IN CLASS
Go Ahead and Laugh; The Rock Jocks
At 1: 51 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 23, the ground shook on the East Coast. The rare magnitude 5. 8 earthquake
was a seismic public relations event for Pro-
fessor Allen Glazner’s cause; just nine
serendipitous minutes later, in Mitchell 108,
he welcomed 23 freshman honors students
to his first-year seminar on Field Geology of
Eastern California — or, “How I Learned to
Love Rocks and Stop Dissing Geology.”
The course, now in its 10th year, is
remarkable for two reasons. First, it offers a
weeklong research field trip to California
during fall break that, truth be told,
explains why seats for the honors class are
filled — boom, boom, boom — as soon as
they are opened for registration. (“College
students are adventurous,” Glazner says.
“They love to travel.”)
And second, it offers Glazner and his
colleague Professor Drew Coleman the
opportunity to debunk every sad stereotype that geology has accrued over time,
from the inglorious moniker “rocks for
jocks” to the misconception that geologists
spend all of their time sitting in the dirt,
admiring each other’s megalodon shark
teeth while a Pig-Pen-like dust cloud wafts
above their heads.
Or, as Dan Peterson, a junior business
major, Morehead-Cain Scholar and semi-
nar alumnus from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, puts
it: “I thought everybody in geology was
just going out to look for dinosaur fossils.”
Past seminar students who have, in the
name of research, pulled on hip waders and
trudged through the Sierra Nevada’s Mono
Lake, just east of Yosemite National Park,
know that geology is more than simply
looking at textbook diagrams of sedimen-
tary, metamorphic and igneous rock forma-
tions. The 18-year-olds who take the course
hike, dine, research and slumber at 10,000
feet in the White Mountains. They trace
earthquake faults; chart the eruptions of
volcanoes; and sketch the earth and its cli-
mate history with such thoughtfulness that
it morphs from a symbol on a recycling
container to a dynamic place of intrigue.
And although they indeed inspect rocks
for clues about the past, they also visit stark
One of the University’s more
unique outdoor spaces is the
Walter H. Wheeler Rock Garden
beside Mitchell Hall, where students from the first-year seminar
and other geology classes learn
to measure a structure’s orientation and identify types of rock
and minerals. While other multipurpose areas on campus tend to
a streamlined, teak-bench look,
the garden, named for a longtime
geology faculty member and dedicated in 1992, crops out of the
earth with a happened-upon feel
— made even more intimate
through a refurbishment last
spring and the addition of tables
12
November/December 2011
