WHEN I TOOK CHARGE of the general biology laboratory course at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, in 1972, many of its problems stemmed from a source that most schools might envy: growth. Located near excellent skiing, drawing from a population that still clings to 1950's views of the relationship between college diplomas and careers, Fort Lewis has grown from several hundred students to 3,000 in slightly over a decade. Biology 100, a one-credit laboratory course (separate from 101, which is the three-credit lecture) is one of the most popular courses on campus, partly because it fulfills a college requirement for laboratory sciences. With this popularity have come both numbers of students per section and numbers of sections, until we now serve close to 500 biology majors and nonmajors per year in roughly fourteen sections. Since each section was taught by only one instructor, freshmen in Biology 100 experienced a faculty/student ratio of 1:36, much higher than that of the college as a whole. Obviously, teaching these freshmen more humanely demanded decreasing this ratio so that more student-faculty interaction was possible. To do this with the resources available to us was the problem. Since Fort Lewis is completely an undergraduate institution, there was no cheap labor available in the form of graduate teaching assistants. With the college's recent growth coming at a time when taxpayers demand accountability (defined as increased grams of students processed per dollar of faculty salary) funds for faculty increases or part-time help were not forthcoming. This resulted in an increasing student/faculty ratio at a time when various factions were recruiting minority students, primarily American Indians, to the campus. Increasing numbers of less qualified students found decreased personal attention available to them in our program. In short, we had problems typical of large institutions without large-school resources. I sought resources previously untapped, our junior and senior biology majors, to help bring more human contact into Biology 100. Biology 390: A Seminar in Teaching Biology Laboratories