Whew! I made it through my first semester teaching biochemistry. It was a lot of work but I enjoyed the learning experience overall. Preparing for class took the lion’s share of my time this semester. This included reading the textbook, looking up supplementary materials to clarify things that I didn’t find clear in the textbook, preparing lecture slides, creating study guides for the students for each class session, assigning homework (from the accompanying online system or writing my own problem sets), putting together my own lecture notes, and learning some biochemistry software to analyze protein structures.
I successfully kept to my rigorous schedule of being three weeks ahead of the students. I managed to maintain this until Thanksgiving when the gap narrowed to two weeks. But by then, we were almost at the end and I only had a final lecture (and associated materials) to prepare after the Thanksgiving break. In the first half of the semester, I was too ambitious and overpreparing. I had too much class material for the allotted time. I had to cut around 5% of the material on average, but after the first month I started to reduce what we would cover in class and found a happy medium in the second half of the semester. On a rare occasion we even finished five minutes early (and there was great rejoicing)!
The students were fantastic. I had a small class (my section was the least subscribed) but an engaged one! They asked lots of interesting questions, participated with gusto in all my assigned class activities, and were very forgiving when I didn’t know something or if I exhibited minor confusion over the material. I was upfront with the students that this was my first time teaching biochemistry and that I was not a biochemist by training. I also told them that I would pepper my class with many examples from origin-of-life research – I think students found these interesting based on conversations in class and when students dropped by my office to chat. I won’t see the course evaluations until January but I suspect they will be quite positive. I feel I established a good rapport with the students.
While I did cover most of the material in the typical sequence covered by my biochemistry colleagues, I made one significant change. I moved enzyme kinetics earlier so that I covered it immediately after protein structure. I think this worked well because all those equations and graphs can be quite intimidating to the students, but they got to see it earlier rather than close to metabolism – another challenging topic – that is close to the end of the semester. The next time I teach this class I think I will start talking about the basics of phosphates being energy carriers (ATP) earlier. I will also move some of the G-Chem review material out of the first few lectures and sprinkle them where they apply during the semester. I’d like to jump into amino acids the first week (I only got to them at the end of Week 2). I need to make some changes to nomenclature/structure of sugars and lipids; these felt plodding. I had applications, but I need to rearrange the material and spread things out a bit more.
I need to write more problem sets and do less with the online homework system so that I can get students to generate written answers of sufficient precision and detail. A number of students gave vague answers – sometimes a sign that they don’t really understand the material that well. I think my first midterm exam was pitched correctly. My second midterm exam focused too much on enzymes and protein function and less on nucleic acids and sugars even though we spent about an equal time on both, i.e., questions on the later topic were a little too superficial. That being said, the average on both midterms was a solid B. Were the exams too easy? I suspect maybe a little. (The students would disagree.)
The final exam had the same average score as the midterms, so I kept my promise to the students that the final would be of similar difficulty. But writing the cumulative final, however, was very difficult for me. Since designing a good cumulative summative assessment that has (I hope) reasonably high validity and reliability requires me to ask a spread of questions, I felt constrained in how deep I could go with the questions. I eschewed multiple-choice questions, which meant I couldn’t ask as many questions if I wanted students to generate answers. Some of biochemistry colleagues do not give a cumulative final; rather the final is weighted similarly to a midterm exam and doesn’t aim to cover such a wide spread – thus one can ask questions of similar depth as other midterms. I think I will do this the next time around because I don’t yet have as much experience designing really good exam questions to test cumulative knowledge. After teaching the class a few times, I’m sure to get better at it.
Hopefully I will be slotted to teach biochemistry again next academic year. In the meantime, I can look forward to devoting more time to G-Chem and P-Chem next semester. This semester, I did adequately in those classes (which I’ve taught many times) but my teaching mindspace was mostly focused on Biochem. I’m also looking forward to getting more research done, as I did almost zero for the four months of August through November.
And that’s the Biochem Roundup! I made it through without screwing things up. I will count that as a win.
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