My dad (who is now retired) was a biology professor the whole time I was growing up. Biology used to be about living stuff -- stuff that you see outside. When I was growing up, biology meant going to a pond and mucking around the shore with a sieve, catching dragonfly nymphs and getting pinched by giant water bugs. Biology meant turning over logs to see milipedes, sow bugs, and elusive salamanders. Biology meant stopping by the side of the road with a bag of books trying to figure out what that pink flower was. Biology meant hiking 5 miles along an old rail grade to see if there were any relict bits of prairies left on the easement. When I was in third grade, I decided I wanted to be a biology professor too. In high school, I got interested in Spanish too and when I went to college I majored in biology and continued in Spanish. I eventually graduated with a double-major in biology and Spanish. Around my junior year, I began looking at the job ads in Science and began looking into graduate school. What I found was that biology was transforming from a science that looked at organisms to one that studied the molecular basis of cellular processes. Most people doing research seemed to end up studying one particular molecule. Universities were increasingly depending on faculty to pursue external funding and very little of what I had thought of as biology was actually fundable. Even if you could get into a degree program, when you graduated you almost certainly would spend years in post-doc positions waiting for a faculty slot to open up. I decided that wasn't for me. When I eventually went to graduate school, I pursued a degree in science education, rather than biology. When I graduated, I was able to skip the post-doc stage and get a faculty position directly. Being in a modern biology department has given me an increased appreciation for modern biology too, but not much of what I had thought of as "biology" goes on here at all.
I'm thinking about a new activity for the intro labs. During intersession, Randy and I were talking about the need for a good biodiversity lab. I was thinking it would be cool to get new dissecting scopes w/ digital cameras (built in, maybe) and have the students look at soil and freshwater invertebrates. The goal would be to see how many unique species the entire class could discover and document in a week. Partly it would be taking an image and writing a description. Partly it would be looking at the other species and descriptions created by students to see if what you were looking at had already been discovered. We could tie it all together by having students record where the different species came from as they documented the species so we could do some thumbnail analyses comparing diversity of different habitats.
I was reading 
this article in Scott Rosenberg's blog. A week ago, I might not have agreed quite so wholeheartedly. But that was before the Amherst Bulletin butchered my letter to the editor. The editor cut out two paragraphs, almost half the letter. He cut the paragraph where I quoted Alexis De Toqueville and the paragraph where I cited The First American Revolution. Maybe the argument is that in those paragraphs, I wasn't simply stating my opinion. I still think those paragraphs contained important references that were critical to understanding my point of view. Its not like my letter was long -- it was only 377 words and the editor gave a lot more than that to other authors. Oh well -- like Scott says, that's what my blog's for.