To Sublime is Sublime

Last week we discussed precipitation reactions in my General Chemistry class. I tried to impress upon the students how surprising it would seem to someone observing such a chemical reaction for the first time. Mix two clear and colorless solutions together, i.e., two substances that look just like liquid water, and out pops a solid! Most of the solids are white in standard demos (and perhaps the jaded student does not find this all that interesting) but lead iodide (PbI₂) is yellow. I wonder if an early alchemist observing a similar reaction might have wondered if this was a route to making gold. I’m not sure my students were all that impressed (having seen this reactions in lab the week before). They might even have found writing out the chemical equations tedious. At the very least I might have amused them with my opening Power Point slide shown below as they were filing into class. Lame, but it still elicits chuckles.

Let’s stop to think about this for a moment. We often see solids dissolve in water (salt and sugar for example) but in everyday experience we rarely encounter solids appearing where you only had liquids to begin with. It’s almost magical. If you had a chemistry set as a kid, you might have had the magical experience of making your own precipitate or growing crystals. Think about the child-like wonder in seeing something surprising that might not have conformed to your everyday experience! (In the age of the iPad with fancy addictive games, it’s unclear to me if today’s kids will find it fascinating.) I’m pretty sure the alchemists did – especially since they did not know the underlying chemistry. I wonder if part of why the students are jaded is because the explanation seems so mundane and straightforward. (Maybe I need to spice it up!) Knowledge should be exciting, not boring!

What questions did students have on this unit? The first one, predictably, was “Do we have to memorize the solubility rules?” This was the final thing we talked about in class where my emphasis was not on memorizing but in trying to draw general principles from the rules – really a list of observational facts. That’s how you put together a theory! (Or perhaps a working hypothesis that can be tested!) But more on that in a later post since I’ve been thinking about philosophy of science and the makings of a scientific theory. In any case, I hope the students understood the idea of how to formulate such a theory based on what they had learned earlier in the semester. We had discussed lattice energies of ionic compounds, packing in solid crystalline structures, and dynamic equilibrium. I waved my hands and drew pictures on the board as I drew students into the discussion. I was at least interesting enough that they were paying attention instead of watching the clock (because we ran over by 2 minutes and they didn’t notice). I suppose I could have an assessment question to check if they really did “get it”.

A related phenomena that I think the alchemists would find particularly interesting is sublimation. Some solid substances will turn directly into gases (skipping the liquid state) upon heating. Dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) is an example familiar to most people. We also covered this in class but I neglected to make the connection to alchemy and teleportation! (More on the latter in a moment.) Iodine works well in a demo because of the lovely purple hue as it sublimes. I did not do the demo this year in my lecture class (noxious fumes) but I have done so when I teach lab (with the apparatus in a fume hood). If you put a watch glass over beaker so you can see the crystals reforming on the base of the watch glass. (Putting a small piece of ice on the watch glass hastens the deposition.) Other substances exhibiting this behavior include arsenic, camphor and ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac). Arsenic and sal ammoniac would have been familiar ingredients to the medieval alchemist, and camphor was available to Europe as a spice through the Arab traders.

Why might sublimation and deposition be of particular significance to the alchemist or magician? I think the process is akin to teleportation! A solid substance disappears into vapors, only to be reformed somewhere else. In the TV series Once Upon A Time, when the evil queen teleports she is engulfed by a swirling purple smoke that resembles the color of iodine vapor! (I wonder if that’s where they got the idea.) Furthermore, sublimation could also be used as a tool for purification, much like distillation – a process core to alchemist’s work. Since alchemy was often infused with the religious symbol of Christianity, one might see the analogy a soul rising upward (or heavenward). If my students lived in the medieval world and witnessed such alchemy, they might think it sublime!

Operation Mongoose

Spoiler Alert: Just finished watching Season 4 of Once Upon A Time. If you don’t want to know what transpires, stop reading now!

Given my interest in how magical worlds intersect with non-magical worlds (a la Harry Potter), I’ve been slowly working my way through Once Upon A Time. The series features plenty of creative story-telling and mash-ups – how characters from two different fairy tales interact with each other. It also prompts me to think about the boundaries of magical systems (I’ll need to post further on this topic some time).

The chief problem with a TV series, as opposed to a stand-alone movie or well-defined miniseries, is how to keep the viewers coming back. Once Happily Ever After is reached, there is no more story to hold the attention of viewers. This seems a tad ironic given that one central theme running through Season 4 is “finding one’s happy ending”. Obstacles have to be surmounted, but to keep the story going, new and more powerful obstacles have to be devised. In the case of Once Upon A Time, this means more powerful characters wielding more powerful magic.

Frozen makes its entry primarily focusing on Elsa as she finds herself in Storybrooke at the beginning of Season 4. I think it’s fairly obvious that she is not an evil sorceress, so the powerful antagonist introduced in this case is the Snow Queen. This is the main theme of the first half of Season 4. I felt that the story and character of the Snow Queen was very well developed – and the way it draws together the web of intersecting lives was done in a clever way. The patience and perseverance of the Snow Queen, hidden in plain sight, was much more compelling in my opinion than the way Zelena, the wicked witch from Oz and Regina’s sister, was featured in the previous season. The intersection of the Frozen world (Arendelle) with the current characters is creative story-telling in some instances, and in other cases feels forced or contrived.

