Long Day RBoC

A whole day without class should have given me plenty of time to get things done prior to a conference I'm leaving for on Thursday morning. This is my planned week of no lab meetings due to the conference. Unfortunately, I only had a slightly productive day. I:

• Went to a committee meeting
  
• Got to observe a senior administrator continually try to steer the committee members away from thinking they might have any role in actual decision making (fun!)
  
• Answered e-mails for my on-line class regarding blackboard gradebook weirdness
  
• Dealt with copy-and-paste Internet plagiarism in my on-line class
  
• Graded two assignments for my on-line class
  
• Met with students in senior-level semi-elective pulling their hair out about a homework assignment. One guy is like "Do you really expect us to turn this in today?" ...as if that is the most unreasonable thing in the world. I did say something along the lines of "What I expected was for you to start it before today." Though I did decide to give them until tomorrow, for a different reason.
  
• Discovered something I thought was in the text for my senior-level required course, was not. Bummer, as I had given them a problem and told them we weren't going over it in class because there is an example in the text. Made handout.
  
• Composed e-mail to chair and registrar to fix Spring class schedule
  
• Arranged water treatment plant tour for adjunct's class
  
• Met with student prep TA for adjunct's lab to give directions on lab prep
  
• Had impromptu department meeting to discuss curricular changes
  
• Realized at about 5:20 I have not yet prepped tomorrow's classes
  
• Gathered some stuff to bring home for class prep, realized this would take a while, called Dr. H, he says "stay, I will get them to bed" Yea!
  

Then I could relax and become quite productive:

• Wrote exam for this Friday when I will be away at a conference
  
• Prepared lecture, overheads and handouts for senior-level required course for tomorrow
  
• Prepared assignment to replace Friday's class meeting in required course
  
• Prepared lecture, overheads and handouts for senior-level semi-elective course for tomorrow
  
• Wrote homework assignment for required course for next week to hand out tomorrow
  
• Wrote study guide for next week's exam in required course
  
• Wrote homework key for this week's assignment in required course and put on Blackboard to appear Friday.
  

Now, I should probably get some sleep.

What not to do if you are in a one-year position hoping to become tenure-track

* Announce to the department chair that your freshman students will be in his office tomorrow because you are going to ream them out in class today.

* Disappointed that the students don't know how to do something, get angry and tell them if they fuck up at their [health-related] jobs in the future, they will kill people.

* Use "fuck" four times in your rant, but never tell the students why you are mad. Do this dramatically enough that word gets around and other students start using "pulled a [your last name] on so-and-so" synonymously with "told so-and-so off". Bonus points if faculty in other departments hear about the rant and mention it to the department chair.

* Ignore all advice/course materials/handouts given to you by others who have taught the courses you are teaching. Instead, change your materials, style and approach daily, doing the first thing that comes into your head.

* Make fun of a senior level student for not knowing a conversion factor. Do this when the student is the only one available to be your lab assistant for two different labs. Make sure to keep making fun of him for about 15 minutes in front of a room full of freshman women.

* Exclaim in a happy voice "Only 1/3 of my class is getting D's or F's!" without determining whether this is typical for the course you are teaching.

* Go through 9 chapters of a 24 chapter, two-semester text in the first three weeks of class.

* Assume the other faculty member who prepped your lab when you were behind was happy to do it.

I concede Wikipedia is not without its problems

I love Wikipedia. I think it has its uses in education, but the challenge, of course, is for us to help students learn to use it appropriately. I wish I could somehow make this happen before they use it inappropriately. On the other hand, inappropriate use sometimes provides me with an opening. Here is an exchange with one of my general education students. The course is theme based and could be something like, let's say, science and art.

To: twice@slac.edu

From: studenta@slac.edu

Hi Dr. Twice: I am curious about a question on the online quiz. The question is "approximately when did synthetic pigments come on the scene?" I answered 200-500 years ago and it was wrong, so I took the test again. The question appeared so I answered 500-1000 years ago even though I was certain it as 200-500 years ago and again it was wrong! I do not understand since everything I have read points to the
1700's and Prussian blue being the first synthetic pigment.

