Ecology of the Mississippi River Delta Region
INTRODUCTION TO THE NOTES
My course on the ecology of the Mississippi River Delta was first taught in the amphitheater of the Louisiana Nature Center in the summer of 1980. Twenty brave students arrived in the “wilds” of eastern New Orleans each morning at 8 am.
The only published information available were a handful of government agency reports [notably from the Louisiana State University Center for Wetland Resources series “Hydrologic & Geologic Studies of Coastal Louisiana” (especially Report 1 on the geology and geomorphology by Woody Gagliano and Johannes van Beek) and the “Coastal Zone Management Series” (especially the biological characterization of the Barataria Basin by Len Bahr and J. J. Hebrard)] and articles published by a host of excellent scientists at Texas A&M University and L.S.U.
Each morning that summer, I was sitting at my desk at the nature center at 5 am (donut and coffee in hand) furiously writing lectures. At 8 am, with an adrenaline and sugar high, I walked in and hopefully presented a coherent lecture on what I considered the most important emerging issue of our day. And, it has been proven to be true.
Most of the naturalists at the LNC took the course, and one day Margaret Landry asked if I would consider writing my notes out so that she didn’t have to spend all her time writing so she could just listen and make incidental notes. My response - “yea, right!” This was only because my notes were in no shape to simply print. There were many places where simply a word launched a 45 minute discussion, and many places where concepts were outlined.
But, the more I thought about it the better the idea sounded. When I began the next semester typing the notes on my little Apple IIE, I just didn’t know the task that was before me. Now we are in the eighth edition of the written notes, and they are on line with slides and figures.
An important page was added a couple of years after the first edition. I noted that some students, thinking that they had the info there before them, did not take any notes. They just sat and listened. None of the info is all that difficult to understand, but there is a whole lot of info to learn and understand before each test. After a discussion with my consulting education psychologist (namely, by better half, the good Dr. Polly Thomas), I added a short discussion of “learning styles.” The purpose was to alert students to something that most have never heard - that each of us has a different way of learning and that we must be cautious to know how our system works. I know that I am an auditory learner, but visual is very important and it really helps if I actually use my muscles to write things down. I am a combo learner, as many of us are. I am told that this knowledge has helped many students, but there are still those who sit and listen only, then don’t do very well on the first exam. Oh, well. We try.
Have fun with these notes, as do I. Please let me know if you find typos (ever present), errors (not to be unexpected), and/or omissions (I know of many), and I would love suggestions of how to make these notes better for my students.
On to a restored coastal Louisiana!