dying out, and through this constant process of evolution, we have the organisms that we see today.

To enforce this idea of evolution, in this Unit we also did the What on Earth Evolved (WEE) presentations. We each got to pick one organism from the book written by Christopher Lloyd, and present on how it evolved and how it had an effect on us. I picked algae as my organism. I learned a lot about algae that I didn't know before such as it is being made into biofuels which could cut down pollution, and that it was such a crucial part of our food web. Presenting was fairly easy as I felt like I knew my material well, and I felt comfortable enough to come and talk in front of the class. If I could do it over, I would probably make more of an effort to memorize my slides, because I feel that reading off of slides does not get your information across as well as speaking does. However this was a good learning experience, and I definitely know more about public speaking and algae than I did before.

All in all, I would say this Unit was one of my favorites. I love learning about species and animals that I never knew existed. One of my favorite parts was looking at some of these animals up close. We had a collection of dissected animals in the class, and we had to identify what taxa they belonged in. I loved looking at these animals up close, especially the ones that I had never seen before.

Unit 8 Reflection:

Previous Reflection


Here is my WEE presentation:

Geologic Timeline Reflection

In this project, we constructed a timeline that shows how Earth has progressed since the beginning to now. 3 major events that happened during Earth's history was the Cambrian Explosion, the Cenozoic Era, and the formation of cyanobacteria. All these events has a big effect on life on Earth, and influence how life exists today. The Cambrian Explosion was an event in which many different species and types of animals suddenly appeared. It led to a sudden diversity of life, a big change to the microscopic life that previously existed on Earth. The Cenozoic Era was the "age of the mammals." During this era, mammals like mammoths, beavers, and primates came about. This eventually led to humans because we evolved gradually from primates. Finally, cyanobacteria was what first created oxygen on earth. Cyanobacteria are a photosynthetic bacteria that produced oxygen as waste. This was very important because all life needs oxygen to live, and cyanobacteria created a huge boost in diversity of life on Earth. These three events had a huge effect on Earth and how it is today.

Earth's history is very, very long. Each millimeter represented a million years, and the whole timeline was almost 10 meters long, which shows how long Earth's history really is. However what surprised me the most was that, what we consider history (human history) was so tiny, it could not even be represented on the timeline. This was shocking because it makes you think about how tiny your life is on Earth compared to the history of all life on Earth. Another thing that shocked me was how long there was very basic life on Earth. More than 75% of the timeline consisted of the Precambrian Era, where only simple bacteria existed.

What I have learned from this project is that the world only very recently looked like the world we see now. In fact so recently that it can not even be represented in our timeline. All the inventions and new creations we have made have, and all the wars that were fought have no significance compared to the long span of time that Earth has existed. However, in the short time we have been on Earth we have made impacts. Considering that we have only been here for a "blink of an eye" compared to the rest of history, I think that we have made a pretty big impact on life and on Earth. 

20 Time Update #3 on Placebo Experiment

During the past few weeks, I have come across a few setbacks. One being that I realized I needed to come up with a placebo experiment that does not involve pills, as I am not allowed to give pills to students. So after some research, I came up with an experiment that was pill free. My idea is to gather a group of 10-20 students and split them up into 2 groups. I will then take the first group in and tell them that I am giving them a very easy test, that everyone has passed so far. This gives them the impression and the confidence that they can do well on the (general knowledge) test. Then I will take the next group in and tell them the opposite, that the test is extremely hard and to just try their best, giving them the impression that they will not do well. Then I will collect the data and see if me giving the group a placebo (confidence boost) helped them.

The second setback is that I need to find people to participate in my experiment. If I used my friends as test subjects, they may not take the experiment seriously, and my data may be altered because of that. A solution to my problem would be to either create a facebook poll to see if people would like to participate, or ask my classmates if they would like to. I hope to start my experiment in the next week or so. Now I definitely have a much better understanding of how the placebo effect can take place not just with pills but also without. I have made a lot of progress in my project and will continue to.