What am I missing?

[Student]


----

To: studenta@slac.edu

From: twice@slac.edu

Hi [Student],

On page 187 in Colour: Why the World isn't Grey, Rissotti explains that the first synthetic pigments were used in the second millennium B.C. (White Lead and Blue Frit, for example). I realize that Wikipedia in one place says Prussian Blue was first, and in another place that it was the first _modern_ synthetic pigment. However, the assigned reading in the Colour course textbook, makes the distinction between natural pigments (minerals), and synthetic ones (those that must be manufactured in some way), without somehow limiting the idea to the modern era.

Please note that Wikipedia is a site with user generated content and, while incredibly helpful, is not necessarily authoritative. This section, and in particular this claim, on the Wikipedia site is not fully referenced, which makes it more questionable. (It is best to confirm these details with other sources.) While the 1700's and on were extremely important in the development and use of synthetic pigments, synthetic pigments were used in antiquity.

-Dr. Twice

I'm in the middle of an ongoing (seven months!) e-mail discussion with my husband, my husband's first cousin once removed, his second cousin (the son of the f.c.o.r) and his sister's husband (my brother-in-law-in-law) on the merits of Wikipedia. The f.c.o.r. thinks it is bad, bad, bad. He has a humanities background, the others, who are more in favor of Wikipedia, have technical backgrounds. I've read several newspaper and magazine articles in the midst of this discussion that speak to this divide. Scientists, in general, are more likely to feel positively about Wikipedia. Reasons suggested include a greater likelihood of participation in the creation of wiki content among scientists, a higher comfort level in the scientific community with on-line collaboration and the earlier adoption of this format by scientists. All of these lead to perhaps more developed and vetted articles in the sciences, leading to more use/trust/participation, leading to more developed and vetted articles, and so on.

I sent the e-mail exchange to f.c.o.r. His response?

"So there!"

In my defense, I never said there weren't any problems. And the pigment entry has been updated now, one of the strengths of a wiki.

Sometimes students understand right away...

I will be away for a few days at a conference next week. This means I will miss one of my upper division labs, and I scheduled a "day off" in the other upper division lab. I almost never cancel class, but the lab falls midweek, missing Thanksgiving, Labor Day and Columbus Day, so it already has more meetings than any other lab in our department. Another reason is that the students in the two classes overlap considerably, and we have a lot due in both (labs, huge problem sets, an exam, etc.).

With that set up, enter one of my more industrious and polite students:

"Dr. Twice?"

"Yes?"

"Mary and I thought we would come in next week, you know, because we don't have lab, and finish the second part of this one. Then we could have a day off later."

"Um, well, if you come in, then I don't really get the afternoon off."

"Ah. Never mind."

This is not...

...what you want to see when you wake up when both you and your spouse teach class at 9:10 and your campuses are each about 25 miles away from home.




Fortunately, it quickly became apparent that a cat had walked across the clock, forwarding the time by two hours.

About this Radiohead thing...

So, all over NPR this morning, I heard a lot about how innovative the band was being. Yes, it is interesting that they are selling their latest album directly to fans via download. And it is also cool that buyers get to choose what they are going to pay.

But all I could think of was, isn't this more or less what shareware has been, for like, ever?

Task Force (noun): a temporary grouping under one leader for the purpose of accomplishing a definite objective

Dr. H., who is a tenured faculty member at a largish university, sends this along for your amusement:

During the council meeting today, we had to elect representatives for the Strategic Task Force, whose mission is to read and organize [some stuff related to] the President's Strategic Plan (it's all very Dilbert).

The Dean took notes on the election on a whiteboard at the front of the room. At the top of the board, the Dean wrote, "Task Farce".

No one corrected him.

An observation from my son...

Dalton likes to ask questions that are really statements.

Dalton: You have a lot of hair on your legs, Mom-my?

Me: Um, yes, I have a lot of hair on my legs.

Dalton: You have a lot of hair on your tummy, Mommy?

Me: Yes, uh, I guess I have some hair on my tummy.

Dalton: Do you have a lot of hair on your back, Mommy?

