Re: [HAPS-L] illustrations of ovaries

["David Evans" <devans@xxxxxxx>]

It honestly has never arisen as a problem in any of my classes.

>>> biology@xxxxxxxx 11/6/2006 2:10 PM >>>

Personally, I do NOT think it would be better.  I think that the more circular model shows the continuum concept.  Instructors certainly should be able to explain to students in a few brief sentences that the diagram is exactly that -- diagrammatic!  In real life, the ovary is three-dimensional -- and all that good stuff.  I do like the students being able to see the continuum -- and I think that is the whole purpose of the more circular models.  If you start putting different stages at different places, students will not easily grasp that a secondary was once a primordial, etc.
 
Roberta Meehan
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ken Saladin 
To: HAPS-L@xxxxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: [HAPS-L] illustrations of ovaries


Hi all,

I have had a number of students think that the oocytes migrate from the  
diagrams and also from models that look like the diagrams.



Do you think it would be better if the introductory diagram of ovarian anatomy showed the follicle types in a more random (at least noncircular) spatial arrangement and without connecting arrows? Or would it be better to retain the circular layout but explain more explicitly in the legend that this is only for diagrammatic purposes, and the follicles do not migrate around the ovary like that?

It's something to consider in the next revision cycle if the typical depiction is more misleading than helpful. My guess, though, is that if the ovary were shown with everything from primorial follicles to corpora albicantes scrambled up and "naturalized," we'd probably get even more complaints from instructors wanting the follicles put in some kind of order to show the temporal relationships among them. It's an eternal dilemma of textbook writing that what we do to please one reader displeases another.


Ken 

>From - Mon Jan 1 00:00:00 1965
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