A Year Back

I missed the Great Pivot of March 2020. Because I was on sabbatical, it gave me the time and space to think about how I would offer my courses remotely. While some of my other sabbatical plans were squashed, I was still able to make good progress on one of my research projects. Being a computational chemist, I just needed an internet connection to VPN into my institution’s computing cluster.

 

We were remote both semesters of the 2020-2021 academic year. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. (Here’s my roundup for Fall 2020 and for the year as a whole.) In short, my upper-division special topics class translated well into the remote environment because we discussed the primary literature. I hardly had to “draw” anything on a whiteboard (viewed through Zoom). The rest of my classes were general chemistry extensively used the white board, but I think I managed fine, and so did the students. I’m glad I wasn’t slated to teach physical chemistry during the remote year.

 

I was glad to be back in person for the 2021-2022 academic year. I think most of the students were too. We had a short remote stint at the beginning of the spring semester because of the Covid winter surge, but that was only for a couple of weeks. Teaching while masked wasn’t terrible since our classrooms are not large. Student participation didn’t seem diminished compared to pre-Covid times. One thing students were not used to: taking exams in-person in a classroom once again. The first exam in my fall semester classes felt stressful for the students. I think they got used to it pretty quickly. I also feel that my weekly meetings with my research students were more efficient in person, and I’d like to think I was able to convey my excitement about their projects better in person.

 

This past year I maintained hybrid office hours, i.e., I had my Zoom open during office hours but also encouraged students to visit in-person (masked) especially if their questions involved diagrams or math. Physical chemistry is full of math, and my P-Chem students always visited in person. It was much easier to work through problems together that way. While I had a few G-Chem students visit via Zoom, those that chose to come to office hours mostly came in person. I did notice that fewer unique students came to office hours this past year compared to when we were remote. I suspect it’s because students (especially first-years in my G-Chem classes) didn’t know their classmates and so many of them were working alone on homework rather than with others.

 

During the remote year I was just trying to keep up with adjusting to Zoom and Blackboard. This past year back in-person, feeling a sense of normalcy, I had time and space to think about how to improve my classes. I overhauled my quantum chemistry course, ditching the textbook and making worksheets for each class meeting. This was a lot of work but I’m happy with the effort I put in because I can build on it the next several times I teach the course. I made some improvements to my statistical thermodynamics worksheets with some new things I tried in quantum. Overall, I felt my stat therm class was more streamlined this year. I had students submit their problem sets and mock exam questions through Blackboard and that worked well. In my G-Chem classes, the self-tests were delivered and submitted through Blackboard too – a practice I retained from the remote year that worked well. Overall, I handed out less paper in class than I used to, and I made more pdf files. So even though we’re back in-person, I now use Blackboard for material delivery and assignment submission, something I hardly used pre-Covid.

 

My year back isn’t quite over. We’re just starting Finals Week. Hopefully none of my students catch Covid and are able to take their final exams on time. Last semester, I count myself fortunate that there were no issues in all three of my classes. But you never know. The U.S. is seeing an uptick in cases again. All in all, it’s nice to have a year back. It passed quickly, and I’m already starting to think about my classes next academic year. But first I need to finish the semester, and gear up for summer research!