Down the Rabbit Hole

How do we encourage students to delve deeper? Three incidents this past week made me think about this question. And the phrase that came to mind was “going down the rabbit hole” per Alice in Wonderland.

Incident #1: We had oral presentations in my Research Methods class. In groups of four, students were presenting their research into the serendipitous discovery of a chemical substance (e.g. nitrocellulose, lidocaine, penicillin). Part of their presentation had to touch on the role of creativity in the discovery. I went to class half an hour ahead of time, instead of the usual fifteen minutes, to load the presentations on the classroom computer. A number of students were already there! A couple were practicing their tandem talk up front. Another two were at the back philosophizing about the connection between creativity and serendipity. I joined their conversation, mostly listening and occasionally chiming in a word or two – but the students went deep into a philosophical discussion. I was thinking to myself : This is the type of discussion we should be having in class, even though it was happening “outside of class time”.

Incident #2: Two days ago I was chatting with a student about her summer research experience. As part of a Luce professorship that my department received a number of years ago, we also built in a funding line to sponsor sending two female students to R1 (research-intensive) institutions each summer. This allows our students to venture away from the very-nurturing environment of a liberal arts college that focuses on undergraduates, and get a taste of what being in a Ph.D. program might entail. The labs we send our students to are carefully chosen to ensure they have a good mentored experience. We are doing our part to increase the pipeline of women scientists in chemistry and biochemistry. Anyway, this student had an excellent experience and came back excited about graduate school and research. She talked about how she has only scratched the surface, and below that surface there’s more, and more, and more. Just like going down the rabbit hole. I’m glad we require all our majors to have an undergraduate research experience.

Incident #3: I am working on a letter of recommendation for a student I previously had in Honors general chemistry. In many ways he was your typical A student. He learned the material well, participated in class discussions, worked well with others, was pro-active about completing assignments early and not waiting to the last minute, and keeps himself busy with co-curricular activities on top of school. What made him stand out among his peers who are also typical A students was that extra depth I would see in his answers on problem set and exams. Not only would he clearly show the steps in his reasoning, his final answers had that extra bit of thoughtfulness, that showed he really understood the material conceptually. Some A students can solve problems algorithmically, but don’t necessary display the depth that made this student stand out. He went deeper.

This made me think about my general chemistry course. There is so much material to “cover” that I often do not take the time to draw the students in deep, at least in class. A student who comes by my office with questions gets that deeper treatment, i.e., I almost always respond to a question with a follow-up question to lead the student to a firmer conceptual understanding. (The initial question typically reveals the shaky foundation, but that’s part of the learning process.) I feel more at leisure in my office not to rush through an answer, even if the student would prefer just getting the answer and running off.

That’s one disadvantage of the typical chemistry major; it’s rather hierarchical. At the introductory level we have many sections of general chemistry. Students may have a different instructor in the second semester, so if I didn’t “cover” what the instructors as a group agreed upon, then I put these students at a disadvantage. The same thing happens after general chemistry when the students move on to organic chemistry in their sophomore year. Physical and inorganic chemistry come after. The advantage of a hierarchical major is that you leverage earlier material that the student knows to help them reach the more advanced material. Later courses build on earlier courses, and without completing the pre-requisite, a typical student has little chance of doing well in the next class following the sequence. Could we do all this differently? Possibly, but it would take a major redesign of epic proportions. The inertia to overcome this barrier is substantial.

But perhaps I can carve out a class period or two for some rabbit-hole pursuits. We covered properties of covalent bonds in class yesterday. Students were given data on bond lengths and energies and were asked to identify trends, anomalies, and come up with explanations. But being pressed for time, I would only ask “why” one or two levels down at most. Not far down the rabbit hole. Certainly not five levels down per the 5 Whys of the Toyota Production System. I could have restructured the material to go further down the rabbit hole, but I was blinkered by my adherence to the course syllabus. I’m giving an exam next week and wanted to make sure we “covered” the material. However, perhaps I could construct a Problem Set that requires going down the rabbit hole; this idea just popped into my head while I was typing the previous sentence – serendipity! Okay, I need to take some time to flesh out that idea more carefully.

I leave you with a “down the rabbit hole” picture that I liked from websurfing. You can see the creator’s signature in the picture. Here’s the Pinterest link, which takes you to Etsy (but I don’t have an account so I didn’t go down that rabbit hole).