What makes plants interesting to students?

A long time colleague used to say that it takes a certain mental and emotional maturity and sophistication to appreciate something as subtly interesting as plants. He actually said this to explain the behavior of some of his zoological colleagues, but the Phactor is certain that most of you agree! Here's a link to a nice science education article that attempted to answer the question posed above. Mostly this study found what those of us who have long labored in botanical education have known for a long while; the more like an animal the plant is, the more interest it will generate among the other little animals. For many people ordinary plants just don't register with their perceptions at all; they're plant blind. And as attention spans get shorter, it's getting more difficult to get even college-age students to study plants because even great stuff like tropisms "take too long"! To develop and maintain an interest in plants kids have to be exposed to them, grow them, watch them, have things pointed out to them, all along, not just for a week long science unit once a year. The Phactor had the advantage of having had gardeners for parents and having lived in a sufficiently rural area that exposed you to real nature. You learned early on what to avoid (leaves of three, Mr. Throckmorton's orchards and melons, etc.) and what fruits and nuts were edible. Do your children have pets? Do they have plants? And so our efforts to make plants interesting will continue, although as my colleague suggested, not everyone matures enough to like plants, and they will probably retain their plant blindness forever.

Generating student interest in botany

A long time colleague used to say, "I'm going to teach them ecology if I have to rip their little heads off and pour it in." Such practices are widely frowned upon among the more enlightened members of our profession, but short of pouring it in, you can't make students learn anything that they are not interested in. Therefore the first and most vital step in teaching, especially subjects like botany and ecology that are viewed by many students as "boring" is to generate interest. Here's a nice post about how an aquarium visit generated student interest in ecology (and a link to a freebe publication), but generalized there is a lesson for all educators. Put something interesting in their hot little hands. The most successful general biology lab for non-science students the Phactor ever constructed consisted of a series of stations each with some intriguing problem that posed questions to be answered via a simple investigation by a small group of students.