All Aboard

The First of September, in the world of Harry Potter, is when young wizards and witches would board the Hogwarts Express, eager to start the new year of school. Friends who haven’t seen each other over the summer holidays are excited to meet again. Parents are giving last minute advice and reminders to their children. The sounds of magical creatures and pets add to the cacophony. Then at eleven o’ clock I imagine the whistle blowing and the train starts to move. All aboard!

 

In my world, it’s the first week of a new semester and a new school year, although today is not the first day of classes. The campus is buzzing with activity and there are students everywhere. Some wander the halls of the science building trying to find their classrooms or their professor’s office. It’s a bit of a maze and the room numbers are neither consecutive nor is the logic intuitive. At least we don’t have moving staircases. We also no longer have a mask mandate for classrooms this year. I’m still getting used to seeing student faces in full. I’ve said hello to students I had last year in my classes when I see them in the building, and they seem glad that I remember their names. I’ve yet to learn all the student names in my classes this semester, but I hope to have reached that milestone by the end of Week Four.

 

I have a lighter schedule this semester: one section of General Chemistry I and one section of General Chemistry II. Offering the latter in the fall semester is to help students get caught up more quickly so they don’t have to wait until next spring. We’ve been offering G-Chem I both semesters for at least fifteen years. While the bulk of these are in the fall semester, we typically have a few in the spring because there are just so many students who need to take it. However, those who took G-Chem I in the spring had to wait until the following spring to take G-Chem II, unless they take it during the summer (and pay extra). This fall, we’re offering just one section of the G-Chem II lecture (and two lab sections) as a trial run. My lecture is relatively full, so students are indeed taking the opportunity. Because I’d previously only taught G-Chem II in the spring, I’ve had to make some minor rearrangements to the schedule to accommodate different breaks and holidays. We’ll see how things go.

 

I’m always felt a little nervous leading up to the first day of class, even though I’m a seasoned teacher, and these are classes I’ve taught regularly for twenty years. It’s a good sort of nervous energy, I think. Seasoned Hogwarts veteran professors don’t seem to betray any anxiety. We do read about Hagrid’s jitters – very understandable – when he first gets the opportunity to teach Care of Magical Creatures. He feels out of place as a newly appointed academic, even though it’s clear he knows the subject material very well. I’m sure the students are more nervous. What’s this professor going to be like? Am I going to enjoy this class? Will it be a chore? Will it be a total bore?

 

The first day went well, at least in my opinion. Everyone showed up to class who was on my roster. There was some amount of student participation in class discussion, more in my G-Chem II class (with mostly returning students, but also some new transfer students), while the G-Chem I students (many of them first-years) were a lot more reticent to venture their opinions about “what is matter?” and “why does it matter?” and “why do you believe in atoms even if you’ve never seen one?” After day one, my nervousness goes away. For me, it’s only limited to the first class when I meet the students for the first time each semester. Hopefully the students also shed their nervousness, and it’s all aboard as we dive into the material. And we dive in very quickly. On day two, we’re knee-deep in calculations (units and measurement in G-Chem I, and the First Law of Thermodynamics in G-Chem II).

 

The lighter teaching load this semester means more time and energy for other things. (Although we’ll see how busy my office hours get – they’re usually less busy when I’m not teaching P-Chem.) I’ve been struggling to shape a paper that I’d like to submit to a journal by mid-October. At least I’ve told the journal editor that it’s on the way. This week I also told my research student who contributed to those research results last academic year, so now that I’ve said it, I need to follow through. We’ve collected lots of results and there are some conclusions we can draw from it, but there isn’t the clear impactful discovery narrative I would like to have. I feel it’s important to have a good story to tell, and that weaving narrative thread hasn’t coalesced in my own mind yet. Thinking about it is deflating for now.

 

That being said, I am noticing that the buzz of activity this first week of classes is starting to energize me. At the same time, I also feel more tired at the end of the work day because I expend much more energy when I’m teaching. More standing. More walking. More talking. And on the first day of class, I tried to be super-enthusiastic about chemistry to set the tone. (Or perhaps I’m scaring the students.) We’re on a journey together to learn about the interesting world of the tiny unseen things that help us explain the visible world that we interact with. What could be more exciting than chemistry! All aboard.