Ok. My AGU abstract is submitted. My quizzes are graded. My powerpoints (both Monday's and tomorrow's) are uploaded onto the course management site, so students can print them if they prefer to do that. (I'll still encourage them to draw.) Lab is done, the kid is at a soccer clinic, and the plants are watered. It must be time for a meme.
From Chuck:
Use bold to indicate minerals you’ve seen in the wild. Italics is for those seen in laboratories, museums, stores, or other non field locations.Ex pet nerds may use underlining to indicate those that they’ve grown with their own two hands.And I won’t bother with stuff you intend on seeing- if you didn’t want to see all these minerals yourself, you’d be spending your precious lunch hour on a physics or biomedical blog.
I'm going to underline minerals that I've probed, dated, or had some other intimate acquaintance with.
And I'll put an * beside any minerals in my intro class's mineral lab.
50 minerals everyone should see:
Andalusite
Apatite (I'm sure some of my rocks have had apatite, but the &^%# blueschists didn't. Good thing Trevor found some in the other rocks.)
Barite
Beryl
*Biotite
Chromite
Chrysotile
Cordierite
Corundum
Diamond
*Dolomite
Florencite
*Galena
*Garnet
*Graphite
*Gypsum
*Halite
*Hematite (I may have probed this while trying to figure out what was in a rock, too.)
*Hornblende (Ugh. I will never date a hornblende again.)
Illite
Illmenite
*Kaolinite
Kyanite
Lepidolite
*Limonite
*Magnetite
Molybdenite
Monazite (Only probed, not dated. And they were too small to see.)
Nepheline
*Olivine
Omphacite
Opal
Perovskite
*Plagioclase
*Pyrite
*Quartz (I've also probed it when I meant to probe plag. A lot.)
Rutile
Sanidine
Sillimanite
Silver (native)
*Sphalerite
Staurolite
*Sulphur (native)
*Talc
Tourmaline
Tremolite
Turquoise
Vermiculite
Willemite
Zeolite (Which one? Huh?)
Zircon (The ones in my rocks have been too small to see without a microscope.)
Minerals that should be on the list
*Calcite
Glaucophane
Rhodochrosite
*Muscovite
*Copper (native)
Gold (native)
I vote to ditch florencite, willemite, and illite in favor of three of these.
Edit: You know this is a really funny meme to be doing during the week when my intro class is talking about minerals. Especially when I've just finished writing an online assignment (well, open-book quiz, kind of) in which my students are supposed to find out which minerals from their lab are in which mineral groups.
2 comments:
Well, everyone *should* see calcite and muscovite, but gold, glaucophane, copper, and rhodochrosite are fun minerals to see.
Some of the monazite grains I date are not only big enough to see with the microscope in the thin section--one of them was big enough to see in the thin section *without* the microscope! (Which made it rather difficult to get a decent BSE image of on the probe--darn thing was too big to fit on the screen!)
Post a Comment