Sometimes gobs of turkey fat and impish monkeys say more than a textbook can.
As stimulating as some 80-minute labs in the basement of Heroy Hall can be, some professors think that field trips are a keystone in SMU’s science curriculum.
Professor Bonnie Jacobs, who teaches “Introduction to Environmental Science,” fulfills her students’ laboratory requirement by venturing off campus with them for seven field trips. Texas Instruments and the Lewisville gas plant were new additions this year. Her favorite place to take the class is the Dallas Sewage Treatment Plant.
“You never forget the stuff you flush,” she said. “Our last visit was after Thanksgiving and we could see gobs of turkey fat collecting in the sewage.”
Ronald Wetherington instructs a human evolution course, which requires a weekend trip to the Dallas Zoo. He says that lab trips are so popular among his students because observing other primates interacting is “like visiting one’s relatives.”
“We learn about primate evolution and the emergence of humans through bones and teeth, so when we see primates in action, there’s something that brings this kinship closer to us,” Wetherington said. “In watching the chimps, for example, we see some of our own impishness.”
Berrett Popst, a junior business major, enrolled in Wetherington’s course after transferring to SMU from the University of Texas. Although Popst was initially upset about missing the first half of the UT championship football game, he ended up enjoying the sunshine, fresh air, chilidogs and lemurs.
The information Popst took home from his zoo tour might have been skipped over in a textbook or slept through in class.
“There are so many just foreign words you hear in class like sexual dimorphism,” Popst said. “Nobody in the class could really explain what it meant until we saw how much bigger the male baboon was than the female. You’d be surprised how dominant they are.”
Professor Vickie Hansen teaches a structural geology course that focuses on the history of the earth and how it works. Although very enthusiastic about field trips, Hansen finds that “structurally, the Dallas area is kind of boring.”
Once a semester, Hansen’s students trek to what she jokingly refers to as the “Oklahoma Alps,” the Arbuckle Mountains.
“In the field, you can understand the language of the rocks,” said Hansen. “It’s all about reading the information from the earth so the students can understand the story the rocks are telling …You just can’t bring that into a classroom.”
Professor John Goodge, who schedules his geology courses around his annual trip to Antarctica, agrees.
“Texas is kind of geologically challenged,” Goodge said. “I mean, it’s great if you love limestone.”
