Immersion in a Wizarding World

It turns out that setting aside a large chunk of quiet time to read the books or watching the movies is not the only way to immerse oneself in the Harry Potter experience. Apparently a Polish company is setting up a Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) festival in a beautiful castle and grounds that will have the look and feel of the Potter universe. The events are set to take place in April in Czocha, Poland. (A search on any of these terms brings up videos and enactment photos.)  As an aside, I just watched the light and amusing “Austenland” where the main protagonist fulfills her weird obsession of all things Jane Austen by participating in a LARP holiday experience themed around the Austen universe.

When I was in graduate school, there was an annual Renaissance Faire LARP out on the lawn next to my building. Colorful tents would be pitched and the inhabitants dressed in medieval clothing. There would be knights in armor carrying swords, long tables for food with drinking goblets, and a variety of flags and pennants. Although I saw barrels, I don’t know if there was mead or ale or some other alcoholic drink given there might be minors in the vicinity. There were also never any horses, for which I’m thankful – I don’t think the smell would have gone over well. I’ve personally never had any interest in LARPs, even though I’m a huge fan of the Tolkien world. Nor have I been to Medieval Times where apparently there is jousting, which means there are horses present.

In any case, the Czocha experience apparently allows one to take on different roles: professor, student, groundskeeper, janitor and possibly others. Students can experience being in Hogwarts classes. Potions class is explicitly mentioned. I bet I could teach that class – it would be chemistry lab with fun loud experiments and probably improper safety conditions. I wonder if the school robes are flame-retardant. Monsters may be lurking in the woods. There is broomstick and Quidditch, although notably one’s feet stay on the ground in this case. The pictures and videos suggest that students also learn how to cast spells, i.e., effect some sort of magic. It’s unclear how exactly they are going to accomplish this.

Let me speculate on a possible example. In Book 1, the first years learn how to levitate objects using the Wingardium Leviosa spell. It requires you to swish your wand in a specific motion and pronounce the spell correctly. Now one could set up a contraption where a feather lies on a mesh. This mesh covers a tube that can blow air to lift the feather. Release of the air is voice-activated, such that the correct “magic” words will cause the feather to rise. This is fairly straightforward. A little more tricky is to coordinate this with a particular hand motion. But one can do this if the wand sends out signals to a sensor similar to a Nintendo Wii remote. In fact the Nyko company makes a third-party remote called a Wand. How appropriate! So if the words are said simultaneously to the correct wand motion, the contraption is triggered and the feather is raised.

There are probably several other spells you can carry out using a variety of contraptions but there are significant limitations when dealing with actually manipulating physical objects. It would be much easier to have an immersive experience as a spellcaster through a simulator, possibly utilizing an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality (VR) headset for 3D gaming along with a Wand. Given the evolutionary speed of computer games in my lifetime alone, and the advanced graphics and sound, I think it’s simply a matter of time before we get to the point where you will immerse yourself so fully in the experience, you might have trouble differentiating fantasy from reality. VR gaming is probably the next step in the evolution of the computer game. It will be much easier to implement the manipulation of virtual objects than clumsy contraptions manipulating physical objects. But if the physical experience is what you are looking for, the Czocha version apparently has 180 spots for fans.

What other options are there for now? For the theme park feel, there is also the Universal Studios Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida. Apparently there is a 3D simulator ride although I don’t think you really do anything but take the ride. I haven’t had a chance to visit, or maybe I should say an excuse to visit. I’m still waiting for an appropriate conference not too far away from Orlando that will push me to go visit. In the meantime I’m quite happy with my books!

Training New Students in Undergraduate Research

This past week I was training two new research students. For new students in my lab, I set aside a day and a half to teach them some of the basics so they can get started delving into a research project. The learning curve can be steep because it is rare for a student to have had a class in computational chemistry before joining my group. I try to take students at all levels; one of my students took quantum chemistry last semester and will be learning some thermodynamics and kinetics this coming semester. The other student hasn’t reached those classes yet, but has a strong science background.

Over the years I have developed resources to help shepherd my students through the first stage. First they go through a Unix tutorial to familiarize themselves with the operating system and working in a command-line environment. Then they learn how to use the basic text editor “vi”. After that we cover the general setup of the hardware, how to log in and out of machines, check the load on a compute node, and other system-specific things. All this takes about half a day. As homework they then read one or two papers related to their assigned project, that also covers some of the basics of computational chemistry. I tell them that they won’t understand most of the paper the first few times reading it, and that’s okay. They will be re-reading the papers over the semester and comprehension will come with time.

The next day we go through the basic outline of how computational chemistry relates to things they’ve seen in class. We cover some basic terminology and students get a rough sense of their projects. I assign a project to each new student, because in the early stages a student typically does not have the background to outline a doable project. I do take into account their interests, prior knowledge and skill set. A student who has been in my group for a while may later shape their project according to their interests.

