As previously stated on my Creative Pursuits page, taking and maintaining the perspective of a learner is vitally important to my personal pedagogy. How can I hope to help my students learn if I forget what it’s like to learn something for myself? To that end, I enjoy taking up new skills and expanding my knowledge, although I’ll admit I’ve always liked doing such things outside of a teaching viewpoint anyway.
One area of learning that has held my attention since my own school days is foreign languages; seeing how different cultures express similar ideas and organize language structure made me feel like I was learning about the very cultures themselves. My current learning goals are to become multilingual – French and Japanese alongside my native English.
My current progress in Japanese on the DuoLingo language learning app.
While the progress may not look like much, I have come to realize that I learn language skills better when I take my progress slowly rather than trying to gain many levels all at once. As such, I only do one lesson a day right before bedtime, when I’m most likely to store new words in my long-term memory.
I also have a love for mycology – that is, the study of mushrooms and other fungi. I unexpectedly fell in love with it during my biochemistry degree, since I needed extra biology credits. I found mushrooms to be interesting because of how incredibly varied and colourful they were. You had typical little brown and white capped species, puffballs that threw clouds of spores everywhere, rock-hard conches on tree trunks, jelly mushrooms in all colours, and many more.
One of the fungal sample I collected during my BIO 318 course ten years ago. I identified it as Hygrophorus megasporus using the field guide and Matchmaker program.
The spore print I did of the above mushroom specimen. This is part of the process of identification.
It was once a secret dream of mine to discover the fungus that could make the antibiotic to combat normally resistant strains like MRSA and VRSA. While I’ve moved away from the lab in terms of my career path, I continue to hold out hope that maybe another mycologist might make these same discoveries. Maybe one of them might end up in one of my classrooms during their own learning journey.