Faculty Spotlight - Greg Crowther
What do you teach at EvCC?
I teach Anatomy & Physiology - A&P to insiders, Biology 231-232 to the registration office. I mostly teach pre-nursing students, plus some other pre-health sciences students.
Tell us a little about your professional background.
After studying human muscle metabolism in grad school at the Seattle campus of the University of Washington, I came back for a bunch of additional years of postdoctoral biology research and teaching. As funding for my research became scarce, I refocused on teaching alone, which led me to UW Bothell and then here.
Note: While in grad school at UW, Greg began making up song parodies about things he was learning, (for example, "Take Me to the Liver" about cholesterol metabolism, to the tune of "Take Me to the River"). Crowther, who took piano lessons from 7th to 12th grade and sang in various school choirs, has continued writing songs to help his students understand complex scientific concepts, a technique he uses in the classroom. Listen to his version of the song"Sugar Sugar" called "Glucose Song."
Why did you choose EvCC?
I admire the College’s efforts to give everyone access to a high-quality education that helps them get where they want to go in life. I love contributing to this effort. Many of my students have huge family and/or work responsibilities, yet they carve out a bunch of time to take my courses. It feels good to help them on their way by making reasonable accommodations.
How has the pandemic affected you? How are you doing?
I’m OK. My mother-in-law lives with us and takes care of our two little kids full-time, which is a great luxury that most people don’t have. Moving my courses online has been hard, of course, but also good motivation to learn more about online education tools. For example, there is a human anatomy website called Visible Body that I had never found time to use before. After the pandemic hit, I had to use it to see whether it would be a good substitute for in-person anatomy labs. It turns out to be fantastic, so now I hope to use it with all of my future classes, socially distanced or not.
How have you adapted your curriculum and teaching methods to support students who are learning from home?
This is very much a work in progress. Like most other science faculty, I’m thinking a lot about online lab simulations - how can we make them experiences of discovery, rather than just endless clicking, clicking, clicking? I’m building in extra prediction steps so that students are generating and testing hypotheses when possible. Measuring the fake oxygen consumption of a fake rat isn’t necessarily that interesting in and of itself, but if you need to predict whether the thyroidectomized rat will consume more or less oxygen than the normal rat… Now you have an interesting little puzzle to ponder.
One other little example of an adjustment is that I’ve encouraged students to use the chat windows to make little jokes and generally create a bit of the social vibe that they would normally get from meeting in person. They’ve been great about injecting their personalities without being overly disruptive. For example, in a recent physiology session, I tried to use a golf analogy, and some of my students humorously objected on the grounds that golf was unfamiliar or boring to them. There was some playful banter on whether we could come up with a basketball analogy that would work better. Similarly, I sometimes refer to my ‘70s-’80s music tastes and see whether anybody knows what I’m talking about. Yesterday I mentioned a song from "The Muppet Movie," and there was at least one student who knew it, but maybe only one.
What advice do you have for students who are taking online or livestream classes for the first time?
Get as much information as you can up front about exactly how each class will be run. For example, will you be spending a lot of time in Zoom rooms, or will almost all of the learning occur asynchronously? Think hard about how your own brain works and whether a given format is likely to work well for you.
Also, don’t be afraid to make polite suggestions to your instructor about how to make the online class work better. A lot of us, including me, are still figuring out how to do this, and sometimes students have good easy-to-implement ideas that we haven’t considered.
What do you like to do for fun?
Fun has not been a priority lately, but this summer I’m looking forward to doing more running and walking with my family. We live near a nice wide Interurban Trail, so exercise with social distancing is relatively doable.
What is your favorite snack?
I like to snack on late-night student questions! (How’s that for a ridiculous non-answer?)
Anything else you’d like to add?
This is basically unrelated, but I just published a new biology education paper that is easily the best science education paper that I’ve ever written. It suggests “Test Question Templates” as an inclusive, equitable approach for connecting class activities and homework to fair-but-interesting test questions. I think it could be a really useful framework for lots and lots of instructors … which is why I spent much of spring break creating the paper’s 77-page appendix. :-)
EvCC biology instructors Greg Crowther (on piano) and Hilary Kemp lead microbiology students in an extra-credit singalong in August 2019. Crowther wrote the original song "A Blaze of Glory" to help students understand how the body handles viruses, focusing on the difference between their extracellular stage and their intracellular stage. Listen to Greg's science songs here.