Me: No, I don't have a lot of hair on my back.

Dalton: Yeah...you do!

In Praise of Whiteboards

I love whiteboards. Judging by my department and a recent post at Learning Curves, I must be the only one.

In our department, we have maybe 6 classrooms we teach in frequently, and there are maybe 6 or 7 more classrooms in the building. There is a whiteboard in just one. The college wanted to put one in the building as a trial, I was the only one not adamantly opposed. It went into the room I use more frequently than anyone else. I love this board.

In my defense, it is a very new board which appears to be very high quality, no one has done anything unforgivable to it (yet) and the surface is really in great shape.

And I can make graphs in color! Color! I love color.

I do have some advice for dealing with whiteboards:

• Bring your own markers, always. Take them with you when you leave. (Easy for me - my office is 10 feet from the whiteboard.)
  
  
• Do not use low odor markers without testing first - some are impossible to erase and leave a horrible film. Others don't. Learn to love the solvent.
  
  
• Never leave stuff on the board when you leave. Something happens after stuff is on for longer than an hour and getting it off is not pretty.
  
  
• Only use the cleaner when you have dry erased what you can and there is ample time for the board to dry.
  
  
• Bullet tip yes, chisel tip no.
  

Yesterday, I said to Dr. H. "No one seems to like whiteboards except me. Everyone else hates them." Turns out he prefers whiteboards too.

Weird, I thought. Is it a tech/engineering school thing? Is is that we both teach in rooms with good boards and everyone else has boards that someone has dragged sandpaper across? Are we the only ones who bring our own markers?

Then I realized: we both have super dry skin. When I teach in rooms with chalkboards, I spend about 5 months in the winter with borderline chapped hands. Dr. H.'s get so bad his skin splits.

As an added bonus, Google gives me 13K references for rhinitis and chalk dust. For whatever reason, the markers don't bother my nose nearly as much as the chalk dust.

Another Note to My Students

Just a quick hint:

Suppose you are asked to "Calculate [blah] using the equation below from [reference] and comment on how these compare to [blah] calculated by [the usual fashion]"

An appropriate comment is not:

"It makes no sense to me but whatever."

p.s. In fact, if it really makes no sense, maybe, just maybe, your calculation is incorrect.

What I Like About My Online Class

I teach an on-line general education science course for non-science majors. The course is theme-based, and physchembio 101 principles are integrated into the course as needed to explain various phenomena in the theme.

It is considered a "hybrid" course. I have on-line lectures, discussion board post requirement and quizzes. There are also traditional homework assignments and short writing assignments. The hybrid part is this: every other week we meet on campus for lab. The lab meetings are used for laboratory activities, exams, and regular classroom stuff - help with homework, review of difficult concepts, and some introduction of material that is just flat out easier to do in person than on-line.

I'm very happy with this course, and one of the reasons it succeeds is the on campus meetings. These meetings give the class a sense of camaraderie and allow me to establish a class personality. They also allow us to do cool experiments, and ensure the students have an opportunity to ask questions in person, and give me a place to do organizational stuff beyond sending long explanatory e-mails. I also have the ability to give closed book exams. At our small college, we do not have a testing center or any similar setup, so there would be the possibility of a roommate doing an on-line exam - hence my preference for the in-class kind. In class, I can also help people learn how to use their scientific calculator, do cool in-class demos, and sit down with students after the experiments are over and work through stuff.

I recently added weekly on-line quizzes on the reading. I used the question pool feature of Blackboard to create a pool of questions, and the students may take the quiz as many times as they wish. Each time, they get a randomly selected set of questions, and I create enough questions that most quiz attempts will contain unique different questions, though there will be occasional repeats. As far as I can tell, students use this appropriately. The take the quiz once, study some, and come back an try again after some time is passed. When they come back, their score is usually much higher. When they are close to a perfect score, there will be multiple attempts in a short period of time, separated by 10 to 30 minutes. I'm anxious to see if this helps their exam scores any, and what they think of the whole thing.

Now, if I just had fewer classes to teach, I could offer this course more often.