We devote considerable time to epithelia, muscle and connective tissues , because students have not studied those tissues in much detail in earlier courses, and because those topics enable integration of many aspects of the subject. People learn by doing. We use active, investigative dissection as a tool of understanding. Pictures and computer programs cannot substitute for experience. The emphasis is on doing.
Laboratory is an important supplement to reading and discussion.
Students cannot learn the material without a sustained and active attention to all aspects of the material. Students read Robert Bakker's novel, Raptor Red, as an example of how knowledge of biological organization fits into unerstanding in many fields. Late in the term students have the opportunity to appreciate the art that is unpreserved vertebrate anatomy by applying their new expertise to recently terminated mice or rats. We end the semester using acquired expertise in group dissections and presentations to classmates of non-mammalian vertebrate and related chordate dissections. I give students tools for continued self-education and confine the burden of terms to those most necessary at this level.