First Week: Spring 2017 Edition

Looking back at my blog, I see that I have regularly posted about my first week of classes; at least I have done so the past three semesters. So without further ado, here is the Spring 2017 edition!

Having recently read Dylan Wiliam’s book, and giving my self two things to work in my teaching, I was very excited to make modifications to some of my class activities. I am teaching two classes this semester: (1) the honors section of second-semester general chemistry, and (2) a chemistry for non-science majors course themed around potions!

The honors general chemistry section is small, limited to 20 students this semester, partly because we are in a very tight classroom that just barely fits all of us. There’s a little room to spill out in an adjacent lab space; I expect to do so for some group activities that will require more space. The class has 17 women (85%), which tells you something of the trends we are seeing. (For reference, the baseline average is 60% female across the college, but my classes are typically two-thirds to three-quarters women.) The students seem eager to learn and I’ve had no trouble getting students to participate in class discussions and group work.

On the first day I gave a 15-minute quiz based on Energy concepts they should have known from last semester. (I had warned the students a week ahead via e-mail.) After the quiz I had the students work in groups to come up with a working definition of energy, list types of energies, and then generate a mind-map to relate their different ideas about energy. (Class went really well in my opinion.) After class I read through the responses, chose one question (a definition of the Ionization Energy of an atom) and picked out six student responses. The next class, we started with the students critiquing the anonymous responses to illustrate how one writes out a clear answer without vague or extraneously incorrect information. After discussing this as a class, I gave them back their ungraded quizzes and for homework, they would make any corrections they chose and resubmit the work the next class. (I’ve now graded it, and it was much improved.) Hopefully that set up the quality of work I will receive from the students as the semester progresses. We’re now knee-deep in the First Law of the Thermodynamics and how to calculate and make use of Enthalpies.

In my nonmajors class, we started by discussing “What is matter and why does it matter?” It is a story that starts with the students declaring that matter is made up of atoms, my challenging this assumption, and then a whirlwind tour through Greek philosophy, alchemy and attempts to synthesis the philosopher’s stone. (I’ve done this sequence many times!) Then we discussed the scientific method, and the importance of measurements in science, ending up with Archimedes’ eureka moment, different density of metals, the density of water and human beings, and body-mass index. Class #2 began with a slide on the making of Polyjuice Potion and alchemical thinking, and I’ve connected this to a quiz to calculate density of a liquid, and a “formative-assessment” question about what happens when two liquids are mixed. It required the students to take a scientific approach and reason possibly about what is happening with the molecules they cannot see. (The class material then continued into molecules, compounds, mixtures, and phases of matter. There were too many definitions so some parts of the class were rather tedious; I need to restructure this section a bit differently.)

Fun things I did include embedding a secret word (“snake”) in my syllabus to check if students read the syllabus before the first day of class. The majority did so, but some didn’t. The best guess from someone who hadn’t read it was “waffle crisps”! For my formative-assessment question and quiz, I have pictures of green liquids to match the Polyjuice Potion theme. For some reason, when you search the web and get hits on “making polyjuice potion for your party”, they all seem to be green liquids. Slytherin? Snake shedding its skin? I don’t know because I chose not to go down that web-surfing rabbit-hole.

Overall, my first week classes went quite well (in my, perhaps limited, opinion); a similar thing happened last semester. This counterbalances the research-related hardware problems I’ve been having. Besides the lab server going down, we’re fighting problems with the new blade cluster showing some odd behavior resulting in load spikes on some nodes – which then slow down all the other jobs possibly related to I/O. Perhaps it’s a good thing that Hogwarts and the magical world is forced to avoid electricity and computers. Sometimes the latter are a real headache. But for many of us Muggles, computers are the magical black boxes that keep things chugging along. Until they don’t.