Wide Margins

Among the many tidbits I learned from Judith Flanders’ book A Place for Everything was the evolving use of marginal abbreviations. These are annotations that readers (and sometimes writers or publishers) would put in to help them cross-reference material with other related things. They were in the margins! You sometimes see such marginalia in used books, or you may have written some in books you were reading. I am personally not an annotator, and I’m usually annoyed when I find them in library books (my main source of reading material), but they can be occasionally helpful. Harry Potter readers will recall how he utilized marginalia in his second-hand Potions textbook for both good and ill in Half-Blood Prince.

 

According to Flanders, there was even a brief surge of books (in medieval times) printed with wider margins – more space for readers to annotate! I suppose that double-spacing the lines of text performs similarly; hence I might ask my students to turn in their lab or research reports double-spaced to ease my red-inked annotations of their work. And nowadays professors typically tell their students not to exceed one-inch margins in their submitted papers. In contrast, research grant agencies tell professors not to shrink one-inch margins. There’s trying to get away with too little, and trying to get away with too much.

 

Since I made the decision not to use a textbook for my quantum chemistry course next semester, I am planning to have prepared worksheets for every class meeting. I already do this for my statistical thermodynamics course (the other half of P-Chem), which consists of (1) some printed text usually for definitions and context, (2) the occasional figure/graph, and (3) blank space for students to write in mathematical work. I’ve use one-inch margins simply because that’s the default setting of my word processor, but I wonder whether I should consider wider margins.

 

In my stat therm class, the students still do a lot of writing. That’s because it evolved from an earlier incarnation where I wrote out “full” lecture notes on the board usually surrounding fully-worked mathematical examples (derivations or problems-to-solve). Over time, more has gone into the “printed” worksheets and I might partially work through a derivation or problem on the board. I found this helped as class sizes increased and I started to encounter a wider range of students with very different comfort levels utilizing math in P-Chem (even though all students have taken the math and physics prerequisites). The last several years, I’ve started to embed pre-class assignments/questions and directly tie each homework problem to what we’re doing in class that day.

 

There are a lot of nitty-gritty details in the integral calculus employed in quantum that students can easily miss (subscripts, superscripts, Greek symbols) and I’m wondering if I should have more of the equations and derivations printed in the worksheets. I could accompany this with wide margins and other white space so that students can annotate more. This may shift how students “put together” their notes not just in class, but also when struggling through problem sets, and preparing for exams. Although the numbers are still small, I am also starting to see more students use tablets to take notes in class, and I’d like to adjust my worksheets appropriately for direct electronic use. (Most students in my stat therm class print out the worksheets and bring them to class.) An important support I might need to provide is teaching students how to annotate well.

 

I hadn’t thought about the advantages and uses of wide margins until reading A Place for Everything. If successful, perhaps I will bring about a revival of useful marginalia in my P-Chem classes! Could it teach students to be more inventive like the previous owner of Harry Potter's textbook? You’ll be seeing more on this as I work my way through the process starting this summer as I prep and through the fall semester when I actually teach the course.