Then we start to learn the software. There are many steps to setting up a calculation for the type of work that I do, so we go through these step by step. While I have a group wiki that the students can refer to (and I write up “cheat sheets” for reference), I’ve found that being present and guiding a student through the first few runs is what works best. First the student sets things up with my instruction, line by line, on a “toy problem” (i.e. one for which the answer is known). Then we repeat the process for a slightly different calculation with different parameters, but still following the same overall methodology. This time, the student works it out (they take copious notes the first time in their lab notebooks) while I’m there to guide them when they get stuck or stumble over some of the steps. Finally we do this a third time where I leave the lab, and the student comes by my office if he or she runs into trouble midway. By the end of the day, the student shows me the results of the third calculation. I then give the student a little more reading related to the actual project and now the student is ready to delve into a project. I had forgotten how much talking I do during the day and a half and as a result I had a scratchy throat by the end of the second day. Thankfully it was a Friday and having avoided talking much in the last 24 hours I’m now recovered.

For the first half of the semester, my meetings with new research students usually take the form of my telling them what type of calculation I would like them to run, and their showing me their results and subsequent analysis. In the meantime I try to teach them a little theory along the way depending on their background and what classes they have taken. By the second half, hopefully they will start to have a bit more self-direction and figure out what to do next, i.e., I ask them what they think they should try next. Some students are quite independent and start to catch on, but others need hand-holding for a longer period of time. This is something I still find hard to predict even though I’ve had a fair number of students over the years. My research group typically has 3-4 undergraduates.

Being in a liberal arts college with no graduate program, means that there are no graduate students. Thus, the nature of undergraduate research is quite different (at least in the sciences) at a liberal arts college compared to a research university. For starters, the main goal of my running a research program is to give undergraduates the opportunity to learn how to do actual scientific research. They work on real problems (that no one knows the answer to), although I have usually carved out their projects into bite-sized pieces. My goal is not to become a famous scientist, nor do I have the time, energy or resources to compete with labs at research universities with armies of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. To keep my lab running, I do have to write grants for extramural support and keep publishing in peer-review journals, albeit at a lower rate than expected at a research university. Thankfully, things have gone well so far, but funding gets tighter as the years go by, and the competition gets stiffer.

One positive outcome (and there are many) of undergraduate research is that students become more invested in their other science classes, at least that has been my experience. When starting on research, I think they get a glimpse of how much is unknown, and how important it is to keep learning. I try to make connections between their research projects and the classes they are taking. (There are always connections!) It’s a pleasure when students report that something clicked for them in class because of their undergraduate research project. Many of my students are co-authors on my peer-reviewed publications. This I’ve found is a strong motivating factor for them to work hard on their projects! Providing students the opportunity to present their work at national conferences is also a delight, and they usually find the experience mind-blowing. I’m particularly pleased when my undergraduates are mistaken as graduate students at poster conferences (we put them in the thick of it with graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and full-fledged scientists).

Having undergraduates work in my lab also forces me to keep being involved in research. My time gets easily taken up by teaching (which I love) and administration (which is part and parcel of the job), and sometimes research gets short shrift. The funny thing is that if I wanted to be more highly productive research-wise, it’s actually better for me not to take on undergraduate students. I can do the work much faster than they can (at least the type of work that I do) and I would save time having to explain the ins and outs of the research project, methodology and the theory behind all of it. Not to mention, I have to check all their files carefully before I publish anything, sometimes checking and re-running calculations myself. So one might even say it’s double work on my part. But that’s not the point. The point is the education of the student and so I’m happy to have the students participate as co-creators of new knowledge!

My Ranking of the Harry Potter books

After re-reading Books 1-4 in the series, I’ve been slow about starting on Book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The reasons, I think, are two-fold. Book 5 is my least favorite in the series, although let me be clear that I greatly enjoy all the books. I also suspect that it might ironically generate the most material for my blog. My plan is to read through it slowly, because it brings up many “educational” aspects allowing plenty of room for commentary and speculation on my part.

Since I’ve mentioned that Book 5 is my least favorite, it’s only fair that I rank the books and provide some subjective commentary. So without further ado, here are my rankings from most favored to least favored: 3, 6, 7, 1, 4, 2, 5.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is just a romp of a story. In my opinion, it has excellent pacing, engaging twists and turns, interesting and memorable characters, and introduces two very interesting objects – the Marauder’s Map and Time Turner. Both objects are integrated very well into the book, and the Marauder’s Map goes on to feature prominently in some of the following books. The ending sequence is superb and you hit the “point of no return” reasonably early in the book where you just have to get all the way to the end of the story. Very well set up in my opinion!

Books 6 and 7 are very interesting because they aren’t mainly about Harry Potter, but about Voldemort and Dumbledore respectively – both of whom have been up to this point rather mysterious and intriguing. Snape also features prominently across both books. We know quite a bit about Harry, Ron and Hermione from the earlier books so it’s a change of scenery to peek into the lives of other interesting key characters. While I found Dumbledore more interesting than Voldemort, I think the story-telling in Book 6, with its advantage of being the penultimate cliffhanger to set up the last book, having a superior storyline. Book 7 has a little too many things going on, although the positioning of Shell Cottage at the turning point of the story is excellent.

