September 1: First day for Hogwarts students; end of the first week for me. It’s been a very busy week with lots of meetings in addition to my three classes. This semester I’m teaching General Chemistry, Physical Chemistry and Biochemistry. All three are lecture classes (I’m not teaching the associated labs).
I have the Honors preceptorial this semester: twenty new first-year students who are my academic advisees and also enrolled in my G-Chem 1 course. I think I finally learned all their names today! I worked hard at it by saying their names multiple times in discussion. I’m also having each of them visit me in my drop-in (office) hours so they know where it is, and it helped me with memorizing their names. Half of them came this week; I expect to see the other half next week. I think I’ve helped all of them figure out any changes to their course schedules.
In terms of the G-Chem course, I made some changes to my topic lineup. I’ve moved the two lectures on Nuclear Chemistry to the very end (typically I get to it in Week 2), and moved Intermolecular Forces up by several lectures. I’m also making study guides for each class session since I felt that was something the students benefited from last semester and I had a lot of positive feedback. I’ve also decided to give four midterm exams and drop one exam score, rather than three (which I’d been doing for about a decade). We’ll see how it all works out but hopefully it puts the students a little more at ease; but also moves the first exam earlier in the semester so they get a sense of what a college-level chemistry exam is like!
P-Chem 1 was a ton of work the last time I taught it because I ditched the textbooks and completely converted to worksheets. This time around is much less work but I have made several changes to the topic lineup. I shortened some of the math surrounding the rigid rotor and the hydrogen atom. I moved centrifugal distortion from rovibrational spectroscopy to perturbation theory. I will be adding some computational components (IR spectra, MO calculations of various types) and I plan to expand Valence Bond theory and hoping to culminate in the strange case of the dioxygen molecule. I have a particularly small class of just 10 students this semester. (Our number of majors has been going down.) I’ve learned all their names! But I already knew half of them ahead of time.
Biochem is the most work since it’s a completely new prep. I’ve blogged about how much time it is taking and I hope to get more efficient. I have the first four weeks of class prepped in detail so I’m in relatively good shape at the moment. I haven’t learned all the students’ names yet. It takes longer because the class meets twice a week (TuTh) rather than thrice (MWF) which is the schedule I usually teach. I’ve had a number of the students in G-Chem so that has helped in my identifying the students. I hope to have all the names down by Week 3. One challenge for me is that Biochem has been taking up much of my mental space. I must remember not to under-prepare for each of my G-Chem and P-Chem classes so that I can still give those students my very best.
I had practically no research activity in the month of August, except for the national conference I attended. Will I get to it in September? I hope so. I will still be helping my research students move their own projects along, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get to my own stuff. I really want to get a paper submitted by late October but I don’t know if I’ll make my self-imposed deadline. I’m on a grant review panel (online) next week so that’s an additional thing on my plate.
But it’s Friday afternoon and the tiredness is kicking in, so I’m not going to spend time worrying about it and instead enjoy my long (Labor Day in the U.S.) weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment