Return to Page 1 of On Campus Courses >>>
January 10, 2008
Crime Scene Investigation - Calvin Buquet
It’s hard to imagine why so many students in one class would, at various points throughout the lecture, be studying their palms and fingertips. Knowing that this is an Interim class called “Crime Scene Investigation,” the strange phenomenon starts to make sense.
They’re looking to discover whether their fingerprints form arches, loops or whorls and how their ridges are formed. Gathered in groups of three, the students set up their mini-crime labs. Later they’ll be using these identification skills to match their own fingerprints to ones they've left on bottles or cans, but before the comparisons start, the silver powder, a print brush and book-binding tape have to come out and be used to collect the evidence. Soon the analysis begins. Thankfully none of these students have prints out being matched to prints found at a crime scene—this is all just a skill-building session.
The exercise is being led by guest speaker William Wolz of the Grand Rapids Police Department. He’s brought with him slide after slide of fingerprint data from real criminal cases in the Grand Rapids area. “How many common points on two prints do you need to be sure that you’ve got the right person?” he asks the class. “As many as you need to be sure—a misidentification is fatal in this business.”
The course, taught by Calvin Buquet of the sociology department, is studying many aspects of crime scene investigation this January. Even DNA analysis is on the syllabus. Perhaps more than any other course taught during Interim at Calvin, this course is truly hands on.
January 9, 2008
Flavors and Fragrances - Eric Arnoys and Kumar Sinniah
Does it taste bitter or sour, sweet or salty? Or does it taste umami?
Students in the “Flavors and Frangrances” Interim course were plugging their noses and holding tongue-droppers above their heads, trying to discern what flavors various mystery liquids contained. In reality, they were just salt water, sugar water, lemon water and tonic water—combinations that caused not only wincing across the room, but also—surprisingly—eyebrow-scratching. Without the sense of smell involved in the sensory experience, the tongue often has a difficult time discerning various tastes, even the most basic tastes shown diagrammed on tongues in most biology textbooks.
Just before the liquid taste experiment, the students had a more pleasant tasting experience. Wearing blindfolds, they were fed one of three varieties of potato chips. They had to discern what each chip was when fed to them by a classmate. “It tasted peppery, but I couldn’t taste the salt!” said one student. In some pairs, the blindfolded partner had one potato chip placed on the tongue while a different chip was placed under the nose. This had the potential to create a confusing experience—a guess that a barbeque-flavored chip was in the mouth while a pepper-flavored chip was under the nose could prove to be exactly the opposite in reality.
Kumar Sinniah and Eric Arnoys, both professors in the chemistry department are team teaching this interdisciplinary course that brings the fun back into science for students who may not have done experiments like this since fifth or sixth grade. A third of the students in the course are chemistry majors while another third are majors in other science disciplines. The remaining students are from the humanities and may not have taken a chemistry class since high school. As such, the course is designed to be accessible, with its focus on distinguishing the scents and flavors in various foods and fragrances.
On Friday, the students went to Frederik Meijer Gardens to work on distinguishing various flower scents. On Monday the students did coffee tastings. Eventually some students will work on a project that involves making their own custom fragrances from a wide variety of chemicals and essential oils sitting on the counter in their laboratory classroom. Students are learning a wide-variety of facts about taste and smell, along with the basic chemistry behind these bodily phenomena. Among these learned facts is the knowledge that there is a newly-categorized taste called “umami,” the taste of protein created by the addition of monosodium glutamate (MSG) to foods. These students will truly never eat food—or pass the perfume counters—the same way again.
January 8, 2008
A History of the Book - Frans van Liere
“Make sure you evenly distribute the goop,” said history Professor Frans Van Liere as he demonstrated the art of paper-making to his students in his “A History of the Book” Interim course.
He was making the product out of materials the students contributed: old newspaper, wood dust and dryer lint. First they added water to these materials and allowed them to decompose and mix together. Then the students watched as their professor put batches of the mixture into a blender to create a smoother consistency—a proper form of “goop” that is just right for creating one’s own paper. Once the goop was fully constituted as such, he went on to press it onto a screen and remove some of its water content. Soon it was ready to be turned out onto foam board and dried with the official moisture-removal instrument, a hairdryer. “Now you can have a go,” Van Liere said to his eager students.