I rank the first book next because it holds a special place as the first introduction to the characters in the book. It’s an engaging compact story and the scenes with the mirror are some of the best parts of the book. One also feels the same sense of wonder as Harry, being transported into this new magical world. The fourth book is a pivot in the series. While the story stretches belief in certain parts, it has many interesting bits – learning about other schools, the merpeople, the Death Eaters, and the Pensieve.

The Chamber of Secrets is in the vein of many mystery books – there’s a killer on the loose and the protagonists need to find out who, how, what, and why. We get a little bit of history into Hagrid and Riddle. The diary is interesting as a pre-Pensieve, but the story is uneven at the end as Tom Riddle reveals who he is. Lockhart is a little annoying as a character, and the storyline features some weak parts – it feels a little less cohesive.

The Order of the Phoenix starts off in a promising way, but Harry’s constant whining throughout the book is one of the main detracting features. I didn’t find the Prophecy storyline as compelling, although there are some interesting parts of the book. Certainly the educational aspects, the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) interplay between the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore, the forming of D.A., and Legilimency. I am looking forward to re-reading it next, and I might start this weekend. So I expect to be waxing about education and Hogwarts shortly!

That’s my ranking of the books and I’m sticking to it! At some point I’ll have to rank the movies but that means re-watching them and I haven’t decided yet if I want to do so at the risk of constraining my imagination.

Once Upon A Time

On the recommendation from my sister, we decided to watch the TV series Once Upon a Time by borrowing DVDs from the local library. I’ve now finished Season 3 so I will have to wait a while until the Season 4 DVD set is released. We don’t own a TV, and frankly I think watching the DVDs is much more efficient. Normally I don’t start watching a TV series until after the series is completed, but I have made a few examples, for example, BBC’s Sherlock (mentioned in my most recent post). The only two series I’ve watched all the way to the end so far are the new(er) Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad; the latter was discussed in a previous post.

The premise of the first season of Once Upon a Time is that the main protagonist, Emma Swan (played by Jennifer Morrison), travels to a town named Storybrooke. The denizens of the town are “fairy tale” characters trapped there by an evil curse, which has also taken away their memories. They cannot leave the town, nor can outsiders come in (they won’t see it there) with some rare exceptions. Emma is one of the rare exceptions and the story unfolds around why she is here and how her coming heralds the breaking of the evil curse.

The best part about this series is the back-stories of the characters. The writers have done a great job overall in coming up with creative stories that combine aspects of the fairy tale that we know with unexpected twists and turns. Some characters transcend multiple roles across different fairy tales. And seeing how characters from one tale might interact with those from another tale opens up all sorts of story-telling possibilities. As the series progresses, the histories of the characters are pushed further back and intertwined to keep things interesting. The overall series is good, i.e., I will probably watch Season 4, but it suffers from some unevenness after the first season. The reuse of certain large-scale plot devices feels a little forced (as it does in other TV series and fiction books). The Hunger Games trilogy is probably the best example of this given its current popularity. It makes me think that the authors or writers lack the ideas or creativity to bring a story to its appropriate conclusion. Sometimes there’s a good stopping point, and one should just stop. (It’s hard to stop when something is popular and making money.)

As the series progresses, we are introduced to more Once Upon a Time characters and the interesting idea of multiple worlds. The people of Storybrooke come from a world called The Enchanted Forest. But there are other worlds with characters from different tales. Some characters can travel between worlds if they have an appropriate magical method, device or object. Some worlds, such as The Enchanted Forest, are magical worlds where some of the characters wield magic. Others, like our own, are categorized as non-magical worlds. Not surprisingly, the curse that transports folks to Storybrooke into our world, also bring magic into our world. This world is hidden to outsiders though, in the same way that the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter world takes great pains to enact laws against revealing the existence of the magical world to Muggles, the casting of Muggle-repelling charms in key locations where magical folks congregate, and to cast Obliviate spells to erase/modify the memory of a Muggle who may have inadvertently witnessed magic being performed.

Not everyone in a world with magic is capable of wielding it. In fact the vast majority of folks are not. Magic is power, and in fact the magical folks are typically the de facto rulers of their respective realms. Interestingly, most magic wielders in Once Upon a Time are women. There also seems to be some genetics and some training involved in becoming a magic user. Like in the world of Harry Potter, non-magic users can give birth to magic users in The Enchanted Forest, although it’s unclear when, how or why. Certainly training is important to learn how to use or channel the magic. Magic can also be imbibed through magical objects. There is Dark Magic, to be differentiated from Light/Good/Regular Magic.

Is there a gene for magic? Harry Potter, given his parentage, is born with great magical abilities as expected. Hermione, on the other hand, had Muggle parents but turned out to be a most astute and capable student of magic. Two very capable wizards, Voldemort and Snape, both had mothers who were witches but fathers who were Muggles, so-called “half-bloods”. Does magic then run in the blood? Or is it just a figure of speech?

