Old Babylon School

We’re constantly hearing about how our students have changed, even more so in the wake of COVID-19. Not to mention there’s the constant drumbeat of pivoting away from non-traditional teaching approaches, as if there’s something bad about tradition. There’s a good reason tradition endures, and I think that lecturing has its usefulness, although it’s certainly not the only approach I employ from my pedagogical bag-of-tricks. If I’m feeling curmudgeonly about all this, I might refer to myself being old-school even as that term takes on increasingly negative connotations.

 

But my old-school isn’t all that old. I picked up useful tips observing my teachers, both what to try and what to avoid. It was one sign I knew that teaching was in the cards for me, because I found it interesting analyzing the varied teaching approaches I observed as a student. So if my teachers were old-school, I’ve retained parts of their pedagogy but infused it with what I bring to the table. I firmly believe that teachers should take advantage of their individual strengths and abilities, and so even if I admire a colleague’s teaching approach that’s very different from mine, I won’t necessarily emulate it.

 

As we go back in time, we know less and less about how school was conducted. There are caricatures aplenty of how old-school is out-of-date with modern technology, and we need to adapt or be deemed obsolete. How far can we go back? How old-school is the oldest schooling we’ve heard about? Turns out we know a little bit about school in Babylon. Not the Babylon of the Bible that sacked Jerusalem in 587 BCE, but older – what scholars today might call Old Babylon (circa 1900 to 1600 BCE). Why am I pondering this? Because I enjoy reading ancient history and archaeology and I’m working my way through Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization, by Paul Kriwaczek. 

 

Mesopotamia is fascinating. Thanks to the birth of cuneiform and a tradition of writing, we have a bunch of tablets from Old Babylon. But today’s post will just focus on what we know about schooling. Here are translated excerpts from a student who had just graduated:

 

“I had three days of vacation each month: and since each month has three holidays when one does not work, I therefore spent twenty-four days in school each month. And it did not seem like a very long time to me! From now on I will be able to devote myself to recopying and composing tablets, undertaking all useful mathematical operations. Indeed, I have a thorough knowledge of the art of writing: how to put the lines in place and to write… Since I have attended school the requisite amount of time [not stated how long] I am abreast of Sumerian, of spelling, of the contents of all tablets…”

 

The graduate goes on to claim the ability to draw up documents and contracts of various sorts: trade, marriage, sales, adoption. It’s like a resume on a tablet. Kriwaczek contrasts this with a translated satirical story titled ‘Schooldays’ where the writer bemoans the drudgery of school, the old-school teacher who beat him for constantly “breaking rules”, making errors, having poor handwriting, and more. Bribing the teacher for better treatment ensued.

 

There’s much we don’t know about school in Old Babylon, but the evidence accumulated at present suggests that temple officials (priests) ran private schools, but it wasn’t mainly a religious education but a secular one: reading, writing, and numeracy. Students were being trained to be scribes. And yes, math was challenging – additionally so because the Babylonians used base-sixty rather than base-ten, and they didn’t use the numeral zero nor decimal points. Apparently they used multiplication tables and the equivalent of the logarithm books that I used during my schooldays before hand calculators were allowed.

 

The science of Old Babylon school was also much more about going through many specific examples, and less about distilling abstract or general principles. This meant lots of memorization, and what are tablets of writing if not aids for memorizing and working your way through math problems that you can’t do in your head with limited working memory. Omens and portents were taken seriously, as was astrology. This shouldn’t surprise us – if you don’t know why something happens, you try to make connections (hypotheses) and see how they turn out. There was a lot of guesswork. Very similar to what many students do when they begin organic chemistry – memorization and guesswork. But once they see the underlying principles, then things might start to click.

 

Our human brains and capacity for learning haven’t changed very much evolutionarily in the last three thousand years. But our tools have! Perhaps that’s why there’s always a dance between old-school and new-tech, one that I expect to continue for generations to come.

Return to Conferencing

It had been a while since I went to a large conference. No thanks to the pandemic. But last week I was back at the American Chemical Society national conference. This one was in San Francisco; I’ve blogged about my usual conference activities at such a meeting. While there were a few individuals who wore masks, it mostly felt like a pre-COVID conference. There didn’t seem to be social-distancing anxiety and folks were happy to shake hands instead of just elbow-bump.

 

This was in contrast to a smaller regional conference (~100 people) I attended last October, which was my first in-person conference in almost three years. Almost everyone was masked, appropriately so since the small lecture theater barely accommodated us – the organizers were not expecting such a good turnout. I guess we were itching to get back in person. I did take off my mask when I was speaking at the podium, as did the other speakers.

