ABSTRACT
Each year I fill out a request for teaching supplies. Every teacher in the nation probably does this, and teachers throughout the world probably do the equivalent. What are these supplies? In my case they range from microscope slides, cover glasses, and petri dishes to living earthworms, rotifers, soil nematodes, to common grocery-store items such as mushrooms, to preserved snakes and turtles. The best thing that can be said for these items is that I don’t have to make or collect them and most of the time they are delivered to my door at the university. The worst thing that can be said for them is that they are often unrepresentative of their respective phyla (e.g., earthworms), and that they arrive completely out of context-that is-missing the environment in which they live. Even biological supply houses occasionally fail to deliver on their catalog promises, however, so I do get back orders. By the time I find out the materials are not going to arrive, it’s usually too late to write a new lab exercise. Although context is a problem regardless of the subject, teachers of literature, music, philosophy, mathematics, and chemistry are never faced with an unpredictable supply of material. But an inadequate and unpredictable supply of living materials is the bane of any biology teacher’s existence.
