I think flowers are pretty sweet. Like this one; it's so unlike your typical flower that you see. Everyone has seen a daffodil, rose, pansy, tulips, etc. all these common flowers that people immediately think of when you say the word flowers. But man, orchids would have to be my favorite so far, that and some other flower that I had to draw in art class but forgot its name.
I'm in this class called Practice of Science which is to teach future scientists or biology majors how to write scientific papers. It's quite different than your average paper. We had to write a research paper for yesterday's class and man, you had to cite everything. Not only that, every sentence had to be specific and straight to the point. No nice sounding sentences with imaginative adjectives and beautiful phrases and sentence structure: nope, straight to the point. If you don't she'll mark all over your paper with scratch outs and phrases like "what's the point for this sentences". My teacher is Dr. Tatyana Lobova, a young, quite attractive, professor from Russia who is teaching here at ODU and also several online graduate classes at Harvard, with one class group calling her in the middle of the class to reaffirm directions to a field trip to wherever they were going. Very smart and very, very passionate about flowers and evolution. Yesterday's class was about 5 people; the other half didn't show up cuz it was paper turn in day. No surprise there. But at the end of the class the whole class, including the teacher, started joking about papers and turning in papers and the like which made the atmosphere more comfortable; makes you less afraid of the teacher when she gives you comments or you have to meet with her concerning your paper.
Afterwards she invited us to go look at some orchids in the greenhouse which is currently under construction on ODU's campus and is not open to the public yet. So a few of us went to go see some orchids, me included cuz I've never seen one in real life. There was this one orchid which has a stem like structure that was 8 inches long which contains the nectar and pollen that is needed for this flower to reproduce. She went on to explain how this flower specifically evolved to have a moth, with an 8 inch probiscus which is essentially an 8 inch tongue, be the one species that can pollinate this flower. Like I said before she is very passionate about evolution and flowers; when she looks at this she sees nothing but evolution for being the sole cause for this event to happen. I see it and see nothing but evidence for God and is unique, awesome creation. Of course we're both biased with our opposite views on such subjects but it's interesting how she portrays evolution as a living "being" constantly working on creation while I see it as God's awesome creation. Evolution is god to her; God is god to me. I think it would be interesting to see what her opinions on religion would be in the first place but maybe some other time. Overall it was cool to see this teacher become more of a person, to see something that she loves doing and loves teaching about and "open" up a little bit to show that she's not just a hired hand to grade our stuff and determine our passing and failing. Because when you're in a class of 200 or so you see the teacher as just a teacher with out really any personal attributes but on a smaller class basis like this class you start to see the person more and that makes the learning environment a lot more enjoyable and more comfortable.
but yeah, concerning evolution, I have a interesting view on it with God being in the center of it all which I got into a slight disagreement/argument in my small group with a very brilliant person over the controversy of evolution. Something I've been getting use to, being one of a few Christians in my biology classes, especially my evolution class. The more I study science, the more I see God, the more I want to talk about God and especially Christ. Maybe being a scientist is a way I can do that, only God knows. :)