Now magic seems to be akin to the Force in the Star Wars Universe. The following is found in Wikipedia: “According to the Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn, midichlorians were described as ‘microscopic life-forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with the Force.’ Midichlorians existed in the blood system of individuals in the Star Wars universe and acted as an energy ‘conductor’ of the Force.” So perhaps the reason why some folks are magic users and others are not has to do with a microbial symbiont. This could explain why the women in Once Upon A Time are the predominant magic users, and that the main transmission may come from the mother. It also helps with explaining Voldemort and Snape’s magical abilities, although it doesn’t help with the Skywalker family. Given that I’ve been recently thinking about the history of microbes, this could be an interesting topic for further exploration.

Clearly much training is needed to wield magic. This is the case in Once Upon A Time and in the Harry Potter books. It’s also true for Jedi. So while you might possess the symbiont, you still need to learn how to channel the necessary abilities to manipulate nature. Education turns out to be just as important in the magical world. That’s why there’s Hogwarts! Keeps professors in business.

Make It Stick: Part 3

I’ve just finished reading “make it stick” (which I borrowed from the library), and have decided I need to buy my own copy so I can refer to it regularly during the semester. The book’s final chapter covers tips for students, teachers and trainers. For the students reading my blog, here are some of the habits of a very successful student profiled in the book. (There are more. Also I have paraphrased in some cases.) For the teachers, go get your copy of the book and read it.

·      Always does the reading prior to class

·      Anticipates exam questions and their answers while reading/studying

·      Answers rhetorical questions to test retention of the reading

·      Reorganizes the course information into a self-designed study guide

·      Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them near bed/desk, and self-tests regularly from time to time.

However the topic of today’s post outlines the two things that jumped out at me from Chapter 7, which is subtitled “Increase Your Abilities”. The first is linked to something I discussed in my previous post about the potential illusions of “knowing”. Asking someone to vividly imagine an event can lead to the planting of a false memory. The person later recalls that the imagined event took place when it actually did not. What’s interesting is that this can be used to one’s advantage in trying to remember things, and it works like a mnemonic device or memory cue. This is the famed “memory palace” I first encountered when watching BBC’s Sherlock. Yes, Sherlock’s memory palace strategy really does work and there is evidence! By vividly associating objects in a particular location (a familiar room or a café), one can hang topics, concepts and details in such a way that recalling a large number of details becomes quite facile. Apparently this is one of many strategies employed by world-class Memory Championship participants. (I didn’t even know such championships existed.)

The second is related to Carol Dweck’s studies on the relationship between how one one’s notion of intellectual ability (either as naturally fixed or something that can be improved) and actual learning and task performance. As the authors write, there is much truth to the old saw “If you think you can, or you can’t, you’re right.” Dweck’s studies are quite interesting, but I won’t describe them in detail here. (An internet search will turn up many of the famous ones.) Instead I want to quote the book’s authors describing some of the conclusions. They say it much better than I could. Below I’ve stitched together sentences from several paragraphs that I’m quoting. This is just to give you a gist. To read it in full, go get the book!

“Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet [so you] look smart. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative and work harder. Paradoxically, a focus on performance trips up [stars who] praised for being naturals, believe their performance is a result of innate gifts. [They believe] they shouldn’t have to work hard to excel [and] avoid practicing, because a need to practice [might suggest] their natural gifts are not good enough. [They] hold back from risk-taking where they [may] have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome. When you praise [kids] for intelligence, [they] get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. [However it’s] more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility, and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success.”

To get there however, “the active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your control.” So it looks like it’s important to have the right attitude and work hard using effective strategies, many of which seem counter-intuitive (such as interleaved practice and spaced retrieval). It feels, at least in the very short-term, “less effective” than massed practice and cramming-style re-reading and repetition. That’s why many students use it even though it does not serve them well in the long run (which may be as short as a semester, or even until the next midterm exam).

One thing the book makes clear is that it is important for the teacher to explain the strategies used in class (frequent low-stakes quizzes, working on problems before the material is “taught”, reflective meta-cognition writing assignments, etc.) otherwise there tends to be much grumbling and complaining from students, at least initially until they see the dividends pay off. Of course if a student is not willing to work hard (or the teacher for that matter), then good, solid, effective learning isn’t going to take place.

Make It Stick: Part 2

Chapter 5 of the book that I’m currently reading, “make it stick”, is titled “Avoid Illusions of Knowing”. (See Part 1 of my post for more information on this book). The authors go through a number of ways in which we can easily be fooled into thinking or “recalling” something that isn’t true. Asking someone to vividly imagine an event can lead to later recall that the event actually took place when it did not. The power of suggestion, via leading questions or statements, can alter how someone recalls an event. A hypnosis subject who is asked to freely explore anything that comes to mind can lead him or her to later “remember” an event imagined while under hypnosis. 

I’ve found that many students have a false sense of preparedness when studying for an exam. Much of science class (mine included) is about working problems. A student who gets stuck on a problem and needs help sometimes asks me for help, but more often than not prefers to ask a fellow student. One reason may be that my typical response to a question is to ask a question back, typically at a more fundamental level to get the student to think about the basics. This is much more time-consuming both for the student and the teacher. On the other hand, fellow students tend to just “show how they worked out their answer”. The original inquirer then exclaims, “Oh, that’s how it’s done!” and has a false sense of knowing how to “work the problem”. Sometimes I interject to force the student to think a little more carefully about whether he or she understood the basics, but other times I don’t. It depends on how busy the class is (if group work is being done) or how many students are in my office simultaneously. I’ve seen enough to know that this is widespread outside my classroom and office hours.

