The most difficult class I took in college was, without hesitation, General Entomology with Dr. Fashing. Yes, one should expect a 400 level biology class to be hard, but I figured it's a class about bugs, how hard could it be? I majored in biology so I was used to getting my lazy ass kicked, and friend of numerous GTBers Bekkah took Insects and Society with Dr. Fashing and raved about him and how low-stress the class was. Insects and Society is a 100 level course designed for Art History majors to fulfill their Area I requirements so in hindsight this wasn't the best recommendation to follow.
Dr. Fashing is a very nice guy and he's passionate about the subject matter, but the class was insane. The lab component was 1/4 of the grade and it was entirely taxonomy. He would start every lab with a quiz which involved him throwing 10-15 dead bugs on a table and he would ask you "What Order is this one? What Family is this one?" and I would write down "bug" or "cricket" or "butterfly" which was never the right answer. The lab required a project: go out and collect (i.e., catch and kill) forty different Families of insect. Not a mom and dad and sibling group of bugs, but a taxonomic Family. That's really fucking hard. Why you ask? Well, they all look the same so you can spend three hours out in the field collecting fifty insects but when you get back to the lab and key them out you'll find you only have four different Families. It was awful.
And it was bad socially. I rare knew anyone in any of my biology classes, usually it was everyone's favorite ER doctor but he wouldn't take bugs with me. Luckily Langdon from Sig was in there too so we would forage for bugs together. Everyone was assigned a butterfly net and a killjar (a mason jar with some substance mothball-like glued to the bottom that smothers the bugs) so I would wait for Langdon on the back porch, then we would meet up and go to the woods or a field or whatever. On one such occasion, erstwhile GTB contributor Dennis's girlfriend came flouncing by in a nightie with four or five of her similarly-attired fellow sorority pledges--they were off to perform some task which apparently called for "sleazy and demure."
Ever the gentleman, I said "Hello" and she replied, as sarcastically and sing-song as possible "Hey butterfly boy!" and all her trampy little friends giggled and tittered. It's my experience at W&M in a nutshell.
We had to save all the dead bugs we collected and mount them on pins in a box and turn them in at the end of the year. I didn't get to forty, all I ever had was a bunch of flies that mimicked other bugs to avoid being eaten--apparently this is their jam. The rugby girl with the leg brace took pity on me at the end and gave me a weevil and some evil looking creature I don't remember the name of and that got me to maybe thirty-eight, which is more than half-way to sixty-nine but not enough to get full credit for the lab.
It was also bad for rootsy because my box of dead bugs attracted live bugs--ants swarmed my collection which I kept on top of my wardrobe which was next to his face on the top of our cave. So he awoke to a facefull of ants. I, of course, was panicked--not for rooty's health but for the integrity of my box of bugs. No one had bug spray so I stole spray starch from one of the ROTC guys and surprisingly that did the trick. Between what the ants ate and the starch destroyed, I lost a few precious bugs for my project.
As you can see in the link to his bio above, Dr. Fashing's research centers primarily on mites which are arachnids, not insects. We were only allowed one arachnid for the collection so everyone had one spider. But we would've gotten credit for a tick, which is also an arachnid. And also gross. Here is without hesitation the most entertaining video I've ever seen about ticks. You should watch it because it's tick season and you need to know what you're in for if you go out in the woods. My friend got Lyme disease and now she's out from work on disability so it's serious business. You should watch even if you have no plans to go outside this summer. If not for yourself, watch it for Dr. Fashing, all his miserable bug-collecting students, and their ant-swarmed roommates.
And if you don't like that deer tick video, check out this Deer Tick video.
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