Once the students in “A History of the Book” are finished making their paper, they’ll actually go on to make the other constituents of a book – the binding, the cover, even quills to use once the book is ready to be written in. When the book is entirely assembled, they’ll collect bits of wisdom to be written in the book and displayed in the Hekman Library (if all goes well).
The book-making exercise is just one hands-on experiment that will bring history to life for the students in Van Liere’s Interim course. They’ll also be going to a museum in Chicago to see a book that was created hundreds of years ago during the medieval period. The difference between the book the students are creating and the old book is significant—the older book is made out of parchment, not shreds of newspaper and dryer lint. Students explained that the paper-making process would have been quite a bit messier (something hard to imagine) if they had made medieval-style parchment. They would have to use the skin of a cow, goat, or even a rabbit to create this kind of paper, something they’re pretty sure would arouse the protests of students in the Interim course “Peaceable Kingdom.” (See below)
January 7, 2008
Peaceable Kingdom - Matt Halteman
The phrase “bunny-hugging” comes up several times during the Monday session of philosophy professor Matt Halteman’s Interim course, “Peaceable Kingdom.”
"Do you have to be a bunny-hugging lunatic to believe that the Bible gives us reason to take the interests of animals seriously?" the professor asks. In another turn he says, “We don’t want to be bunny-huggers first and Christians second.”
Though humorous in tone, this question and statement get to exactly what the students in “Peaceable Kingdom” are thinking about this January. They’re exploring exactly what relationship they as Christians ought to have with God’s other creatures, animals. And even though the course is just beginning and they are still trying to establish a biblical vision for this relationship, students are already starting to think in practical terms. One student wondered about the difference between eating an apple and eating beef. Another wanted to know why many vegetarians won’t eat eggs or dairy products.
Few answers are given in this discussion-oriented course, but many questions are asked. What will help students consider the relationship between animals and humans are two simple ideas: God cares about animals, and humans are meant to be good stewards of God's creation in all of its aspects, human, animal and environmental. From this foundation, the students in “Peaceable Kingdom” will consider how they as Christians will relate to animals for the rest of their lives.
January 4, 2008
English Grammar - Elizabeth Vander Lei and James Vanden Bosch
Their heads mostly buried in their thick grammar workbooks, the students of the English Grammar Interim course look up in expectation to hear what their grammar teacher—the grammar sage Jim Vanden Bosch—has to decree regarding the usage of adjectives as nouns. Co-teacher and grammar goddess Elizabeth Vander Lei interjects a comment from her seat by the students, enlightening everyone as to the way in which an adjective-turned-noun might add a rhetorical flourish to a sentence. Professor Vanden Bosch shakes his head and bemoans the grammatical problems this use of what should be an adjective causes.
Never has grammar been so dramatic—or attractive.
Words like “gorgeous,” “beatific,” “fervor,” “evocative,” and “pleasure” float around FAC 220 in between discussions about intensifiers, double genitives and elliptical adverb clauses. The students become more and more comfortable with their professors’ dramatic (and sometimes bewildering) ways and start to ask questions. By the end of the three-hour class, their hands are shooting up everywhere as they try to catch the slippery nature of the English language. If they can begin to grasp—and hold onto—the finer points of English, not only will they live in a continual state of self-satisfaction for the rest of their lives, they will also have absolutely no problem finding employment after college.
January 3, 2008
The Trouble at Calvin College - Professor Randy Bytwerk
Brouhahas over President George W. Bush's 2005 visit to campus, full-page newspaper ads in the 1980s saying that the devil was loose at Calvin College and a group of seven students in the early 1950s presenting the faculty with a list of ways in which they were not sufficiently Reformed—if this year's first-year students were not disillusioned with their college experience yet, they got an awakening at the first general lecture of Developing a Christian Mind (DCM), a required Interim course that presents new Calvin students with the significant themes of a Calvin education.
During this lecture, students were introduced to the truth that parts of their college education should, and would, trouble them. It's all part and parcel of going to a school that tries to be Reformed and Christian and a liberal arts college all at the same time.
Students shouldn't think to stay away from all the trouble—the thinking, the challenging and the broo-ha-has—they ought to become "righteous troublemakers" themselves, asking important questions and perhaps even initiating a practical joke or two during their time at Calvin.
