How to teach evolution

I'm cruxing on the fact that a lot of my students clearly don't understand evolution and natural selection.  Those topics are particularly tough for several reasons:
1. It's political (which is dumb, but people are dumb, so it makes sense)
2. People think that they understand it when they really don't
3. It's a topic that needs to be "sat" with for a long time to really let it sink in
4. It's not something that you can see happen in an instant.

So I'm putting together a series of videos:

First one that I can't embed that is by far the most offensive, and hilarious:

http://youtu.be/KzF5aQ8X-hA

Next up:









Too bad I can't actually show all of this or I'd get fired. Being in a community of academic scientists in Davis has skewed my perception of the world and what people believe, understand, or care about. I try to remind myself of that every day, but I'm still actually surprised when people believe in Jesus and shit.  I can't let my students in on my disbelief and how much of a bubble I live in. It's hard.

I'm not required to teach evolution in my class. In fact I'm not required to teach anything since the class has never been taught before at American River. However on a personal note it's really important to me that people at least understand it, even if they don't believe it. Some of the students understand it, but since there are no prerequisites, a lot of folks have never had to learn evolution, or learned it so long ago that it's out of the window.  So many questions about what I should/can teach. I mean even a quick and dirty talk on evolution and natural selection could be a challenge - people get entire graduate degrees and base their whole careers on understanding it.

Basically this is all I'm thinking about right now. Such an eye-opener.