Six-Month Roundup

Now that I’ve been blogging for six months, it seemed like a good idea to take stock of what I have or have not accomplished (or maybe learned) through the process.

I re-read the first six Harry Potter books, thereby averaging one book a month. It’s been a very enlightening experience to re-read the books with a different lens. I learned that when I have an additional motive (blogging), that I do read topics that intersect my blog with a different eye. This also proved to be the case with some of the students in my class. Having an assignment of blogging regularly made them see things and ask questions from the point of view of scientific inquiry. This was eye-opening for some of the students who proceeded to also enjoy writing about their observations. However, for other students, this remained a chore. I’ve found myself flagging through the months of March and April. I’d like to blame it on my bad back problems and the busyness of the semester, but maybe it is just a matter of re-prioritization. I am looking forward to re-reading the seventh Harry Potter book after the semester ends.

Looking back at some of my blog posts, I realized that I read many books about teaching, education and the liberal arts, more so than I have in the past. The blog may have contributed in encouraging me to think more about education systems. Having more involvement in academic administration has probably also contributed significantly to what I spend my time thinking about. I’m very glad that I decided to attempt to overhaul my General Chemistry course this semester because that made me go out and read more about teaching and learning. The three best books about teaching and learning I’ve read in the past six months were Building a Better Teacher, make it stick, and most recently Minds Online.  I need to write a review of this third book, hopefully in an upcoming blog post. It’s sitting right next to my home laptop for that sole purpose!

I was hoping that blogging would help me become a better writer. I’ve learned that I need to be more disciplined in the drafting and editing process. I paid more attention to this in the early stages where I spent time thinking about the best way to craft a blog post. Admittedly I got lazier and was not willing to put in the time to improve my writing. I will have to re-evaluate my time priorities and figure out if I’m willing to put in the time to allow myself the opportunity for significant improvement. I tell my students that they need to put in the time and persevere and then learning isn’t “easy”. I should apply the same principle to myself.

Thinking about the intersection between science and magic, and exploring the world of alchemy, has given me interesting ideas about the intersection of philosophy, history, literature, art and science. To make further advancement in this area would require a significant time investment. I feel as if I’m dancing around the edges thinking about low-hanging fruit, but am unwilling to throw myself into a larger and more significant project. That being said, with the summer approaching, I’ve recently become more excited about my science research projects. It also helps that I have some enthusiastic new research students who will start in late May and early June. I’m enjoying the excitement of potential new “discoveries”. It seems easier to keep doing what I was trained to do (in terms of the science and my methodological expertise) than to branch into a philosophical-historical-scientific project. Maybe I’m just not quite ready, or I haven’t found the right collaborators yet. I certainly don’t have the expertise to pull the different threads together.

Blogging has opened up fun and interesting conversations I’ve had with students, colleagues, and friends & family outside of academia. Some of them read my posts with bemusement. I actually feel that I bring a bit more to a conversation when I’ve spent some time previously thinking about or blogging on a related topic. Maybe it’s just the academic in me!

Finally there is always a time trade-off. I’ve found that what I do in my “leisure” has changed since I started blogging. Some older hobbies lay untouched (but not forgotten). New interests have taken hold. I think that overall this is enriching. Will I continue blogging? I think so. Although I think it is okay if I don’t make my self-imposed requirement of two thoughtful posts per week and not feel guilty about it either.

The Faint Young Sun Paradox

I had been suspecting that the last couple of weeks, students in my Honors General Chemistry class might be slacking off and not preparing adequately for class. I can tell by the increased number of blank stares when I go through something that should have been familiar if students followed the preparation instructions beforehand. There is usually some reading, a few basic problems to try, and occasionally an additional reading or a video to help motivate the topic to be discussed. As the semester draws to a close, students increasingly (as they get busy) try to skip the reading and go straight to the problems only going back to the reading if they can't do the problems.

We had just finished looking at acid-base aqueous equilibria and the plan was to put things together by having the students go through an exercise where they can apply what they learn to study an interesting problem that has both relevance today and in the distant past. It's kind of a neat exercise that I put together (if I do say so myself!) Starting with just four equilibria one can derive a relationship between the partial pressure of CO2 and ocean pH to a reasonably good approximation, and I guide the students through this. They aren't strangers to this sort of exercise. I had a similar guided exercise the week before on deriving O2 saturation curves for myoglobin and hemoglobin the week before after we finished the chapter on chemical equilibrium.

