My third artifact from my career at the Richard Stockton College is a tree
identification report (see PDF file) from Professor Zimmermann’s Dendrology course.
This course, in addition to being my favorite course that I have taken at Stockton, was also
the most rewarding. The assignment that I have included is an example of the “Mystery
Tree” assignments, where Professor Zimmermann would tell the class to use our acquired
dendrology skills to identify an unknown species based on morphology. The entire class
was based on in-field tree identification and taxonomy, and the information that I learned
in the class has stuck with me more so than any other class that I have taken.
The skills that this class imparted upon me (tree identification and taxonomy) are
particularly valuable to me as I enter graduate study. I will be an instructor for the
undergraduate dendrology lab at Yale University, and it is because of the class at Stockton
that I was able to obtain this position. My duties will involve taking the class into the field
for tree identification, and I will be utilizing the skills I gained in Professor Zimmermann’s
class to teach.
Aside from the class that I will be teaching this fall, I will continue to develop the
skills that I learned in the dendrology class throughout my professional career. That is why
the mystery tree exercise is such an important artifact of my study at Stockton. After I have
completed my education, I will still need to evolve my dendrological knowledge base by
learning the identifying characteristics and taxonomy of new species. The mystery tree
exercises allowed me to practice this by using my own observations and research into
dendrology textbooks to discover the identity of a tree species that I had never before
encountered.
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