The second half of the season is where things start to fall apart story-wise. While the intrigue of finding the Author kept me watching, when he is finally revealed and plays his magical hand (or uses his pen), I was unimpressed. Two new witches are introduced (Ursula and Cruella) each with their own back-story episodes, and Maleficent gets resurrected. Not to mention Zelena shows up. August returns. Lily comes back. The plot feels way too contrived as the prior entanglement stories are stretched to the point of weak credibility. There is something particularly compelling about fiction that rings true. It’s magical in a way I don’t know how to explain, and maybe that’s the point! Great stories or great literature share this in common. In contrast, many other fictional stories feel contrived and dragged out. The longer they get, the more difficult it is to “get the story right”. I think this is a growing problem with the Once Upon A Time series - the piling on of backstory entanglements weakens the pleasure of the overall story. In the first season, there were fewer entanglements and backstories mainly focused on character development rather than entanglement of different characters from different worlds.

Three magic-related things I pondered while watching Season 4:

(1) Magic-wielding folks seem to have good ways of resurrecting or reincarnating themselves. However for non-magical folks, dead is dead. This makes the world outside Storybrooke interesting because without the ability to wield magic, sorceresses (and most of the magic-users in Once Upon A Time are women) cannot easily protect themselves or reassemble themselves.

(2) The pen is mightier than the sword, at least in the case of the Author – but that can only impact those “authored” in the enchanted or magical worlds. Henry, for example, is unaffected when Heroes & Villains gets written. Oddly, the Author himself seems not to have come from a magical world. It’s entirely possible he might given the way Once Upon A Time springs new back stories on characters. The concept or the idea of an Author (or multiple authors) writing things into reality and who can impose a will on the outcome is interesting, but I felt it was used in a rather one-dimensional way. Maybe later seasons will fix this.

(3) Things get interesting when the world outside Storybrooke intersects with the enchanted world. The use of magical objects is still permitted outside of Storybrooke, i.e., one could enchant an object for a specific task but not be able to channel that magic in any other way. Thus, the necklace Zelena wears allows her to take the form of another (sort of like Polyjuice Potion). Also, magical scrolls (we never see what’s written in them) allow one to recognize and re-enter Storybrooke. This reminds me of 12 Grimmauld Place. Perhaps the writers got this idea from the Harry Potter books.

I will probably watch Season 5 when the DVD is released, although my interest started to wane two seasons ago. I don’t see how the storyline can get better with the new Emma the Dark One trajectory. However, I have gotten more interested in the nature of story-telling that involves magic and also magical story-telling, so this will have to do – until something else more engaging comes along. I’m looking forward to Fantastic Beasts, but my expectations are not all that high. Prequels can be done well or they could be done poorly even if the movie special effects have improved. So can sequels.

Aqua vitae

I’ve been pondering some of the alchemical recipes in The Chemistry of Alchemy. (I’m halfway through the book now; my previous mention of this book is posted here.) I learned that cinnabar (mercury sulfide) was known as dragon’s blood (picture below from Wikipedia.) I did not know that another source of dragon’s blood is tree sap (resin) and apparently has healing or antibacterial properties. Scientists have even analyzed the flavonoids from the plant Dracaena Cambodiana. Hopefully no one actually tried to eat cinnabar as the compound would be toxic when ingested. I also learned that the famous Paracelsus helped advance alchemy via a medical slant, but his healing strategy generally took advantage of the placebo effect – diluting the active compound so it won’t do any further damage as many of the chemical treatments could be toxic.

John of Rupescissa is a name I was unfamiliar with. He lived in the 14^th century and apparently said or wrote: “The quintessence: it is the human heaven.” Rupescissa, thought that each substance had its quintessence, or its ultimate and purest form”. Aqua vitae is aptly named: the water of life! When distilled to purity, aqua vitae is a clear liquid that can support fire, i.e., it is a  “water that burns”! Aqua vitae turns out to be high-proof ethanol, discovered by the alchemists looking for the essence of wine. Multiple distillations led to the separation of ethanol, clear like water, with the aroma of alcohol (where I’m assuming this aroma was interpreted in a positive light). Aqua vitae also had healing properties – not surprising as alcohol can act as an antiseptic, and Rupescissa eagerly promoted this new product – the “pure spirit of wine”.

Since each chapter in The Chemistry of Alchemy is accompanied by a practical demonstration, the authors chose to make “Burning Waters”. Their preamble to the actual process is very amusing. “First, an additional safety instruction: do not try this demonstration with ethanol because if you do, you could end up in jail, and jail is not a safe place to be.” (They had previously discussed how much time Rupescissa spent in prison under the rather nasty conditions of that era.) “Seriously, distilling grain alcohol – or any alcohol that comes from fermented food substance – is illegal by federal law. You don’t have to check the regulations in your state. Illegal. Guaranteed. And dangerous. Don’t drink anything made in these demonstrations, and certainly don’t drink anything run through this still… the type of alcohol we will be distilling is not the same as the alcohol in highballs and is in itself a poison.” (They use rubbing alcohol or 2-propanol.)

One of my favorite demonstrations is “The Parting of Gold”. The authors tell us how to make the combination of mineral acids (HCl, H₂SO₄, HNO₃) needed to dissolve gold and separate it from other metals. I should have brought this up when I introduced acids and bases in class, but I hadn’t got to this demo yet. Anyway, one starts by making sulfuric acid known as oil of vitriol, in this case by placing a rock consisting of iron(II) sulfate and heating it up like crazy. It took a lot of work to get just a few milliliters of the acid so they continued the rest with commercial sulfuric acid (which one can easily get from aquarium pH-lowering solution). The next step is to drip the sulfuric acid into common table salt (NaCl) and collect the gas (HCl) formed. Hydrochloric acid was called “spirit of salt” by the alchemists. When sulfuric acid is dripped onto saltpeter (potassium nitrate or KNO₃), this forms nitric acid also known as aqua fortis (or “strong water”). When the three acids are present together in a solution, the mixture is known as aqua regia (“royal water”) because it can dissolve gold. (I really should learn more Latin!)