I try encouraging students to work other problems (there are many to choose from in the textbook) that were not assigned as homework, but very few actually choose to do so. They prefer to go over problems previously covered in class, or previously assigned in homework. And to go over usually means to read through, rather than attempt the problem again from scratch. Why? Because it’s faster and gives one a (false) sense of fluency. I warn students against this self-deceptive strategy, but they still use it. I also provide past-year exams so students get the sense of how I ask questions, but very few students actually try to take them “under exam conditions” on their own, despite my telling them that this is how they can best take advantage. Then having “practiced” the exam, the student “feels prepared”. Makes me wonder if I should stop providing my students with practice tests.

As mentioned in my previous post, what I really need to do is help my students adopt meta-cognitive strategies to monitor their own learning. I will have to look up more resources since this is not my area of expertise. I haven’t figured out how exactly to handle the reflective student writing assignments yet although I have some ideas percolating.

The authors of the book also reminded me of something I need to watch out for as a teacher: the curse of knowledge, i.e., “our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.” I try to mix up my teaching schedule as much as possible, i.e., teach many different types of classes. Given the standard load of three classes per semester (I have some release time because I am chair), I would opt to teach three different classes. Most of my colleagues would prefer fewer preps and instead teach multiple sections of the same course in the same semester. Where possible, I also am happy to skip teaching one of my “standard” courses in a particular year because it forces me to work harder when I teach it again. (Memory fades!) I also try to revamp a class after teaching it four times to keep the material fresh. Now all this takes a lot of time, and I could have probably been more productive on the research front if I put less time into teaching. (Research is almost always the first thing to take the hit when you’re a professor at a liberal arts college with no graduate students in your department.)

The chapter ends with a section called “Tools and Habits for Calibrating Your Judgment”. Suggestions include: (1) frequent testing and retrieval practice, (2) learning with others in teams to better self-calibrate, (3) altering conditions to learn things flexibly, but also make the learning more effortful. Earlier in the chapter, the authors write: “The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.” One of the things I’m looking forward to is, for the first time, having a (senior) student research assistant in the class that can help gauge what is going on in the classroom and help mitigate my instructor curse-of-knowledge blinkers. We’ll see how well that works.

Chapter 6 is “Get Beyond Learning Styles”, where I think the authors are going to debunk the notion that you learn best with instruction in your preferred learning style. Looking forward to reading it tonight!

Make It Stick: Part 1

This week I’ve been setting aside 2-3 hours a day to prep my newly revamped class. Back in November when students were registering for Spring classes, I wrote an open letter to my potential students describing my grand plans. Over the holidays I came up with a theme to wrap around the course content. Since then I have made a list of all key content learning objectives for the course (it was a three-page bulleted list) and where each could be found in the textbook. I did tell the students that my plan was not to slavishly follow the textbook, although I do want to make sure I cover the same content as my other colleagues teaching second semester General Chemistry (there are seven sections running). It would be bad if my students did not cover the requisite material needed for subsequent courses that require General Chemistry as a prerequisite.

The next thing I did was drawing up a calendar of all class meetings for the semester. I started putting in potential topic names in a sequence. Some examples are:

·      Rocket Fuel: Work, The First Law, Enthalpy as a proxy for Energy

·      Quality of Energy, “Wasted” Energy, Riddle of Spontaneity

·      Energy in the DuraCell: Galvanic Cells and Batteries

·      Energy in the Cell: The ATP Currency, Coupling Endergonic/Exergonic

·      Primordial Soup: Colligative Properties

·      Before Continents: What’s in a Saltier Sea? Weak acids, bases and salts

·      Primordial Soup: Effect of a high CO₂ atmosphere

I then associated these “topics” with their corresponding content learning objectives. If you teach (or have taken) the equivalent of first-year college chemistry, you will probably know what I’m covering in most of these. (The one not-so-obvious example on CO₂ is an exercise I’ve used before: Students figure out the relationship between the partial pressure of CO₂ and pH of the solution, requiring playing around with a number of different equilibrium constants. There is evidence that early earth’s atmosphere had a much higher CO₂ content compared to today.) As you can tell the topics cover my twin themes: Energy and the Origin of Life.

For my “fun” chapter-a-night reading, I’ve been going through make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning. The authors, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel, discuss what is known about learning from cognitive science, and come up with a list of very helpful and practical suggestions of how to improve teaching and learning. Some of their tips seem counter-intuitive to students, but the authors make good arguments (backed up with evidence), as to why the seemingly intuitive approach of novice learners results in shallower learning.

