Andrena imitatrix

Today is THAT day. It is the last regular day of the semester. Students are busily calculating their points. Various point totals have been tabulated. Glory, failure, triumph and defeat, I can hear it all coming to pass in the hallway outside my cave. I hide in here. If there were any use in hiding under a table, I would hide there. I ignore their knocks. There are no more points for them. They have one more chance, which is to confront the best-four-of-five dynamic inherent in the optional final.

I hate points. I hate their obsessive focus on grades. I understand it, but I hate it. Only a small fraction of them are here for their education. For the others, they have responded to the family ambition to produce a doctor, a pharmacist-something practical and reeking of status. These occupations cleverly control supply, so that given high demand, they can assure their members high salaries, days off, golf, and the luxury of never answering the phone. The students, for the most part, do not understand this. Most of them will never make the cut. My job is to perform the initial phase of weeding. Those of them that cannot learn a great deal of heavy material in a short space of time will not make it to doctorship. Instead, they will do other things with their lives, and most likely, be happier. Nobody should be a doctor unless they have a genuine desire to serve humanity...I wish I could test for that without blatantly abusing my power.

Why did we invent points? They are a cheap, stupid, means of weighting the relative value of assignments. I first encountered points at UCLA and was stupefied. Points, being arbitrary, vary from one class to the next, and are somehow non-transferable.

What do I want from them? Everything and nothing. I want the impossible-for each and every one of the 450 students in bios 101 to blister with intellectual curiosity. I would probably give them all A grades, blisters and all. I do not expect this, I understand their utilitarian perspective. It makes me wish LSD were still fashionable at universities. I see the cosmic all.

This day, every semester, I remember the opening scene to Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, where the protagonist escapes out the window to his office, and think fondly.
Unfortunately, my office has no windows.
Soon, I will escape to an undisclosed location.

Every semester, they start as a list of names. Soon, they become points on a spreadsheet. Some of them become unique challenges; cheaters, squeaky wheels, the wonderful ones who are incredibly smart and learning a great deal-but do not do well in the class, because they overthink everything. Others quietly come and go. Every semester, one or two become friends.

The lost mariner is my friend now. She might last. I have another in the works, perhaps, and perhaps a few from the other place I teach.

The others, become a list of grades. Next semester, the process starts again.

A week ago, I corrected one of my species identifications. A species I had identified as Andrena fenningeri was actually Andrena imitatrix. This is the sort of mistake a taxonomist makes if they follow a key too precisely, and have no real fee for the various subgenera of Andrena. The latter bee is highly polymorphic, exhibiting widely different colors, textures, and, most likely, other aspects of its phenotpye, in different parts of its range. The former bee is rare, but widely-ranging. I wonder of fenningeri exists at all, actually, or is part of the variation in another polymorphic species. Labels.

Andrena imitatrix is born, after months spent under the ground, knowing precisely what it needs to locate food sources, build nests, reproduce, survive. Millions of years of coevolution with flowers, huge triumphs and tragedies as ice ages came and went. In general, Andrenas prosper in Northern latitudes, exploiting that guild of vegetation that flowers in spring before the trees leaf out. By the hundreds, Andrena species have migrated north and south as the ice ages, six of them at least, waxed and waned over the face of Eurasia. In my collection, it is a name. A record. Names.