The authors recommend using 14-karat gold wire as the starting material from a jewelry-supply outlet so that the sample is free of lead and nickel. Copper is present, and the experiment involves an intermediate step separating out a beautiful blue copper solution before finally leading to the gold solution. If I ever get to teach a class on alchemy, this gold separation experiment might be on the list of things that are interesting and not too unsafe. Several of the other demonstrations, while I think they are fascinating, are a tad on the scary side for me as a theoretical chemist. I can do lab experiments (and I do teach General Chemistry lab), but I’m not particularly interested in heating up different ores on a skillet to high temperatures. I could however do the Tree of Diana, Invisible Ink, or the “Stone that moves on its own”. Feel free to check out that the book if you’re interested.

The Five Minutes Before Class

I was catching up on my reading of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) and came across the article “Small Changes in Teaching: The Minutes Before Class” by James Lang. This article at the moment is accessible to the general public. But in case wider access is removed at a later time, let me summarize the main idea. Lang argues that those few minutes you have before class can actually be used very productively. When he started teaching, he would spend the final moments gathering his thoughts before launching into class at start time.

Over the years he finds that these “warm-up minutes actually represent a fertile opportunity [to] enhance the learning that will take place in the hour that follows, to build a positive atmosphere for class discussion, or [getting] to know students better.” Here are his three suggestions, and my use (or lack thereof) of similar measures.

Suggestion #1: Spend time asking students “How are You?”

The crux behind this suggestion is creating opportunities for increased interaction and building a rapport, leading not only to better discussions in class, but increased student engagement overall. (The professor cares!) In this area, I need much improvement. While I do spend the first few minutes learning student names, and occasionally chatting a little more with the students near the front of the class, I have not done much else. (Okay, at the beginning of the semester I do have students tell me a little bit about themselves on a small index card – which isn’t much.)

Lang describes an introverted colleague who took the time to spend the first few minutes briefly chatting with a couple of students in each class period. His colleague would visit different parts of the classroom to rotate through all the students. The result: improved class atmosphere, better connection with students, and the students noticed and commented positively in end-of-semester evaluations.

This is something I could certainly do. I need to get over my introverted and focused routine so I can concentrate on engaging the students. I know my class material well enough by now. One thing I have done in smaller classes (not often) is to have each student visit my office at least once during the first two weeks of class for a short 5-minute conversation. Depending on the student, these can be awkward sometimes, and they seem to find it strange that I’m interested in who they are as individuals. Perhaps it’s because my office is unfamiliar territory while the classroom (with the other students) is more familiar and less intimidating. My goal is to try and put this into practice starting in my class tomorrow!

Suggestion #2: Outline the framework for the day’s class

One thing we know from research about the difference between novice and expert learners, is that the experts have a clear framework of their discipline. They know how the pieces (or branches) connect to the main trunk. This is not always clear to novices who grapple with isolated pieces of knowledge. The recommendation is to have the agenda on display at the beginning of class and constantly refer back to it.

This is something I’m relatively good at doing. I start my class with a five-minute review of the most important things from the previous class. (Students like this!) I then lay out our plan for the day. Now I’m not always good at writing this on the board, sometimes I remember – but at other times I don’t if we are having some discovery-type activities. In my case, I think there is room for improvement in providing a clear framework and referring to it regularly. My classrooms are a little short on board space and sometimes I erase my “plan” in the flow of maximizing board space. I need to be more conscious of what I’m doing.

Suggestion #3: “Create Wonder”

The specific suggestion Lang provides is to provide an interesting picture or video at the beginning of class for students to consider (if they come early or on time) and spend the first few minutes of class discussing it. He learned this from an astronomer who used an “Astronomy Picture of the Day” from NASA.

This is something I do in almost every class, and I got this idea from one of my colleagues a number of years back. The quality of what I put up varies depending on how much work I put into it ahead of time. I try to pick something from current news related to the topic at hand. With Thanksgiving season approaching I have shown them information about pumpkin-flavored spice (that has no pumpkin in it) and I have another one prepared on serotonin, sleepiness and Thanksgiving Turkey.

As Lang says, what this does is convey to the students that as an instructor, “I find this stuff fascinating, and I think you will, too; let’s wonder about it together.” It especially works well on some days when midway to the class something clicks with a student who makes the connection and brings up the picture I showed at the beginning of class in discussion! Okay, it doesn’t happen that often – but I’m moderately good at referring back to it at some point during class if it is sufficiently informative. Sometimes I’m lazy and just put up a chemistry joke that’s nerdy and lame but students find funny. It usually connects to the class material so hopefully it activates some memory pathway when exam day rolls around.

Those are the three suggestions. Try them if you’re a teacher!

The Aims of College Education

I am slowly working my way through Derek Bok’s comprehensive tome Higher Education in America. The book has five parts. Part I provides the context by first analyzing the nature of the different types of institutes: research universities, comprehensive universities, four-year colleges, community colleges and for-profit institutions. This diversity of institutions (in their goals and governance) and the role of government is addressed, as are the strengths and weaknesses of the system as a whole.

