Botany, taught at the bench.

Most botany courses are a textbook full of diagrams with a few demonstrations bolted on. This one is the reverse. Every week is built around a question you answer at the bench — with a microscope, a hand lens, a flower on a dissecting board, a seedling reaching toward the light — and the reading exists to support that work. That is what "lab-led, not textbook-led" means, and it is the single most important thing to understand about how this course runs.

The course is organized as a two-day rhythm: a Concept Day where the idea is introduced and worked through on paper, and an Experiment Day where it becomes physical — measured, dissected, sketched — and gets written into a real lab notebook. Between the two days, the student works at home, and that gap is where retention actually consolidates.

Mastery is the progression rule. A student advances through a concept when they can reproduce, explain, and apply it — not when the calendar says so. "Not yet" is the honest, expected default; "mastered" is earned and demonstrated. The rubrics are the instrument that makes that judgment fair and repeatable.