A theme in the book is that deeper learning is effortful. This comes as no surprise. I expect my students to put in the effort if they want to learn well. However I sometimes wonder that my “clean-and-clear” approach makes things feel a little too easy for them in class. By this I mean that because they listen to and enjoy my clear lectures (yes, students do say this on my teaching evaluations), many of them have a false sense of knowing the material. It seems easy and straightforward because I, as the teacher, have pre-digested and pre-packaged the material in an easy-to-use format. The authors write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

On the other hand, my classes are very high-paced, and so the students do have to pay attention to keep up. (The other comment on my evaluations from some students is that I’m too fast.) Strong students and others who do the pre-reading assignments are usually fine. But the weaker students who don’t prepare for class find it a struggle, and not the positive kind. For a teacher finding the right balance is always tricky when there is a large range of student preparation and ability. Many of my students, though, want learning to feel easy. That is, they seem to equate “getting it quickly” with learning. I’m not sure whether it’s a generational thing and whether kids immersed in today’s multimedia are wired differently. (That’s a topic for another post that will complement my previous neuroscience posts!)

In the book, the authors discuss interleaved practice being far superior for deeper learning compared to massed practice. Massed practice is just repeating something over and over again until you’ve burned it into memory. Examples given by the authors are repetitive re-reading and cramming for exams. I certainly discourage my students from doing this (even though I used the cramming approach in school, and learned nothing, thereby having to re-learn the material later). Interleaved learning on the other hand introduces varied topics and repeats things at different times and in different contexts. Opportunities to retrieve what is being learned (by self-testing and reflection) also lead to long-term gains.

Interleaved learning however feels more difficult because you’re moving on to something else before you feel you’ve grasped the current topic (at least at first encounter), but studies show that the learning and recall is more durable at the end. Massed practice on the other gives the illusion of learning in the short term. The authors compare this to binge-and-purge eating: “A lot goes in, but most of it comes right back out in short order.” On the other hand: “The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allow time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.”

This reminded me to check that I was indeed setting up interleaved learning at appropriate points in my course plan. So this afternoon I went back over my calendar of topics and tried to map out where the most important concepts and skills are revisited. In a number of cases, the time interval may be too long so I will have to make some adjustments either by re-ordering the topics or by providing appropriate “recall” exercises at the appropriate times. It also makes me wonder if I should jettison opening the class with nuclear energy since there aren’t many good places to bring it up again in connection with other topics. I’ll have to ponder this over the next couple of days.

The other thing I was reminded of is thinking about how to engage students in reflection. I’ve been toying with the idea of blog posts and discussions, and to perhaps have students submit a portfolio of their reflections (a “greatest hits” selection) periodically over the semester. But instead of my grading it, perhaps I should ask the students to suggest the grade their portfolio deserves based on a rubric that I will need to provide. I’ve only used blogs/forums in specialized non-majors courses or special topic chemistry courses but not in the “standard” courses required for the major. Hence I don’t have much experience with this approach and I’ve always struggled to grade them. Maybe this reflection portfolio is worth trying. More to ponder over the next several days.

How do you hire for success?

I don’t know.

Actually let me qualify that statement (as you would expect from an academic). Except in one category with a limited data set, I don’t know how to predict with a high probability whether a given candidate will be successful, at least when it comes to hiring new assistant professors at liberal arts colleges that emphasize both teaching and research. In the lingo, these are often referred to as SLACs (Selective Liberal Arts Colleges). When I use the acronym, I will refer to the wider net of SLAC environments and not necessarily small prestigious liberal arts colleges.

Okay, okay. I thought I knew once, but now I’m not so sure. I naively thought I would figure out the secret tried-and-true formula after being involved in hiring many new faculty members over the years. Many years and hires later, I haven't figured it out. However I’ve been thinking about this issue recently after reading several essays from Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. The book is a collection of Gladwell’s articles from The New Yorker magazine. His pieces are well written, engaging, and they make you pause and think.

The first essay, Most Likely to Succeed, discusses the vagaries of picking quarterbacks from college-level American football who could be successful in the professional league (the NFL). This turns out to be a tricky proposition because the pace and style of the game in the professional level can be quite different from the college level, and therefore a successful college quarterback could do miserably in the NFL (and there are many such examples). In his essay, Gladwell links this issue to finding good teachers in schools. His argument: Potentially the best way to find the best people is to put them in the actual job and see how they perform. This requires having a much larger pool to start, keep the good ones, and let go the weak ones.

The second essay, The Talent Myth, discusses the dangers of the McKinsey and Enron philosophy of “hiring top talent at all levels”. It’s not clear what counts as top-talent, and often the prestige of the institution and degree program attended by the candidate is used as a proxy. Gladwell describes this as the War for Talent and that the strategy used is “differentiation and affirmation”. Essentially, pay the top performers exorbitantly, and push out the lower performers. HOW one decides how to differentiate is much more problematic, and Gladwell describes how “you end up doing performance evaluations that aren’t based on performance” at least in the McKinsey/Enron world. (Gladwell contrasts this approach by comparing it to companies that do not employ a “star system” and does not rely on the wunderkind.