 

One of the themes of the big San Francisco meeting was Artificial Intelligence applications and machine learning. I went to several high-quality talks presented by folks from both academia and industry. Some were well attended, others sparsely so. This is a field that is moving very quickly, hype notwithstanding. I’m not an expert in machine learning, although I am picking up the newest lingo, and I have some basic knowledge of how computational neural networks work.

 

Of all the talks I attended this time around, three stood out. One was a machine-learning talk on protein engineering that had underlying intriguing results to protein evolution. I don’t think the speaker had origin-of-life research in mind, but it gave me an idea of how that research could be extended. Another was a statement that a speaker made in a Q&A, essentially that living systems invert our standard thermodynamic model. In a standard G-Chem or P-Chem undergraduate course, the environment (thermal surroundings, modeled by a water bath) is considered to be a large reservoir that is relatively invariant while the chemical system is where all the “changes” are taking place. However, living systems maintain homeostasis and stay out of equilibrium while adapting to the environment changing. I liked the pithy contrast!

 

The third talk was unusual. I was in a session celebrating valence bond theory where almost all the speakers talked about research. However, one person chose to talk about how he was incorporating valence bond theory into P-Chem. This is not the (pathetically simplistic) valence bond theory of G-Chem, but the more sophisticated version that quantum chemists use. I had started incorporating bits of this into my quantum course, and I’ve been trying to slowly enlarge that share, since my expertise is in chemical bonding. This has meant cutting out some other parts (including math). Anyway, I very much enjoyed the talk and it sparked some ideas that I plan on trying.

 

Overall a good conference, and that takes my travel tally to four in-person meetings this calendar year so far (which included going to the ESCIP and LABSIP workshops, sort of like mini-conferences). It’s refreshing to return to in-person conferencing after a lapse of several years. I’ve missed the interactions between fellow human beings without an intervening screen or device!

Circle of Knowledge

The word encyclopedia comes from the Greek enkyklios paideia which refers to “learning within the circle” or “all-round education”. I’m learning these interesting facts from Simon Garfield’s new book All the Knowledge in the World, subtitled “The extraordinary history of the encyclopedia”. The famous Encyclopaedia Britannica features prominently in many of the chapters (there are 26, with titles from A to Z), and I learned that Wikipedia plundered much from the prominent and possibly the most popular 11^th edition (conveniently no longer in copyright) to use as a starting base. A Guardian article from a decade ago pays homage to its magic and appeal.

 

But Britannica had competitors. I learned that Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought it was a travesty to publish each volume in alphabetical order over a period of years. He called it a “huge unconnected miscellany… a worthless monster”. His vision, realized in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana “emphasized the systematic relationships within knowledge bases, presenting the sciences, the arts and other subjects as a rational and unified progression rather than a scattered constellation.” This reminds me of the strange palette of college core curricula; in most schools students are offered a grab-bag (take a course in Group A, two in Group B, etc). There are regular attempts to update the core curriculum meant to make it more “coherent” but it’s hard to agree what exactly that means. And it’s a time-consuming process. I speak from experience having gone through it twice!

 

Collecting knowledge into some authoritative volume has been going on for a long time. Information explosion is not a new thing. But with the industrial revolution and the rapid advances in scientific knowledge, staying up-to-date became more challenging. There was a proliferation of encyclopedias that were geared to specific topics, for example there’s an Encyclopaedia of the Arctic. I can’t imagine an encyclopedia of chemistry today – the explosion of knowledge is exponential. I can hardly keep up with my own field; I suppose that’s why going to a focused conference is helpful because organizers usually invite good speakers that have breadth and depth. As an attendee, I can just soak in the material without having to go looking for it.

 

Who were the knowledgeable people writing entries for the encyclopedia? In the early years of Britannica, many of these were experts in their field. That, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily make them readable. Experts often wrote for other experts, going deep into the weeds of their cherished subject matter. Entries were uneven in length, detail, readability, and more. Some writers were polemical, one-sided, and took the opportunity to demean their opponents. Some were tardy. I learned that Lord Rayleigh was supposed to “contribute the entry on the physical properties of Light for [the] ninth edition” but he missed the deadline. He then missed the deadlines on Optics and Undulating Light, but made up for it in the Wave Theory of Light (Volume 24).

