The slumbering giant awakes

University campuses are strange beasts. They can transform from desolate ghost towns to crowded dynamos of activity almost over night. Over the holiday break the Phactor marveled at the solitude of walking home through the central quad, which today is bustling with people. It is a transformation as marvelous as watching Lee Marvin's drunken sot become Kid Shaleen, one bright moment in an otherwise forgettable movie. Uh oh, students! That means classes have started and it's time to check the schedule for teaching obligations! Yes, in exactly one hour the semester begins, and for the first time in a very long time, about 15 years, the Phactor will be teaching a new course to fill in for a colleague on leave. The subject, general plant biology, is neither difficult nor unknown, but it has been at least 35 years since last the Phactor taught this subject, and it's surprising how much work a new course actually is. It doesn't really help to have gotten class materials from a colleague once you discover that you really don't think alike at all. So now to get ready to meet the eager young faces ready to do battle with ignorance and push back the frontiers of knowledge, and just maybe figure out that plants are not just green animals.

new semester + new course = unprepared

Uh-oh! Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a train headed your way! In 8 days, a class of bright, eager, faces will be wanting to learn some botany, and all that other course stuff like a syllabus, grading, a lecture/lab schedule, and the like. This is not usually a problem, but in an effort to help a colleague and help the department provide the best array of courses, the Phactor got talked, nudged, cajoled, blackmailed, into teaching a new course - basic plant biology. How could this be a problem? Well, let's see when was the last time the Phactor taught general botany? Hmmm,let's think. OMG, 25 years ago!? Yikes! So now to come up with 40 some odd new lectures and a dozen or so new labs. To demonstrate his desperation the Phactor actually looked to see if any of the end-of-the-world predictions might bail him out. But no, May 27th is too late; that's nearly 3 weeks after finals. But what was that? You find new material in the funniest places. Plants were created in heaven and just transported to the garden of Eden! Well, let's grab that link and work it into a lecture. That doesn't explain a lot of things, actually it explains nothing, but when you're desperate, you do desperate things. So, first off, plants are not uniformly green; all the green is in itty-bitty green things that without a microscope you cannot resolve as individual points of green. It's a start.
Image from Botany Blogs.