Below are the instructions to my students in preparation for class:
 
To integrate the material you have learned in Chapter [number provided here], you will be figuring out the relationship between the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere and how that affects the pH of the ocean on the early Earth. In preparation for class:

1. Read the wikipedia entry on the "faint young Sun paradox". You should be able to tell me what it is, and how CO2 might help "solve" the paradox.
2. Look up the polyprotic acid dissociation constants for carbonic acid (Ka1 and Ka2), the solubility product equilibrium constant (Ksp) for CaCO3, and the Henry's Law constant for CO2. [Explicit instructions of where to look were provided.]
3. Be sure to bring a device that allows you to make a data table and construct a graph since you will be plotting P(CO2) versus pH for the early ocean.
4. There will be a worksheet in class that takes you through the multiple steps you will need to plot the graph. If you don't finish it in class, it will be turned in as homework at the beginning of next class.
5. Optional: 2-minute animation on the effect of ocean acidification on shell formation of marine life -- we'll be looking at the same chemical reactions, but in much more detail, in class today. [A youtube video link was provided here.]

My class has frequent low-stake quizzes. This semester I am counting the top 20 (for 10% of the total grade) but I give the students 25-30 quizzes throughout the semester. They take place right at the beginning of class and take 3-5 minutes so the students are very used to the drill as they are quizzed 2 out of every 3 class days on average. On Friday morning I decided to check how many of them actually did the reading in #1. My quiz question: What is the faint young sun paradox?

This is a case where if you did the reading you would know exactly what the answer is. If you didn't, you would have no idea. Some students looked completely befuddled, others started writing immediately. I could tell within the first 10 seconds who had done the reading. Grading the quizzes after class was hilarious. (I either give full credit, half credit or zero credit for a quiz so I can grade them very quickly. The students write their answers on an index card.) About half the class easily got full credit. The other half got zero credit with answers ranging from nonsensical to amusing. I got a nice picture of a sun wearing shades, several apologies for not doing the reading, some who honestly said they didn't know, and some that tried to make up scientific sounding but completely wrong answers. However one answer was so amusing it made me laugh out loud and I decided to award half-credit just because it was witty and written in just a couple of minutes at best:

The "faint young sun" paradox originates from ancient Greek philosophy and the concept of existance. The paradox itself questions the ability of our sun to flicker and faint despite being a young sun, son.

[The student spelled existence incorrectly.]

Given I was grading this at the end of the day after a bunch of Friday afternoon admin meetings, this was welcome relief! A nice way to end the week.

And if I successfully get you to look up the faint young sun paradox after reading this blog, I've done my job as a teacher!

Measuring c with peeps

I'm always amazed at the creativity one can find on the Internet (amidst all the crap of course). This week I discovered Skunk Bear's "Finding the Speed of Light with Peeps" from NPR Kitchen Science. It's engaging, funny, well-paced, educational, and has good clear illustration and narrative. I've been watching a number of science related videos this semester for my General Chemistry class. There's the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I won't share details of the latter two. I have found a number of channels that do a relatively good job of explaining some of the conceptual material, or go through how to manipulate a numerical problem. I've also enjoyed a number of wacky music videos that explain different aspects of biochemistry. But I have to say that this latest video is one of the best ones I've seen recently. I wish I had more creativity to put something like this together, or perhaps the time and energy! I could say more but the video speaks for itself.

Retooling the Chemistry Major?

Here’s an article that was making the rounds in the blogosphere this week. The Wall Street Journal in the Education section (Apr 12) has a story titled “Chemistry Departments Try to Attract More Students by Retooling Major”. The subtitle of this article is “Universities begin to overhaul traditional curricula in science field that some worry is churning out too few graduates for nation’s needs”. Click here for a link to the article

This caught my attention because my department is having the opposite problem. Seven years ago thereabouts we retooled our curriculum by actually increasing the requirements, the most significant addition being a required Research Methods course. At the time we had 20-25 majors per cohort, and our laboratory-heavy curriculum could support up to 32 majors per year (it would be a squeeze) without requiring a significant overhaul. This year’s graduating class has just under 40 majors. The group coming up behind them has about the same number. This morning I signed in major #43 of the current sophomore class. And I know there are more to come. I’ve actually dissuaded a number of students away from the major if I thought there was something else that would be a better fit given interests, aptitudes, and what classes they had taken so far.