Part II, the largest section, is directly concerned with undergraduate education. I just finished it and my post today will highlight some of the things that caught my attention. Parts III and IV are concerned with professional education and research respectively, and there is a wrap-up Part V. I will try to comment on these latter parts in a subsequent post when I finish reading them.

My focus today is on Chapters 8 and 9, “What to Learn” and “How to Teach” respectively. Chapter 8 opens with the aims of a college education. I’m going to quote Bok here (and in other places) since my paraphrasing does not do justice to his very clear prose.

“For almost a century, undergraduate education in the United States has pursued three large, overlapping objectives. The first goal is to equip students for a career either by imparting useful knowledge and skills in a vocational major or by developing general qualities of mind through a broad liberal arts education that will stand students in good stead in almost any calling. The second aim, with roots extending back to ancient Athens, is to prepare students to be enlightened citizens of a self-governing democracy and active members of their own communities. The third and final objective is to help students live a full and satisfying life by cultivating a wide range of interests and a capacity for reflection and self-knowledge.”

Bok goes on to list specific goals that have broad consensus among faculty members, the highest (with 99% agreement) being that that “teaching students to think critically and to evaluate the quality and reliability of information” is essential or very important. Coming in second (at 90%) is “increasing students’ capacity for self-directed learning, mastering knowledge in a discipline, and developing an ability to write effectively.” There are several other goals listed (you can read the book!) but then Bok addresses the disconnect where much of the public thinks that courses and skills taught in college (particularly the liberal arts rather than a vocational approach) do not prepare students sufficiently for employment in a competitive global economy.

After more discussion (read the book if you’re interested!), the section concludes with a question: “Are colleges that claim a wide variety of aims actually pursuing them all with sufficient seriousness to warrant the requirements imposed in their name?” This is followed by an apt warning, that I have certainly felt as my institution has been going through a core curriculum review: “As a growing number of goals vie for space in a crowded curriculum, it is possible that some of the requirements agreed to by the faculty are uneasy compromises that threaten to produce the worst of both worlds – making enough demands of students’ time to represent a burden but not enough to afford much chance of actually achieving the hoped-for results.”

Bok then lays out the traditional curriculum in its three parts: the major (40-50%), electives (~25%) and general education (~30%). The rationales: (1) The major allows students to explore an area in sufficient depth, (2) electives allow students to explore different individual interests, and (3) general education “was originally designed to provide the breadth required to prepare enlightened citizens and to awaken intellectual interests that could endure and enrich one’s later years. More recently, it has expanded to become a kind of curricular catchall for courses designed to nurture the growing list of specific competencies that faculties believe students need in order to function well in the contemporary world.”

He then goes into the problems in each area and the tensions among them, the most serious in my opinion being general education. The problem is that as newer competencies are added, the curriculum must be increased or something must be cut to make room. For most institutions, breadth of knowledge is often satisfied via a distribution requirement in contrast to a common curriculum. My opinion is that coherence is lost for the sake of practical compromise and avoiding turf wars over what should be in the common curriculum. Bok writes that “it is much easier for individuals to insist on their particular version of the ideal college curriculum than it is to persuade a large body of highly educated scholars with widely varying educational views to agree on how to accomplish a long list of worthy goals within a limited number of classroom hours.”

In the next chapter, “How to Teach”, Bok first surveys the decline in academic engagement of students. Considerably less time was spent on coursework by students. A University of California survey found that “undergraduates at highly selective colleges spent three times the number of hour engaged in recreation and socializing as they spent preparing for class”. Shocker! It seems that “college authorities have unwittingly contributed to the problem by organizing all manner of absorbing extracurricular activities, many of them wholesome and worthwhile, but all of them tempting diversions from the intellectual work of the college”. Worse still, demands placed on the students (pages read and written) decreased. And to compound this, grade point averages have risen. Particularly crazy is the survey results from chief academic officers. According to Bok, while 72% think this decrease in academic rigor is a serious problem across institutions, only 16.5% think it applies to their own campus. Similarly while 65% think grade inflation is a serious problem across institutions, only 35% think their institution has this problem.

Bok goes on to tackle the criticisms of undergraduate teaching head-on. Apparently the claim that faculty neglect their teaching in favor of research is not well justified. He cites Schuster and Finkelstein’s book The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers but I haven’t read the book to see the data so I’m skeptical (suggesting I should put that book on my reading list). Similarly Bok states that the increasing use of part-time or adjunct faculty does not necessarily decrease teaching quality as critics have claimed. A slew of studies are cited in this case. My limited experience suggests that teaching quality is highly variable, some adjunct faculty are very capable, others less so. Maybe it’s a wash.

The next criticism is the use of the lecture. Bok writes: “Lecturing appeals to instructors because it is the most efficient way to cover a lot of material. The catch is that students retain very little of what they hear.” While the traditional lecture may still take place, my experience in the sciences is that instructors are injecting a variety of methods into their “lectures” to increase student engagement. Could more be done? Probably. But teachers will only take the time to change their approach if they strongly believe that their current method is failing. If most professors think their teaching is above average (Bok cites 90%), then why change? Bok then discusses some examples where teaching may be improved without costing too much, and the role of assessment – a can of worms. He then devotes Chapter 10 to discuss “Prospects for Reform”. Let me briefly quote one section that jumped out at me from this chapter and a concluding thought.