The third essay, The New-Boy Network, is subtitled “What do job interviews really tell us?” While providing examples from the tech-hiring world, the essay is mainly about what we have learned from psychology research. Specifically, it discusses how we make unconscious snap judgments as to how capable someone is from as little as two seconds of videotape that correlate well with a short meeting you might expect in a job interview. Quoting one of the psychologists, Gladwell writes: “The basis of the illusion is that we are somehow confident that we are getting what is [really] there [from the interview].” Gladwell also narrates his experience with a human resources consultant on “how to extract meaning from face-to-face encounters”. Apparently, the only method that actually has some success in predicting subsequent performance is a highly scripted process. However, most employers choose not to use it. Gladwell dramatically explains why: “We are looking for someone with whom we have certain chemistry… the unlimited promise of a love affair. The structured interview, by contrast, seems to offer only the dry logic and practicality of an arranged marriage.”

Let’s compare all of this to hiring college professors. Since my experience is in a liberal arts college that emphasizes teaching and research, that will be my benchmark. Being in the sciences also has its unique challenges when one is in a SLAC environment. A candidate aspiring to land a tenure track position in chemistry, in this very tough job market, needs at minimum to have a Ph.D. in hand and some postdoctoral experience. One needs to be productive research-wise measured in contributions to research publications and presentations. Some teaching experience is needed, the more extensive the better; and it helps if one is the instructor of record and not just a teaching assistant. The tricky problem here is that if you’re teaching extensively as a graduate student, this takes time away from your research. Many postdoctoral research advisers are also not supportive of their postdocs moonlighting as teachers on the side.

Teaching is a large component at a SLAC, but one also needs to keep up a research program competitive enough to get external funding (albeit at smaller dollar amounts than needed at a research university). At top-flight institutions, one is actually discouraged from spending too much time teaching as a graduate student. One is also usually plugged into a project to produce results, which have to be of a certain quality and quantity to make it into a top-flight journal. This allows the P.I. (primary investigator, or one’s boss) to keep writing grants to support the laboratory research. More publications and grants lead to a higher profile, academic fame and prizes. The typical graduate student does not learn how to manage a lab, or time, in a way that prepares him/her to be a liberal arts college professor. (Neither does the typical postdoc for that matter.) There might be parallels between the situation of scouting out successful postdocs (who were also successful graduate students) to be SLAC faculty members, and scouting out top college quarterbacks for the NFL. It’s difficult to predict success.

Liberal arts colleges are smaller institutions, and therefore it is very costly (not just in monetary terms), to hire faculty who prove unsuccessful and don’t make tenure. It’s a small tight-knit community, and people are hired for their specific complementary teaching and research contributions. (I've chosen to omit discussing service, the third leg of the academic's stool, in this article.) It’s very painful when someone comes and struggles and then has to leave. Mentoring and pre-tenure reviews can be time-consuming, and being in a smaller department means most people have a reasonable degree of involvement in the process. There is also the nebulous process of finding “fit” to the department and institutional culture. One often hears the claim that this is a crucial part of the interview. After shortlisting all the candidates who look great on paper, the phone/Skype interview, (and for those who “fit” best) the subsequent on-campus interview, then lead to a final ranking of the candidates and who might be offered a position.

The winnowing process inevitably involves some degree of considering the candidates’ academic pedigrees (which institutions they went to, and if they worked in the lab of someone famous or a rising star). There is plenty of speculation about the potential trajectory of each candidate and what “problems” might be encountered on the tenure track. We’d like to avoid the problems of The Talent Myth, and I’d like to think that institutional snobbery is not present, but it’s hard to tell. It’s not always easy to differentiate the candidates appropriately.

My department’s phone interview process has a structured component to it, although there is also some degree of flexibility that a seasoned interviewee would know how to navigate well. The on-campus visits are much more open-ended in the sense that the candidate has many individual meetings with the faculty, all of whom have very different styles in “interviewing” the candidate. They are highly unstructured and therefore we can have very different impressions of the candidate (for good or ill). In my younger days, I used to think that I could get a good feel about whether a candidate might do well long-term from the in-person meetings, the research talk, and the one class that the candidate teaches. I’m not so sure anymore.

We have had good success in hiring staff members who prep our lab courses, partly because we have a skills test that involves what they will be doing in their job. I think this strategy works well for a more narrowly and clearly defined job description. On the other hand, our success in hiring faculty who go on to receive tenure and be successful is a mixed bag. When we hired faculty who were on the tenure track at other liberal arts colleges AND had already shown success in both teaching and obtaining external grants, they successfully earned tenure (and continue to do well). Perhaps that is not surprising because they had already shown they can be successful in the relevant environment. (Most of them had been on the tenure track for 3-5 years at a previous institution.) That is my one useful predictor with a limited data set.

When we hire fresh postdocs or those with experience at different institutional types, some do great, but some do not. All had potential and promise (or so we thought), but it’s not so easy to pick out those who would go on to be successful, especially as the performance “bar” continues to be raised. (SLACs are in a ratrace to increase their research profile.) It seems easy in retrospect to point to the early warning signs and struggles, and things that gave us pause when we interviewed the candidate. We think we learn something from these “mistakes”, but how much we do learn is debatable. I have a mental catalog of these, but I’m not sure how useful they are overall. Each case seems unique and different from the others.

What I do know I’m going to do about all of this is learn a bit more about structured interviewing and how to use it effectively.