This year I had the privilege of helping guide our department through another revision – to streamline our majors and allow us to handle the large number of students coming through our classes. Chemistry is the second largest minor at our institution so we have many students who come through our General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry sequences, with Biochemistry being the most popular upper division class after the initial two-year sequence. Our retooling of the major actually provides a little less flexibility in some areas but a little more in others. We had to remind ourselves not to make the requirements even more difficult. We’re certainly not trying to attract more majors as we’re having trouble managing our large enrollments as it is.

The article says that “chemistry professors find themselves waging a fierce battle to appeal to undergraduates who might want a scientific grounding to pursue careers in forensics, molecular gastronomy or politics, but who are turned off by the degree’s onerous demands”. I suppose that could be happening in some places, but how general is this? I also haven’t looked at the data but I suspect that the number of majors has been increasing overall across the U.S., but perhaps the percentage as a whole may not be increasing (and might even be decreasing). The two schools studied were Emory University and Davidson College, and one professor was quoted as saying “chemists [are] not known as the most flexible people … but we’ve really got to change, because academia’s changing.” Really? I don't even know what is meant by being a flexible person!

Is it the demands that are onerous? There’s no doubt that the major is academically challenging. I’m very upfront about this with students. Or is it that the curricula are too traditional (whatever that means, as implied by the article)? I ask myself why is it that my department keeps attracting majors. My anecdotal conversations with many students suggests to me that they find their classes interesting and enjoyable and many of them established a good rapport with their professors. (Our class sizes are small. We run multiple sections.) They also seem to be influenced by students in the cohorts ahead who tell the newer students what a great department they’re in. This of course makes me feel good, and I know my colleagues work very hard to keep up the excellence of the department. It also makes me think that perhaps it’s not the large-scale overhauls that make the difference but the teaching and mentoring relationships that have a stronger impact in bringing students into the fold. When that culture is present, word-of-mouth by the students is sufficient to carry the momentum. Our curriculum is relatively traditional and rather challenging. Our students will definitely attest to the latter. (They don’t know much about the former.) Yet they still keep coming back for more!

Admissions and Admittance

This past week (and weekend), I have participated in several events organized by the university Admissions team. It’s a very extensive team because college admissions is big business and can feel like a circus. My part as a faculty member is to promote my institution by discussing the academic programs and answering questions from parents and students. During some parts, I feel like I am “on display” akin to a performer in a circus who comes in on cue. The video mash-ups put together by Admissions are very slick – I had forgotten how slick until I viewed several of them at the actual events. For a very amusing book on the circus from the parent point of view I highly recommend Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson. I read this a few years ago – it is both hilarious and incredulous!

What surprised me the most was how much I actually enjoyed participating in the event and talking up my university and my department. Talking up my department is easy – I’m very familiar with it and can answer very detailed questions. I think being a department chair has made me much more familiar with other parts of the college and the university as a whole, and means that I now do a better job connecting the academics to other parts of the college experience. (Yes, academics are important, but it’s only one factor among many that compete for the students’ attentions.) Plenty of students, and perhaps even more so their parents, are interested in the sciences. In break-out sessions I had lots of interested folks. Although parents generally asked more questions than students, I had a good proportion of the students speak up on their own behalf!

In the U.S., at a liberal arts college, you admit students in general if they have certain proficiencies or skills (or other reasons that I won’t go into – go read Crazy U). The philosophy of a liberal arts college is that you explore your passions, and match those with your abilities and your life goals – at least according to a high-level university official at one of the events (with slick video accompaniment). Students are encouraged to explore their passions, their inner selves, their many opportunities that the university will help facilitate, and so one thing emphasized is that you do not need to know what your major will be (when you first arrive). At most other tertiary institutions in the rest of the world, you apply into a university with a list of preferred majors. You may not get your first choice of major even if you get admitted. In some cases you apply to a university system and therefore may not get your first choice of specific university. (So you had better be realistic about your list or you might get nothing.)