“Discipline-based majors have existed for so long that as a basic element of the curriculum that their objectives are typically accepted without discussion or passed over briefly with a sentence or two about such things as the importance of giving students the experience of learning what it means to think deeply about a subject. Surely something more than this is required to justify a requirement that occupies up to half the undergraduate curriculum. The goals should at least be defined more precisely and student progress, if possible, tested empirically. If the state aim is truly to help students learn to think more deeply, what does think deeply really mean? To what extent is such a capacity transferable from the discipline of the major to other fields of thought and experience?”

I must admit when reading this that I hadn’t thought deeply about what it means to think deeply in my discipline nor whether that skill of thinking deeply is at least partially transferable. I need to spend some time doing that, and hopefully it will be the subject of a subsequent post.

College Admissions Mania

I just finished Frank Bruni’s book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. The subtitle of the book makes a significant claim as “An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania”. The author’s main point, and I agree with him here, is that students can choose to make the most of their opportunities in college instead of being a passive consumer drifting through the experience. I’ve seen my fair share of students who just go through the motions on the academic front and attempt to do as little work as possible. I’ve also met a number who are engaged, enthusiastic and actively aim to better themselves both inside and outside the classroom.

In Chapter 4, Rankings and Wrongs, Bruni opens with a quote from a former college president (of a high-ranking college) that the U.S. News & World Report rankings is possibly the worst thing that has happened to higher education. When institutions spend huge sums of money to move up the rankings, student education is not always the main beneficiary. Part of the difficulty is that we don’t really know how to measure the complex package that is “learning” and it gets reduced to things we can measure. Whether these measurable items are good proxies and how they are weighted in the rankings is highly questionable. This leads to alternative rankings that jostle to be more authoritative, typically pointing out flaws in the earlier systems. Is there a systematic, dare I say “scientific” method to reach consensus? I don’t know. But one should keep in mind the dictum that “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

While I agree with the author’s main antidote – a call to the student to actively take opportunity of their college experience, I’m less persuaded by his argument when more broadly applied. His main approach is to use personal stories from different individuals – famous and successful folks who did not go to elite institutions. These are interspersed with stories from current students and recent graduates who may not yet be famous, but were able to thrive even though they did not get into their dream (elite) schools. On the flip side, Bruni gives examples of students at elite institutions who are Excellent Sheep, as described by William Deresiewicz in a book of the same name. The main description of many such students is that they often just want to be told what to do to get on to their next stage of a successful life. After all, this is what they’ve been doing since young, thanks in part to their parents and social circles – Chapter 8 of Bruni’s book is aptly titled “Strangled With Ivy”. In all fairness, Bruni does acknowledge that although going to a non-elite undergraduate school doesn’t determine one’s future (there is some indication he might not extend this to graduate school), a student graduating from an elite education is still at an advantage. (Chapter 7 is titled “An Elite Edge”.)

Although I had read Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U some time ago, I was still flabbergasted by the mania that parents and students go through to get into an elite institution. Hiring life-coaches to help craft the student’s application package by making sure they have the right extra-curricular activities and community service work amidst the academics seems out of whack – even more so when it starts before the kid even enters high school. Looking back on my own journey, I’m thankful my family had no ability to influence my getting into an elite institution. (I did not attend one according to U.S. News.) They didn’t read the essays I wrote (in longhand). There were no test prep courses. I went to the library, found a single SAT book with practice questions and sat there and worked through them because it was a reference book that could not be checked out. I didn’t even know how well my college prepared me academically until I went to graduate school. (I was very well prepared!)

But if elite schools do provide the edge by getting your foot in the door, this could still be a significant advantage in a tight economy where jobs are not plentiful. Certainly the statistics show that on average, graduates from elite schools earn higher salaries through life. But the cost of attending these elite institutions is high (if you are paying full price). Can we do the cost-benefit analysis? Maybe so, but it’s unclear how meaningful the numbers will be particularly since we have not come to agreement on the key factors. The cost of higher education is becoming a significant issue in the U.S. and the political circus may lead to some policy changes. Admittedly when I look at this problem, it seems dauntingly complex so I offer no good solutions.

What can I do as a professor? I can be an academic adviser (especially to my first year students – it’s no longer PC to call them “freshmen” aloud on campus in the presence of administrators) that challenges my students to make the most of their experience in college. Bruni’s book did give me several ideas of conversations I could be having with my students. A balance however needs to be struck between encouraging students, pushing them out of their comfort zone, and giving them space to reflect and think for themselves. I don’t want to turn into one of their parents even though some of them do seem like wandering sheep. Instead of a teacher-scholar (popular buzzword), I might turn into a teacher-scholar-shepherd (buzzword of the future)!

Vermeer, Narnia, Moai and other Mysteries

My brother-in-law had recommended an excellent independent film titled The Lunch Box. My wife borrowed the DVD from the local library, and it is a charming movie. However, what caught our eye in the previews was a documentary of sorts called Tim’s Vermeer. We borrowed the DVD (thanks again, local library!) and watched it this weekend. I was blown away!

The 80-minute documentary is about engineer-inventor and art-enthusiast Tim Jenison who becomes intrigued by Vermeer’s paintings. Having had a previous career in what he calls video production, he notices something uncanny about the Vermeer works – almost as if they were painted from looking through a camera lens. This sets him on a five-year journey to figure out if Vermeer could have used an optical set up with lenses and mirrors to essentially paint pictures in a mechanical, almost robotic, approach. The chasm between the arts and the STEM fields we perceive today would not have bothered Vermeer. He was creating fine experimental art aided by the mechanical arts!

