Lessons learned: I do think that students don't make that connection, so I will continue to stress how these processes are connected. I might ask this class next year a more direct question in the same warm up on how is respiration (breathing) connected to cellular respiration - or why they are both called respiration!
With the warm up on mitosis, students had answered a previous question in the same warm up that asked them to list 3 types of cells in their body that they thought would be replaced frequently (by mitosis) and 2 types of cells that they thought would be replaced slowly. I wanted them to realize that to kill rapidly dividing cancer cells, many other types of rapidly divided cells get killed in the process. To do that, they would have to make a 'leap' of realizing that all actively dividing cells would be inhibited by these drugs. As I mentioned in the warmup analysis, the students were so interested in this when we talked about it in class that I ended up writing a Good For on chemo drugs in response to all their questions. They then were able to see that most of these drugs worked either by inhibiting DNA synthesis , or by inhibiting a stage in mitosis.
Lessons learned: I suspected that most students would (mistakenly) think that there was something 'special' about hair cells that made them sensitive to chemo drugs, and the warm up responses indicated that this was so.