 

Reading about the challenge of selling encyclopedias was interesting to me, not having grown up in what was then known as a “third-world” country where encyclopedias weren’t present. The showrunners and editors needed to constantly adapt to customer interests. This meant more standardization among entries, and ensuring that it was more readable to the lay public. Garfield includes a list of guidelines; #2 reads: “Be interesting, be lively, be picturesque. Do not antagonize, do not repel the reader by a dull, forbidding style.” There were appeals to write to a broader international English-speaking audience. And of course the sales pitch was that you were buying a high quality education by investing in Britannica, especially for your children to get ahead and be citizens of the world.

 

Today, bound volumes of such encyclopedias go for pennies. All sellers want is for you to come pick it up. Garfield was probably one of the few buyers. Why would anyone want these huge paperweights when you have Wikipedia and more in The Cloud? For researchers and historians, reading these old entries and comparing them from one edition to another illuminates the state of knowledge in the past and how it evolved. Garfield scatters such examples throughout his book. I also learned that the largest ever knowledge collection, much of which has been lost (fire, theft, rodents), was commissioned by the third emperor of China’s Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di, in the early fifteenth century. He tried to be comprehensive and encircle knowledge, but to no avail.

 

Every year, I take my students through a circuit of knowledge in my chemistry courses. Each cohort enters the circle and exits, hopefully gaining some knowledge in the process. In the two courses that I teach most years, General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, there isn’t much new fundamental knowledge to add. I try to provide contemporary examples, and I regularly update my courses. But I keep going round and around. And as the fall semester approaches, I approach the beginning of the circle once again.

Time for Prep

In my first several years as a faculty member, much of my time went to class prep. The first time you teach a new class, the prep is substantial. This was certainly true of the standard lecture classes I taught: both semesters of General Chemistry, both semesters of Physical Chemistry, and one semester of Inorganic Chemistry. Coming up with all your course materials from scratch is a lot of work. Back then my lecture notes were handwritten, and updated regularly. I used an overhead projector when absolutely needed for visuals.

 

Teaching G-Chem lab was a little easier because we had materials prepped for the instructors thanks to a fantastic coordinator and lab-prep staff. My first Computational Chemistry elective course was also a ton of work because of the additional computer-lab exercises, but subsequent elective courses (e.g. Chemical Origins of Life) were essentially reading and discussing the primary literature. While I had to come up with the readings and discussion questions, I didn’t have to prepare lecture notes, make slides, assign homework, or write and grade exams. I haven’t taught Inorganic in a while (since we hired two inorganic chemists), and while I do update my G-Chem and P-Chem lectures every year, it’s not too time-consuming.

 

But for the first time this semester I will be teaching the first semester of Biochemistry lecture. Why? Because I really want to learn the material given my origin-of-life interests, and the best way to do so is to force myself to teach it. The biochemists finally agreed to let me take one section this coming fall semester. And the prep work is very substantial. I knew it would be ahead of time, but I’m still struggling with how much time it takes to put together one class session (the textbook reading guide, my lecture notes, my slides, the study guide, the homework assignments). I’m much more detailed now, because the students seem to need the extra support – but that means a lot more work on my part. I don’t begrudge it, in fact I’m enjoying thinking about how best to help the students learn the material, but it’s eating up gobs of my time. What’s being sacrificed? Research progress. That’s okay. It’s the choice I made. Also, my blogging has reduced by half.

 

I don’t like the feeling of being last-minute so I front-load my work. I have my overall course schedule laid out, I know what my goals are and what I want to achieve (having consulted with by biochemistry colleagues). Last semester, I sat in every class meeting in a colleague’s class. I took notes. I have copies of slides. But my teaching style is quite different from my biochemistry colleagues, and I need to play to my strengths. Thus, it’s almost as if I’m starting from scratch – certainly in creating and organizing all my materials. As a non-biochemist by training, and with a slant towards the origin of life, I have a unique way I’d like to teach the class that will still cover all the learning goals and outcomes. My physical chemistry background also influences the way I think about and teach chemistry.

 

At the moment, it’s taking me about 15 hours to complete a thorough and detailed production of one week’s worth of material. I hope to cut that time down a bit, or I might have to reduce my thoroughness somewhat. Essentially, I prepare to the point that I can walk into class and get through everything confidently. But my summer is coming to an end, and I still have to prep my other classes and get ready for a new class of academic advisees. I’m going to a national chemistry conference next week. (I had my talk prepped two weeks ago!) And once the semester starts, there’ll be more meetings, office hours, and besides Biochem I’m also teaching P-Chem and G-Chem. I’ve substantially prepped the first four weeks of P-Chem (with much of weeks 5-8 also done), updating my worksheets and problem sets, thanks to motivation from LABSIP. I’ve done a little reordering in G-Chem and don’t expect to make too many changes other than adding Study Guides that were quite successful last semester.

 

Wish me luck!