I’m not going to delve into the details of the show since you should watch it for yourself. Suffice to say that Tim Jenison, a non-painter in every sense, decides that the best way to test his theory is to replicate the conditions and “paint a Vermeer”. He chooses The Music Lesson (shown below from the Wikipedia page) as his test masterpiece. Interestingly, the original is not easily accessible and hangs in Buckingham Palace and therefore Tim makes an attempt to ask the Queen of England for access. Okay, that’s enough of my teaser for the show. What struck me most is that Tim’s curiosity and background exemplifies why one should have a liberal arts education. I don’t know if Tim himself had one, but his project brings together science, engineering, the fine arts, history, foreign language (Tim learned Dutch), computer technology, not to mention a huge dose of grit. Not being a painter, Tim has to spend a rather long time robotically painting the Vermeer.

At the end of the documentary, as Tim considers his quest and what he has learned, he correctly (in my opinion) states that we don’t actually know if Vermeer used a contraption similar to the one he designed. But his approach is at least plausible, and there are strong arguments one could make that Vermeer may have used a similar or related approach. There are no letters or other evidence that indicates what Vermeer actually did (although Tim makes an effort to hunt down as much information as he can, talking to experts in the field). That’s the thing about these historical mysteries. As researchers we try to come up with as plausible an explanation as possible. I think Tim is very successful in this regard.

Watching Tim’s Vermeer reminded me of some recent experiences I’ve had in encountering similar multi-disciplinary approaches to solve historical mysteries. Friends recommended Planet Narnia wherein Michael Ward constructs an argument of what ties the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia together. The original author C.S. Lewis never disclosed if there were over-arching connections leading to much speculation as to whether there was a hidden theological piece. I had read the Chronicles as a child but found them much less interesting than Tolkien’s works on Middle Earth. Tolkien’s world seemed much more immersive than Narnia and some of the theological analogies in several of the Chronicles seemed too overt. It turns out that a theologian discovered what might be the plausible key – but instead of being theological, it was alchemical – to the joy of this chemist! Reading Ward’s synthesis that uses literature, history, philosophy, alchemy, astronomy has given me much more respect for the Chronicles. Lewis had taken his secret to his grave so to speak, and we don’t know if Ward’s thesis is correct, but it seems very plausible (in my opinion as layman of literature). I also had a chance to meet Michael Ward, attend his seminar, and ask him some questions, while he was on his book tour in the U.S. That was roughly 7-8 years ago.

Then three years ago I came across another fantastic book written by two archaeologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. The Statues That Walked investigates and overturns the dominant Collapse narrative provided by Jared Diamond on the deforestation and barren mystery of Easter Island. Their research is carried out carefully, and I find their arguments plausible and compelling – stronger than Diamond’s thesis. Those strange statue heads are called Moai. While there have been many clever ideas as to how the statues were moved from the quarry, Lipo and Hunt provide the plausible suggestion that they were moved standing upright in a “walking” motion of sorts. As the director of a new living learning community cluster for students, I chose this book as a common theme. We invited Carl Lipo to give a seminar and hold discussions with students and faculty. In his seminar he showed us a video-clip of their attempt to “walk” the statue while filming with Nova (shortly before the Nova episode was released). The event was one of my highlights of the semester! Did the original inhabitants of Easter Island walk the statues as suggested by Hunt and Lipo? We don’t know for sure, but the research has yielded a very plausible suggestion both for the movement but also for the deforestation and eventual population depletion of the island. Like Jenison, the authors used a wide variety of areas spanning the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences to synthesize their argument.

For those of us who study the origin of life, we are not trying to answer the question of how exactly life began on Earth. We will never know at least in this lifetime (unless someone builds a time machine that allows us to observe it). The more modest question we are trying to answer is whether there is a plausible route from very simple chemicals (and our best guess of the environmental conditions) to the molecules commonly used in life today – in both its diversity and commonality. As a scientist trying to “solve” a complex historical problem, I’m reminded that insight can come from fields far and wide. There’s probably a good reason why “creation” stories are mythical in nature – where myth doesn’t mean something that is not true, but is rather a literary device to convey greater truth. I’d like to think that a many-angled liberal arts approach to the question of the origin of life that makes use of science, history, philosophy, art, theology, and more, will lead us to a deeper understanding of this mystery – one that leads to awe and wonder.

3 x 1 or 2 x 1.5

No, today’s post is not about math schoolwork images that went viral a couple of weeks ago. I will resist the temptation of adding to the barrage of comments already registered in the internetosphere (my poor attempt to invent a new word).

Instead this post is about my experiment this semester teaching General Chemistry on a Tue-Thu (TR) rather than on a MWF schedule. You might think the hours add up if you’re comparing two 1.5-hour classes per week with three 1-hour meetings. But there’s the problem of “passing time”, i.e., the time in between classes so students and professors can run from one class to the next. (I personally avoid teaching back-to-back classes so I never have to do this. Actually the main reason is that I’m drained of energy right after class.)

At my institution, the 3 x 1 is more precisely three 55-minute sessions, thereby giving you 165 minutes together with the students. I’m not sure why they’re not 50-minute sessions which would lead to less wacky timetables. Imagine trying to remember that your class is 7:50-8:45am or 1:15-2:10pm. Those were the old times when I first joined the college. Then they decided that 7:50am was too early and moved ALL the classes by ten minutes thereby requiring us to remember a whole new set of times. Admittedly I got used to it after a couple of years and now have the new schedule ingrained.