There are many factors that go into the sorting system at these other universities, but it is done by the institutions – not by the students. (Things are changing though, and we are seeing U.S. style liberal arts education pop up around the globe.) The upshot of the liberal arts college philosophy, though, is that to some extent the college have control over what students are going to major in, at least to a first approximation. This makes allocation of resources potentially tricky. In recent years we have seen movement towards more students wanting to major in the sciences. (Tough economic times drives this, supposedly, or at least that’s what some pundits say.) Does one start gutting the less popular programs following the choices of the students? That seems like a bad way to go from a liberal arts point of view. If more resources aren’t going to the science programs to maintain the liberal arts balance, but we keep getting more students who want to “major” in our areas, do we start making our classes harder so we can weed out more students? That way we can just take the really, really good ones. This sort of weeding goes on in science departments all over the country. (I strongly disagree with the weeding philosophy, but I don’t deny its reality.)

Let’s go back to the admissions circus for a moment. If you’re not at the very, very top of the prestige pile, then you have to compete for the strongest students to attract them to your institution. If you do this, maybe, just maybe, it will help you move up the prestige ladder. All this might make one yearn for a “simpler” system such as those practiced by neighbors around the world. Then again, those systems also have their problems. There’s also a lot of pressure on parents and students to figure things out in the U.S. system where choice is an important feature in tertiary education. Of course the institutions also participate in their own choices on their end.

How does Hogwarts do it? Apparently if you have magical ability and you live in a certain geographic area, you automically get invited to enroll when the time comes. It doesn’t matter if you’ve heard of the school or not, or whether you even knew you had magical abilities. We see this in the case of Harry and Hermione. If you were part of the Wizarding World already (Ron Weasley for example), then this would be a familiar part of your life. You could turn down the invitation to enroll of course. It's not clear there is a law that requires you send your magical children to a school of witchcraft and wizardry. On the other hand, in some countries in the world it is mandatory that you send your children to “government-mandated” schools, and that home-schooling is either not an option or very difficult.

There are no Admissions events, School Open Days, nor competition for student places, at Hogwarts, at least not that we read about. There is one mention where Malfoy talks about his parents thinking of sending him to Durmstrang instead of Hogwarts, so there are alternative options. But perhaps the comparison of Hogwarts to the college system isn’t the right one, and instead it should be compared to the secondary school system. Certainly in the U.S., there is a hodgepodge of options. Many private schools function much in the same way as private liberal arts colleges where admissions is concerned. Education is indeed big business.

What have I learned from all this? I’m not sure. But it did make me pause to think about the system as a whole from a broader perspective. As an academic who can easily get engrossed in my own small slice of the college, it is a good reminder to see what is going on from a larger perspective and give some thought to the issues. After all, that’s what a liberal arts education prepared me to do.

Living with Less

I recently read an article in TIME magazine titled “The Joy of Less”. It discusses the culture of consumption, its ill effects, and the counter-culture that is starting to take place. The hoarders are hiring the junk removers. Professional organizing is apparently a growing business. The Art of Zen is permeating Consumer America.

The article traced the history of how easy it has become to purchase merchandise. The first such general catalog was printed by Montgomery Ward in 1872 and Sears published a 500-page version before the turn of the century. But it would take some time to order and buy an item. Then physical department stores started opening so they could show and sell their products in the same location. You could see something and bring it home the same day. The article goes on to argue that post World War II, “a new generation of appliances, furniture and household goods became available” and the idea of “planned obsolence became popular”. Develop a new upgraded model every year and entice people to buy it!

Today we have low-cost retail and Amazon 1-Click ordering that makes it exceedingly easy to buy, buy, buy. And you feel like you ‘re getting such a good deal out of it – I suppose that’s what Retail Therapy is about. The fact that Public Storage facilities have become ubiquitous, and that 87% in the U.S. are currently rented according to the article (I don’t know how true that is and I’m slightly skeptical of the number), seems downright crazy especially given that the homes here are bigger than in most other countries. Heck, everything is bigger in America!

