Looking back at my
blog, I see that I’ve regularly reflected on my first week of class – at least
most semesters. So here’s the Fall 2018 edition!
I started to feel
tired this afternoon now that I’m at week’s end. It’s not even a full
week because Monday was a holiday (U.S. Labor Day). However, I do expend more
energy when I’m actively teaching during the semester compared to the summer.
So maybe my body is just getting used to the regime. We’ll see how I fare next
week when I have to make it through a full week.
One thing I’ve
noticed about Day One of class in both general chemistry and physical chemistry
(the two classes I teach the most regularly) is that I cover less “content”
every year. I spend 5-10 minutes of class highlighting the syllabus because
I’ve e-mailed the students a link to the full detailed syllabus a week
beforehand. I incorporated my ideas from the summer into the syllabus, and
students seemed fine with it. That still leaves me the better part of an
hour to dive into chemistry – which I do! However, I find that I am
increasingly discussing big picture context-type things with less time on
nitty-gritty details of Chapter One stuff. On Day Two of class I’m back to my
densely-packed plan, although in my Quantum Chemistry class, I still made more
big-picture statements while cutting out a few ‘sidebar’ details as we went
through deriving the Rydberg equation from the Bohr model of hydrogen.
On Tuesday
morning, I met my new academic advisees – all first-year students who had
indicated some interest in a science major when they filled in their
questionnaire after being admitted to the university. A chunk of time is
helping them make any needed changes to their class schedules. I’m pleased to
say that this year very few of them needed to make changes, and for the most
part their initial schedules were in good shape. I also spend some time talking
about the liberal arts and our college’s version of the core curriculum. This
year I decided to preface my discussion with having the students spend 5-10
minutes drawing freehand a map of the U.S. in as much detail as possible. (One
international students drew her home country.) Then I paired up the students
such that no two students were from the same state and had them compare and
contrast their drawings. The idea was to have them see that they tend to know
what their home state looks like and maybe several of the neighboring states,
but things get hazy further from home. This indeed proved to be the case although
I had a couple of students who did pretty well – one with 30-ish states and the
other close to having all 48! The subsequent discussion was about learning new
things in one’s classes and from each other, with overtones of
the-parts-form-a-whole speech.
On Tuesday
afternoon, I sent a “welcome back” e-mailed to all my returning academic
advisees (rising sophomores, juniors and seniors). This is mainly to let them
know where to find my timetable and my office hours and to encourage them to
stop by to say hello! I’m pleased that several of them stopped by this week to
ask me about my summer and tell me about what they were up to! I’m also pleased
that a few students in my classes have already come to office hours this week
to get some help on homework or to ask me about studying strategies. A
good start!
My new research
students seem to be off to a good start too! I’ve encountered fewer questions
than in previous semesters about Unix, vi, and using the computational
chemistry software. We’ve talked more about the chemical reactions they’re
modeling and they’ve gotten their first few ‘results’ although there are many
more computations to be run. I’d like to think this is because my revamped two-day training with updated tutorials and focusing on certain key skills has
helped. But it also might be the fact that when three of them were
together training they also helped each other. And they might all simply be
quick learners! Anyway, this is all to the good.
The bad part of
this week was having three technology-related snafus on Thursday. We are using
a new general chemistry textbook this year, and thus a new online homework system. When I logged in on Thursday morning, one of my
three assignments – the one that students were actively working on – had
disappeared! I was also unable to see any edits I made to assignments and when
I tried to create and ‘save’ a new assignment, it didn’t show up! After some
moments of frustration trying different things (including several different web
browsers and refreshing), I gave up and submitted a help ticket. The problem
was fixed and my assignment reappeared. The second snafu was when one of my
advisees noticed a problem on her degree audit system; a class which
should have counted towards her major was showing up as an elective instead.
After a little more investigation I realized that a bunch of other students had
the same problem (although they hadn’t noticed yet), and I’m in the process of
getting it fixed working with the registrar’s office. The third snafu
showed up in the afternoon. I tried submitting a calculation to our computing
cluster only to get an error that it couldn’t contact the license server. This
was odd because one of my students had been running fine in the morning. It
took me a bunch of troubleshooting tests to narrow down the problem, and was
able to then clue the sysadmin into how to fix it. Took an hour but problem resolved.
Other than those
three issues, I’ve had a good first week. But now I’m looking forward to the
weekend!
I enjoyed browsing
my previous ‘first week’ posts:
·
Spring 2018 (technically I was in week 2)
·
Fall 2016 (it's gold!)
Oddly, I didn’t
post anything for Spring 2016. Not sure why.
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