Bobcat Blog

As a child, I saw the ins and outs of Día de los muertos around me because it wasn’t a holiday we observed at home. Part of my family would go to the cemetery and clean the tombstones of our relatives. They would bring pan muerto (bread of the dead) home with them, and I […]

One of the most obvious and frustrating observations in biology is the existence of species. Obvious in the sense that there are immediate and large differences between yourself and say, a cat. But frustrating in the sense that finding a definition that holds true across the entire tree of life has been elusive. Humans have […]

In the summer of 2019, I began making tacos on Tuesdays, not because I am the Spanish teacher with Mexican background but because the availability of a decent taco in the Pacific Northwest is rather low. There are good tacos out there, I know that there are, but driving around and testing one place after […]

As the 4th of July approaches and we prepare to celebrate Independence Day I was reminded of the painting Parson Weems’ Fable by the artist Grant Wood. I first saw the painting while living in Texas at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/parson-weems-fable) and it stuck in my memory because of its unusual qualities, […]

The final assignment in 2020 for my Pre-Calculus students was to research and present an introduction to conic sections. Students learned that slicing a right cone at varying angles will produce a circle, ellipse, or hyperbola (or of course a point or line if it’s a special case). Click here, if you would also like to […]