In a recent big move a couple of years ago, we downsized our home significantly, selling or giving away much of our possessions. I have to say that this felt really good! Our realtor had told us what we needed to remove from the premises to show our home when we put it on the market. Instead of sticking it in storage (okay, I confess I did put a few things in the garage), we decided to shed many of our possessions. (Our house sold very efficiently!) We’re glad to be living in a smaller place now with fewer possessions and living a more minimalistic lifestyle. After this, if I visited a home that was full of “stuff”, I would actually feel slightly oppressed by all the things around me.

If only we could cast magical spells such as evanesco (the vanishing spell from the Harry Potter books) and then have the appropriate spell that conjured up the item you wanted when you needed it. I’m not sure how this physically would work. It seems somewhat complicated. (Can’t help it – that’s how my mind works as a scientist.) An alternative is to have a magical bag like the one Hermione had in Book 7 (which I hope to re-read soon!) where she could simply store a lot of objects. I vaguely recall that the more stuff she put in the heavier it got? Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe the mass is reduced proportionally in some way in the magical bag. (Oops, there I go again.) Hermione, of course, carried lots of books – something you’d expect the quintessential academic would need. (Although nowadays we can just store all our documents electronically – scientists rarely use old books nowadays).

This past December I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is described as a “mystical” book by the TIME magazine article. It really does have mystical overtones, but it seemed to also make very good practical sense. In January I decided to take the first step in the KonMarie method and “keep only the things that spark joy” while discarding the rest. You have to collect and lay out all your items of a particular category in one place. Then you have to individually go through every item (you must touch/handle the item). If you choose to discard something that has served you well, you thank the item for its service. Kondo actually suggests a particular order in which you choose the categories and the items. The first category is Clothes, so that’s what I started with. I must say that I’m very pleased with the results! Following her method of folding and storing my remaining clothes, I found that everything is accessible and gets more use.

But I have not progressed since. The second category in Kondo’s method is Books. Being an academic I have a lot of books. Not as many as my Humanities colleagues, but my books are heavy. I shed a number of books in my first downsizing a couple of years ago, but I have accumulated some more since. My present excuse is that I’m only just recovering from lower back pain – it was bad for most of March. But my excuses are running out. As the semester winds down in mid-May, I really should take a stab at the books. I’m hoping that writing this in the blog will help motivate me to clean up. Hopefully in a couple of months you’ll see a blog post about this!

To Textbook or Not To Textbook

Tis the season of textbook selection for the upcoming semester. The college Bookstore has sent me repeated e-mails the past month that I have not made my textbook selections for the upcoming semester. Over the years I have learned some things about the changing landscape of the college textbook world. When I first started teaching, the business seemed pretty straightforward. The only competition that textbook publishers had were other textbook publishers. The resale market was a minor player, the rental market didn’t quite exist, there were fewer options, and prices (while high for new science textbooks) were not as ridiculous as they are now.

All that has changed. The competition is much fiercer. Textbooks now come bundled with “electronic extras” (we’ll get to that in a moment). But it’s the Internet and Amazon that have really driven the evolution of the textbook world into a cut-throat time-sensitive business. College and university textbook stores are in a no-holds-barred armed race to stock their books at decent prices students might pay for. If I don’t turn in my textbook order (early), it could drive up the price the student has to pay for their books depending on the book and market economics. It has been eye-opening for me, as an instructor, to see the changes that have taken place in the last ten years.

In the old days, I didn’t seriously consider the option of not having a textbook in my chemistry courses. A good textbook significantly facilitates teaching the material, and more importantly saves the instructor significant time. (You weren’t expecting the last bit, were you? Unless of course you’re in the same business as me.) Given the increasing research and service expectations of liberal arts college professors, you have to realistically limit the amount of time you are going to spend prepping for class, answering questions in office hours, and grading. The increased numbers of students in our classes does not make things any easier. This is a sad situation, as teaching is what I love doing most, that I have to find ways to reduce the amount of time I put into the “teaching” aspect of my profession.

