Isaac Newton, the single most important historical figure in the history of the science on which we are focusing this semester, explicitly gave much credit for his scientific discoveries to his predecessors in the famous quotation included on the home page for this course. As a science teacher, there are several people "without whom I would not be here today," as the stereotypical Oscar winner is virtually required to say.


Many of the thoughts and insights that you are getting from me, to the extent that they prove useful, very often originated in the minds of my best teachers and role models, the most outstanding of which are briefly mentioned below, along with places to find the original thoughts:

	Vincent Falcone was the Head of the Social Studies Department at my high school, Westhill, in Stamford, Connecticut. In his Senior Seminar in the Humanities course I learned, both from him and from my fellow students (because – gasp! – he encouraged us to talk and respond!), about the formal ideas of logic and philosophy, but also about the context of rational thinking among human emotions, moral sense, political realities, cultural norms, etc. He had very different explicit political views than I had then (and still, largely, have now), but that just made it all more fun. One of my sisters, who took his course a few years later, used to argue much more vigorously with him than I ever did, sometimes foolhardily citing my mother as a credible authority for a relatively liberal, optimistic world view (think Dory, the Ellen DeGeneres character in Finding Nemo). Mr. Falcone is legendary among our families and friends for repeatedly replying, with an ostentatiously self-satisfied smile, "Listen, Jackson, I've got news for you and your mother!..." He was ostensibly teaching Philosophy. He was actually teaching about Life. Mr. Falcone essentially published the notes from that course in the form of a book entitled Great Thinkers, Great Ideas: An Introduction to Western Thought, which you are highly unlikely to run across at your local bookstore but which is available from online booksellers.
	My undergraduate advisor, the late Prof. Stephen Jay Gould, had simply the most amazing mind of anyone I ever actually got a chance, however slightly and superficially, to know personally. Besides inspiring me to become a science major when I took his introductory course in historical geology and evolutionary biology for non-scientists, he hired me as a research assistant (measuring 32 different dimensions of a genus of fossil and modern snail shells) for a year that I took off from classes. No one in modern times ever made so many interesting connections between science, history, literature, and other fields of learning or endeavor, or used them to make science lectures and essays more enjoyable and memorable. In this way he would have made a great middle school teacher! Almost any of Dr. Gould's books would be great reading, because they are all superbly written. You might start with Ever Since Darwin, the first book-length collection of his essays about paleontology and evolutionary biology from Natural History magazine, or possibly his more hard-science but very readable The Mismeasure of Man, or his take on both the details and the broad significance of the Cambrian Explosion, Wonderful Life.
	Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist like his graduate-school buddy and co-author Gould, allowed me to work in his lab at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for a summer, preparing (with some success) and exploring the classification and evolution of (I failed miserably to generate any original insights) an interestingly problematic genus of trilobites. Combined with my experience in Gould's lab and with helping a graduate student to collect fossils in the field, I came to the conclusion that working scientists are honest, hard-working, often brilliant, admirable people who have much more patience and more of a capacity for "delayed gratification" that I do. (So I began seriously to consider pre-college teaching instead.) From Dr. Eldredge's example I feel that I picked up a determination to maintain high critical standards in intellectual/academic debate while still maintaining a personal respect for one's opponents as human beings. Like Gould, almost everything he has written is great, from his original research on patterns among the trilobites that are so common in that incredible stack of limestone beds that blankets the Midwest (from which the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium emerged), to his several books on the evolution/creationism controversy, including The Monkey Business and The triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, to probably the best "coffee table book" on fossils, entitled simply Fossils.