The Character of Physical Law: Feynman helps me plan my next course

Happy New Year!

This week I have been reading Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law. The book is a compilation of the Messenger Lectures given by Feynman at Cornell University in 1964. Feynman started his academic career as a professor at Cornell, and after five years there he moved to (my alma mater) Caltech. He is reknown for being both an outstanding teacher and scientist. His lectures on physics are outstanding for their clarity.

Before delivering his first Messenger Lecture, Feynman was introduced by Dale Corson, provost at Cornell. Besides the usual laudatory remarks on Feynman’s achievements and some historical tidbits, Corson added that “in the preface of the published lectures there is a picture of Feynman performing happily on the bongo drums”. Feynman is a multi-talented colorful character and his reminiscing is collected in a delightful series of essays published as Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Thus when Feynman was introduced to a scientific audience, reference was often made to his other pursuits and interests outside of physics.

After Corson’s introduction, Feynman began his first lecture with the following bit of wit. “It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. I believe that is probably because we respect the arts more than the sciences.”

In my experience, I think it is not so much respect for the arts, but rather fear of the sciences and its inaccessibility. When I meet someone new, inevitably the “What do you do?” question comes up. Although I usually tell folks that I “teach college students”, the follow-up question is “What do you teach?” The most common responses to the revelation that I am a chemist is “Oh, that was my worst subject in school” or “Wow, you must be really smart” or “I once took a [science/math] class and I don’t think I understood anything”. Scientists and teachers share part of this blame. Since I count myself in both groups, I need to do my part in dispelling the notion that science is inaccessibly difficult, or worse, dreadfully boring in its esotericism.

As I have been planning the revamping of my General Chemistry class next semester (see the open letter I wrote to my students), I have been thinking about the broad sweep I would like to take. I am also trying to work out some of the nitty-gritty details for the first several weeks of class. I usually don’t bring work home with me on weekends, evenings or holidays. But this time around, for the December holidays, I brought back my previous lecture notes, assignments and exams, and the current textbook we are using. My plan was to list the specific content learning goals of the course, and then figure out a way to wrap things together so I can motivate the students appropriately. I would like them to find this class interesting, engaging and challenging, and that they would be motivated to do the appropriate pre and post class assignments.

I have not gotten around to writing out anything other than these blogs (as I’m still on holiday) but the thinking time has been useful. Reading broadly over the holidays has also helped to shape how I would like the class theme to unfold. Since the second semester of General Chemistry is mainly about thermodynamics and equilibria (with some kinetics, electrochemistry and colligative properties thrown into the mix), I think I will wrap my class around the broad theme of Energy.

My plan is to start out with our sun as the energy source sustaining the bioenergetics and activities of living creatures here on Earth. We might lead off with nuclear energy (because nuclear chemistry gets short shrift in the first semester – we cover radioactivity and balancing nuclear reactions but don’t have time to go into the detailed energy considerations).  Then we will pick up on thermochemistry before moving on to electrochemistry. The role of catalysts and materials in the harnessing and storage of energy (while battling entropy) both in man-made devices and in living cells will hopefully feature prominently.

I might be over-ambitious but I would like students to get a taste of two broad areas: (1) the “energy issues in today’s technological society” and, (2) the riddle of how chemical energy was harnessed into biological systems in the origin of life. (The latter was discussed briefly in my post last week.) This way I have some open-ended speculative projects the students can work on wherein they will learn a bunch of chemistry along the way, but will also get a taste of what complex problems look like. The goal isn’t to “solve” the complex problems but rather to learn how to approach them, making use of what you know, learning some new things, and figuring out what else you will need to learn (that you won’t have time to cover during the semester). The projects should also be collaborative (no one person can figure this out) and thus provide good training for the students to go out and solve real-world complex problems in teams.

Where does Feynman’s book come in? Energy, it turns out, is a very slippery topic for students. It is not easy to grasp and I’m pretty sure my students (even though they’ve had first semester General Chemistry) are still rather fuzzy on the concept. I thought Feynman did a great job introducing Conservation Laws in Chapter 3 of The Character of Physical Law. In the letter to my students I told them that I would like to expose them to outside reading material instead of slavishly following the textbook. I’m therefore thinking of having them read some selections from this chapter on Energy Conservation as their first pre-class assignment. Feynman writes lucidly and I think it would be good for students to be exposed to different teachers, many much better than me.

Towards the end of Chapter 5 (on entropy and irreversibility), Feynman makes a claim in support the importance of having an interdisciplinary “liberal arts” outlook in learning. Or at least he seems to be trying to build a bridge between Snow’s two cultures. In contrasting “humanities” level ideas such as evil, beauty, and hope, with fundamental low-level “basic science” level ideas such as the fundamental laws of physics, Feynman writes: “To get a deep understanding of the world with only [one level] alone is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at one end, and the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other.” In fact it is the many “in between, connecting one step to another, … working at the ends and working in the middle [to gradually understand] this tremendous world of interconnected hierarchies.”

I hope that students in my class don’t just learn fundamental concepts of chemistry, but because they have opted to have a liberal arts education, that they will see the interconnections between hierarchies in my class and in all their other classes.