What will a good chemistry textbook have? (1) Content to be covered in the class at the right level, preferably in an order that makes best sense to me as an instructor. (2) Sufficient worked examples for numerical problems, again at the right level. (3) Good figures – molecular level diagrams, appropriate graphs, data tables that are easy to find. (4) Clear prose. (5) End-of-chapter questions that are sufficient in variety and level, and are well-posed. (6) Answers to a subset of aforementioned questions so that students can self-check some, but not all, their attempts. From this list, the most important to me is #5, and is often the deal-clincher or deal-breaker when I would choose a textbook back in the old days. Typically there were just a handful of textbooks that would meet all six criteria. You can very quickly triage the first four items by skimming, but item #5 requires some amount of work to evaluate. It’s worth the time, because having a good set of questions to assign students as they learn the material saves much time and heartache (for the instructor) during the semester.

But the world of information accessibility has changed significantly in a short span of time, and with it, market economics. Now, I keep a close eye on the price of a book and its bundled electronic materials – the most important factor now being the robustness of the online homework system. Working problems is still a crucial part of learning chemistry. I was highly skeptical at the first few versions of these systems and did not use them, but they have reached a stage of robustness where the guided tutorials, problems, adaptive technology, user-data statistics, and advanced features, allow me as an instructor to tailor the outside-of-class learning aspects without it being a frustrating time sink both for me and for the students. In terms of writing good problems with increasing levels of difficulty and giving the students feedback as quickly as possible, the online system is a huge winner. Certainly the immediate feedback provided by the online system is something I cannot personally repliate. The system is also robust enough for me to make small modifications to problems I choose from an increasingly good database. Not to mention that user-data mining can tell you how long a problem takes on average and how difficult it is, thereby allowing you to construct very reasonable problem sets for the students. (I am mindful that my class is often not the only one they are taking.)

Up to this point, it seems that I’m still essentially choosing a textbook although my criteria have changed to include evaluating the online homework system. However, as prices have continued to soar for the book + online system bundle, and the fact that our students are now awash in a world of information plenitude rather than scarcity, I’ve begun to rethink the skill set I should be teaching my students. Practically none of them bother to keep their textbook any more (thanks to the active resale market) since we have the Internet, and the online system access is usually only good for a year. Thanks a lot, market economics. What they will be faced with for most of their adult lives here on out (unless we have an information or technological apocalypse) is wading through and trying to make sense of the wealth of information out there. Yes, I have to teach them the basics, but I should move them further up Bloom’s taxonomy than I have in the past.

For my science major classes, I still use a textbook for the most part (but now coupled with some internet resources and reading primary literature). But the last three times I taught non-majors classes, I have not used a textbook. This has its pros and cons. The reason I chose not to use a textbook was because these classes were small (less than 20 students) and composed of stronger-than-average students (e.g. honors-level), and furthermore the classes were designed to be highly interdisciplinary and team-taught to some extent. It’s hard to find a single interdisciplinary text for a team-taught science class at the introductory level. (These classes were aimed at the non-science major.) The Internet provides a great source of content material, but a lot of work was involved in designing the activities, and writing the problem sets. Grading was much reduced given the small class size.

Next semester, however, I am scheduled to teach a regular section of chemistry for non-science majors. (Yes, I scheduled myself to do this since I’m department chair!) It is a class I have taught many times before and I have used a variety of textbooks back in the day. When I looked at the prices of newer editions of good books I have used in the past, I was shocked at the sticker prices! This always happens to good textbooks. Once the market demand starts to build, the publishers come up with newer versions very quickly bundled with the latest access codes for the online homework system. I hemmed and hawed for the better part of two weeks, discussed with my colleagues the pros and cons of different books and the idea of going without a textbook. (Students seem highly uncomfortable without a textbook, but they get used to it after a while. Of course the times I have not used a book were all in small classes.)

Given the larger size of the upcoming class, the average ability of the student who will be in this class (these will be average students rather than an above average small group), I finally settled on using a textbook. However I picked an older edition of the book that is still widely available. The bookstore will therefore be able to get used books at lower prices and many of the students will still buy direct through the internet. I’ve decided to forego the online homework system since the book is sufficiently robust with respect to all six items in my previous list (and does well for #5 and #6). I won’t start working on the class until the summer, but I plan to incorporate a variety of assignments requiring them to go on the internet and critically evaluate what they read. As an added benefit to my decision, the bookstore has stopped sending me e-mails!