January 2019 Instructor of the Month, Jocelyn Hall

What do you teach?

I mainly teach two courses, Botany 205, which explores the fundamentals of plant biology and Botany 321, which focuses on flowering plants.

Why should people learn about this?

Usually my quip answer is: plants feed the world-literally the entire world. Half of humanity's calories comes from the single-plant family. Every day, pretty much all of us are consuming plants.

But also, if you ask a student to close their eyes and think of a desert, or to think of a boreal forest, or a prairie, they tend to actually think of the plants that define those regions, because plants shape our biome. Animals are always there too, of course, but it's another way that I talk about the importance of plants. And their diversity is tremendous and cool. You can't live without plants.

What's the coolest thing about this subject area?

As an evolutionary biologist, what I find to be one of the coolest and most exciting things is all the different forms and shapes, the evolution of diversity that you see in plants is pretty incredible.

What I find with students, what captures them is that we tend to think of plants as these things that are just sitting in the ground and growing-but they are really interacting with many different organisms. They are interacting with fungus underground, they are interacting with herbivores, they are interacting with pollinators. There's a whole bunch of interactions that plants have with other organisms and the environment, and I think that's also fascinating to students because they tend to view plants as these passive things that grow and may or may not be lettuce. Students don't tend to think of the fact that plants respond to the environment and respond to interactions with other organisms-and they can do that in really cool ways.

What is the most important thing to understand or take away in the study of botany?

Plants are not boring. I think they have the reputation of being boring organisms because they aren't the fauna, but they're really cool and exciting.

For me when I think about plants, and what I want students to learn, is it almost boils down to a little bit of appreciation-which is sometimes hard to do. Sometimes students take classes and I appreciate that they give me the heads up: "I'm taking this class because I have to and I think plants are boring." And that's great, like at least I know where I'm starting and I really appreciate that by the end of the class getting the evaluations: "I thought plants were boring, that I was going to hate this class and I learned that they're more interesting than I thought." That's a great thing because that's the thing-they are interesting and they are cool.

What was your favourite learning experience as an undergrad, and how you incorporate that experience into teaching your students?

I did my undergrad at the University of Arizona, so I was able to do a lot of botany in the field and a lot of field trips because of the environment that we were in. But I usually end up telling students about mistakes I made because they're always nervous about plant identification and my response is: well, you know, mess it up.

But most of my learning experiences that I talk to students about come from grad school, so I find I'm willing to tell really embarrassing stories about myself because I think it helps students remember things. So things that I did when I was in field school in Costa Rica about travelling with this really cool woman who literally had a crossbow that she would shoot up into tropical trees to climb them.

So, I talk about those stories, I talk about the importance of learning to identify plants properly so you don't injure yourself. And I talk about how one time I was in the field and I sat on a stinging nettle and how uncomfortable that was-and how if I had been a better plant person I maybe wouldn't have had that particular experience. Those kind of stories.

What was it that drew you to this field?

I actually had a crush on a boy. When I was an undergraduate I thought I was going to be a wolf ecologist, and we were taking another class together and he said 'oh you should take this plant course' and I'm like 'oh he told me to take it, I guess I'll try it out.' And I just instantly fell in love. It was plant systematics-the class that I'm teaching now-and I fell in love with plant diversity and the principles and concepts of phylogeny. So, how organisms are related to one another and how a tree of life is so intuitive and captures so much, and I never looked back. I asked that instructor to be my advisor on my senior thesis and she took me under her wing and here I am.

I think I'm their first student, in her lab, that went through the whole rigmarole of getting a getting a PhD, getting an academic position, and it all started because I had a crush on a boy.

I like to tell the story because when I look back, I think I wouldn't have taken the class except that I've always had an inherent interest in gardening. I mean the plant interest was there, but it was really getting shown the light of how cool plant diversity is, how understudied some aspects of it are. I like the fact that my career took a turn, and I think that's a good thing to communicate to undergraduates.

What is the biggest piece of advice you give to your students?

I think students sometimes think that they should have figured things way before they need to. The university experience is about taking a class because you have a crush on a boy, or taking a class because you think it might be interesting and just exploring.

We're so lucky to be at an institution of this size with so many courses and things to explore; I think sometimes until you get older you don't realize the opportunities you had, so allow yourself to be swept away in something that you weren't expecting. I think we're trying to follow our programs, trying to get through, trying to have our careers decided by second year and I find that if you talk to many of the professors and many of the people here or other people in life, that many of us meandered to get where we are.

What is one thing that people would be surprised to know about you?

I can't actually grow plants, I kill most plants.

I don't have a green thumb, I do a little bit of gardening, but I used to be a botany professor who had dead plants all over my office so I just threw them out because it looked so bad. Everyone's like "oh you must grow all these things" and I'm like no… I can make a cactus die by not watering it. It's terrible.

You'll notice there's no plants in my office and everyone else is out there growing stuff and I admit it's just bad form to be a botanist with dead plants, so I stopped.