Essays on what the bench teaches, what assessment can certify, and what a science course owes its students.

I'm Leslie Nichols. I formerly served as an anatomy & physiology adjunct lecture and lab instructor and laboratory coordinator at Boise State University, where I coordinated a multi-section lab program serving more than 1,000 students per term. Before that I taught secondary science. I'm an Idaho-certified science teacher, and I now focus on private science education through Bright Minds Learning. We are gathering interest in classes, workshops, and advanced preparation for college-level science and pre-health study.

My teaching career spans more than 30 years across homeschool co-ops, public schools, and university classrooms. Biology and A&P are my specialties. Earlier in my teaching life, more than 20 years leading homeschool co-ops gave me experience across subjects and age groups. That background still shapes how I connect lab work with reading, writing, and mathematical reasoning.

Drawing on that university experience and my work in private education, this site is a place to think out loud about the questions that come up in any large undergraduate science program: what hands-on lab work helps students learn, how to assess competency honestly, what we owe a gateway course that funnels into nursing and medical careers, and where pedagogical innovation ends and content reduction begins.

The pieces here cite the literature where the literature exists. They try to be useful to a department chair, a curriculum committee, an accreditor, or a new faculty member trying to make up their mind. They argue with positions, never with people.