The 2 x 1.5 is more precisely two 80-minute sessions or 160 minutes in total thus gypping the teacher and the students of 5 minutes per week, or 75 minutes total in a 15-weeks semester. It was actually a little worse. Back in the old days when I was mostly lecturing and doing less active learning and group work in class, I would always take a 5-minute break in the middle of a TR class. (These were the non-science majors classes and there’s only so much chemistry they can take without the break. I always announced it as 3 minutes but in reality it takes 5.) Factoring in the break that’s a loss of 15 minutes per week or a whopping 225 minutes (3 hours and 45 minutes) over the semester. What a waste!

For years I have been teaching General Chemistry in the MWF format. Our department schedules these in the mornings to minimize clashes with the once a week four-hour lab sessions. But now that I’ve been trying to incorporate more active learning and group work exercises into class, I’m finding that 55 minutes is a little too short. Last semester when I overhauled my class, I found that I was always about 10 minutes short of time and this was on top of actively hounding the students to work quickly and efficiently. Not enough reflection in class. It was a smaller Honors class, so I had high expectations of what could be accomplished – and was subsequently brought back down to earth.

So what did I do? I scheduled myself (since I was department chair) to teach a TR General Chemistry class. Since these are all first-year students, we could make sure they were co-enrolled in non-conflicting lab sections. One of my colleagues had done this some years back when he was employing active learning methods (in fact, he continues to expose me to new methods and technologies). Now I have 80 minutes per class so I don’t have to rush.

There were some constraints. For one, this was not an Honors class so the students were not as strong on average. This was significantly borne out when some students outright failed the second exam. Secondly, I still have to “cover” all the material so that students aren’t ill-prepared for the second semester of General Chemistry. Many students do not have the same instructor because of scheduling issues and therefore we as instructors agree to make sure we cover a bare minimum content-wise. Except this minimum is nowhere close to being bare. It’s chock-full! Given that I could not push the students as hard as I did last semester, I opted to scale back my more fanciful ideas of what could be accomplished.

This past Thursday I tried out an exercise I had not used in a while – building actual physical models of solid-state structures so students could really get a good handle on how atoms and ions pack in a solid. It’s hard to visualize this even on the computer. These are not your typical molecular model kits used to build small covalent molecules. I had purchased the solid-state model kits about ten years ago for my upper division Inorganic Chemistry course (where I have a module on solid-state structure). The ones I use are from the Institute of Chemical Education (ICE) and here’s a snapshot of their model of ice (how appropriate).

I first tried this out maybe six years ago in second semester General Chemistry (our topic arrangements change slightly from year-to-year). It was a small Honors class. Our classroom was attached to a lab so the students could spread out and build models. But it was very hard to accomplish what I had planned in 55 minutes. We got through less than half of what I thought we could do – poor planning on my part. But since then I’d been thinking about what tweaks (or major overhauls) would be needed. Several years ago I was invited to a high school “lab” class for a two-hour hands-on session with a group of very eager students. I substantially modified my plan and brought the ICE model kits. It was a hit!

So in preparation for Thursday’s class, I scaled down my 2-hour session into a 80-minute plan. I did a 5-minute intro on how X-rays can be utilized to find the ordered arrangements of atoms in a crystalline solid. Then we went through a simple worksheet with an arrangement of four equal-sized circles touching each other in a square arrangement. In this 2D case the students were able to quickly work out the percent of empty space in between the circles, and then calculate the relative size of a circle that could be placed in that empty space (they needed a bit of help from me with this). This took less than 15 minutes. Then I spent 10 minutes lecturing on the three cubic structures (primitive, body-centered, face-centered) sketching out simple drawings on the board accompanied my nice textbook figures flashed up on the projector.

This gave the students 40 minutes of time with the model kits where they built the three cubic structures in 3D and tried to figure out which smaller spheres would fit into the holes and really get a physical feel of how the atoms were arranged. We wrapped up in 10 minutes, basically me going through slides of different unit cells of salts, and towards the end the students were able to determine the information I was looking for just by looking at the PowerPoint slide on the screen. Or so I think. The real test will be this coming Tuesday where I will put up a structure for the five-minute quiz that takes place in two thirds of my class meetings. I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

My final comment on the 3 x 1 versus 2 x 1.5 format is not related to the course material but with that subjective feeling one gets when a class “gels” together as a learning community. Usually in my General Chemistry classes, in the MWF format, this happens around weeks 4-5. The students are now much more comfortable with each other and with me. This semester I thought I was doing something wrong because I didn’t have the expected camaraderie with my students at the same point in the semester. It came later in weeks 6-7. In this case I think the number of class meetings made a difference. My hypothesis is that it takes some number of meetings for the students to get comfortable (at least in my current class format) and this process cannot be rushed. But I think reaching this point more quickly can be facilitated, and this experience has made me think about how I might structure my classes next semester to be more intentional about building a learning community

Interview Season

My department is in the late stage of a faculty search. Late stage? But it’s only early November! Unlike most other areas where there might be a turnaround of several months from start to finish, academic searches can take a long time. My work started over a year ago. At this point last year, I had completed the paperwork requesting a new tenure line along with plenty of supporting data to convince the administration why it was a crucial need. (Our classes and number of majors are bursting at the seams!) In the late spring and early summer we had job advertisements posted with a deadline early in the Fall semester. A subcommittee “triages” through the many, many applications and narrows the pool down to the top 5-10%. Then all of us read the full applications and winnow down the candidates to those we would like to phone-interview. This is further reduced to a very small number of candidates invited for on-campus interviews. That’s where we are right now, and we plan to have an offer out by mid-November for a position starting next August.