	One of these things is not like the others – One of these things doesn't belong... -Sesame Street If you think that this is an unlikely-looking professor, you're right, although not so much so at her current, long-time home at the University of Colorado. Back in the Day when she was teaching at Yale and Harvard and, among other things, campaigned to get herself designated as the official University Fool (as in stylized, Renaissance-era "jester," not "person with remarkably bad judgment"). (The late comedian George Carlin named one of his old albums after an incident in which he decided to have some fun while filling out some boring bureaucratic form, and in the blank after "Occupation:" wrote "Foole.") Patricia Nelson Limerick is perhaps the foremost historian of the American West, specializing in de-romanticizing old stereotypes and exposing the sometimes-seamy underside of a few famous and many not-so-famous people, places, and events, while mixing analytical history with just plain telling fascinating stories, many of which may actually be true (!). Seriously, what I learned from her, besides actual history, is that fiction can be a very powerful way of teaching non-fiction objectives, pseudo-theatrical posturing or even temporary outright deception is sometimes the best way to get across an honest, sincere, and valuable message, and professors who actually look forward to class and show evidence of actually being happy to receive office visits from their undergraduate students are those who are the most happy in their work. Two of her most prominent books are The Legacy of Conquest and Something in the Soil.
	Prof. Carl Berger was my doctoral advisor at the University of Michigan, finding time for me even though he was also Dean of the School of Education for most of my four years there. I came to him as a pretty decent middle school teacher who had a rather abstract theoretical understanding of science and technology and had previously worked only in the rarified world of private schools, and he guided me toward experiences that taught me about the realities of urban public schools, nuts-and-bolts electronics, and, of course, educational research and the world of its professional associations. He was an early pioneer both of the Inquiry Approach to science teaching and of the use of computers in science teaching, and later came to specialize in the uses of computers in college-level teaching across the curriculum. In his current largely-retired status is still involved with a nationally-prominent nonprofit organization focusing on the use of technology in teaching, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT).
	Prof. Fred Goodman was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee, and taught a couple of courses that I took and one for which I served as a TA, but he was much more important to me just as someone who was always there to "bounce ideas off of," and this is where I learned that this is an absolutely crucial role for somebody to fill in any graduate program at a research university. His actual scholarly specialty, creative development of educational games and simulations, is not what any administrator would be likely to call "central to the mission of our institution." He managed to blatantly defy the unwritten but well-established rules of life on the faculty of a research university by achieving the rank of full Professor virtually without caring about major peer-reviewed journal publications. His students remember him mostly for the aphorisms that he repeated frequently (which was his way of pointing out that they applied to a remarkably broad spectrum of specific practical situations), such as: Is experiential learning really better than formal, abstract learning? Is science really a better way of thinking and knowing than others? Yes, and yes! [This is one example of his paraphrasing the educational philosopher John Dewey in everyday terms, which is an extremely difficult and valuable skill that Fred was better at than anybody I have ever known.] We are all Deweyans – we just disagree about the details. [Actually, I think this phrase came from Prof. Sam Meisels, but Fred often conveyed this message in substance.] Ideas have consequences. [This is actually the most memorable one - so remarkably simple.] Simulations and games are bizarre and inefficient pedagogy [actually spoken]...but sometimes bizarre and inefficient pedagogy is the most appropriate [unspoken but implied].
	Prof. Valerie Lee taught me most of what I know about statistics (which is approximately <.01% of what she knows!) while I was in graduate school. (The rest of my statistical insight comes from the baseball analyst Bill James and his intellectual descendants, the staff of the annual Baseball Prospectus volumes.) The syllabus and methods of my ESCI 6990 course have evolved quite a bit over the years, but were originally an outright imitation of U of M's ED 695 from the late 1980s, which I TAed both for her and for Carl Berger while I was there.
	J. Steve Oliver, my Program Coordinator and Associate Department Head, came to UGA at the same time as I did and has been a great friend, colleague, and informal instructor in the Wonderful World of Southern Culture for 19+ years now. Whenever I think to myself "How can I be a better professor and/or a better person?", my default answer tends to be "try to be just a tiny bit more like Steve." I rarely even come close to succeeding, but it's nice to have a constant living reminder across the hall all the same. As Tom Lehrer once said about Mozart, "It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished." (This being preceded by, in a version slightly modified to fit my current circumstances, "It is a sobering thought, for instance, that when Mozart was my age,...he had been dead for 15 years.") I bet Steve would be shocked that I didn't use Monty Python or George Carlin here instead...