The schedule used to be much later. When I was on the job market, many of the interviews were in January, although I did have a few in the late Fall. But over the years, there has been an “arms race” to secure the strongest candidates quickly thereby resulting in deadlines being pushed ever earlier. This strategy has worked well for us – we’ve had the strongest pool I’ve seen in many years. It gets increasingly difficult to winnow down the list with so many highly qualified and capable candidates. Those that make it to the on-campus interview have a busy two full days, as do the rest of us. I enjoy learning new cutting-edge science even if not in my subfield. I’m reminded that I could still be doing a better job teaching while observing a candidate doing a stellar job explaining complex science to undergraduates. There is also wining and dining involved, a very useful setting that allows the candidates to see the strong camaraderie in my department when we’re out on a social event together. But to prevent myself from getting fat with all those dinners out, I have been opting for fish entrees with an extra side of vegetables. I do have trouble resisting dessert though! (I've opted to post a picture of my broccolini instead of my dessert.)

While the process is slow and goes through many stages, I am happy that faculty hiring is primarily in the hands of faculty. This was not the case in the early stages of presently “premier” institutions in the U.S., and it is still not the case in many other countries. I’ve been learning more about the history of faculty involvement in hiring their own through reading Larry Gerber’s The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance. Gerber’s slant is more of an observer reporting on facts and trends, in contrast to Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty, a scathing view (with many personal anecdotes) that I’ve written about in an earlier post. Gerber divides his analysis into eras starting with the antebellum period (a new word I had to look up), 1870-1920 (the beginning of many august institutions), 1920-1940, 1940-1970 (where the largest gains in faculty governance have taken place), and the post-1970 era with the erosion of faculty governance. The AAUP features strongly in the narrative.

Back in the day, the university president and/or the governing board would hire and fire faculty without involving their peers. As the percentage of adjunct faculty (who often have little or no voice in the university governance process) increases in the present era, along with financial belt-tightening, the balance of power is now squarely back in the hands of university administrations.

This made me think about the Hogwarts model of hiring professors. We don’t have many examples of how the process works although it seems that the Headmaster (Dumbledore in most cases) interviews candidates and determines whether or not they will join the staff. No mention is made of whether he consults the rest of his staff. Clearly he is the wisest and cleverest of the group, as portrayed in the books – but he also admits that this can result in errors with more serious consequences. Trelawney applies for the Divination post, and Dumbledore interviews her at an inn (The Hog’s Head!) and doesn’t think she has the chops until she makes a “genuine” prophecy that she herself does not recall. In a sense she is not like the fabled Cassandra of Greek mythology who is fated to know that her prophecies will not sway her listeners. Trelawney is hired mainly for her own protection to which she is oblivious.

The largest turnover is in the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. It’s unclear exactly why Quirrell or Lockhart were hired. Clearly Dumbledore knows that neither of them were particularly qualified. Remus Lupin, on the other hand, is qualified and seems to do a fine job teaching the students through active learning and not just through theoretical concepts – the method of choice employed by Dolores Umbridge. In this case, Dumbledore doesn’t hire her but rather the Ministry (is this the “administration?”) puts her in Hogwarts to “keep an eye on things” and gives her extra administrative powers. Alastor Moody is hired because Dumbledore is “reading the signs” of Voldemort’s return to power, although the one doing the teaching at Hogwarts is a very capable imposter.

Besides Trelawney’s interview, Voldemort also asks Dumbledore for a teaching position in an interview of sorts. Dumbledore wisely does not hire him. The most extensive interview that we read about is in Book 6 when Dumbledore seeks to persuade Slughorn out of retirement. Harry is employed as bait to get Slughorn to agree. In all of these cases, it seems that a conversation takes place between Dumbledore and the potential hiree, and that’s it! This in fact looks like what happens when as department chair I’ve hire adjunct faculty. There is an open position; I have a stack of CVs that I have prioritized; I e-mail potential candidates in order of priority and have a phone conversation sometimes followed-up with an on-campus visit (we’re lucky to have a good local pool to draw from). Then I either hire the candidate or move on to the next person. In fact I was hired in exactly the same way as an adjunct faculty member. In my case this was a little over two months before the beginning of the semester. Slughorn and Moody were hired barely weeks before the new term started.

Why do we hire so differently for these different types of positions? If faculty governance is so important, why do we only take the long-layered route when hiring on the tenure line? To some extent, we’re pragmatic and have limited time – and therefore the hiring of adjunct faculty has been delegated to the chair at least in my department. I'd like to think it's because I can be trusted to do this well. (I do consult with my colleagues in the appropriate subfield.) The job scope of the adjunct faculty member is also much more limited, and we’re hiring for a very specific skill set. A tenure track position on the other hand often hinges on potential – what the candidate could become, rather than what he or she is right now. I suppose that’s true of hiring any new teacher who has little experience. You have to start somewhere. (Here's an earlier post on teacher hiring and training.) And I’m thankful to those who gave me my early opportunities, or trusted me with their children (I started off as a tutor). Did Dumbledore see potential in Quirrell or Lockhart? Perhaps potential to change and grow in maturity? I don’t know. As a teacher, it’s important to remind myself to see the potential of my students to grow as life-long learners even if some of them seem like Quirrell and Lockhart from my limited perspective.