Teaching biochemistry for the second time this past semester was not as time-consuming as the first time two years ago. I spent 3-5 hours per week on class prep and updating the materials which was three times less than my first run. This was significantly more manageable given I had two larger sections of G-Chem 1 using a new textbook. For Biochem, I did not make large-scale changes to the course. The topical flow was similar and I mainly updated the slides and study guides. I made some changes to the in-class computational activities, exclusively using the Molstar/PDB viewer (and skipping Pymol). I added a protein-folding-prediction exercise given the ubiquity of AlphaFold-like tools. It also has a nice wow-factor!
This second pass, I was able to clear up some errors I made and confusion on my part about some of the more complex enzyme regulation involving kinases, in particular FBPases. I streamlined the enzyme kinetics so it would be less heavy math-wise, and I think I did a better job with carbohydrate nomenclature without getting stuck in the weeds. Those are the positives. The negatives are that I likely went faster and had a little more information on my slides when I should likely have done the opposite. I also went into more chemical detail because a third of my class were chemistry or biochemistry majors; in contrast I had less than fifteen percent of them the first time I taught it.
My class was fifty percent larger this time around, simply because there were more students enrolling in the course as numbers have rebounded post-pandemic. This probably made the largest difference because it means I help each student less individually. This was certainly true during in-class activities where the students work in pairs or small groups and I circulate. The majority of students never came to office hours, which didn’t help matters. My end-of-semester grade distribution was much wider and included some D’s and more C’s, and there was a surprising amount of nonsense answers on exams. That being said, many of the students still did well and two-thirds were in the A and B range, unlike the first time around when ninety percent earned A’s and B’s. It was an unusually small class and I was likely paying lots of attention to the students and their learning. By spending less time on the metacognitive aspects of my own teaching and focusing much of my time on G-Chem, I think I did a poorer job overall.
The end-of-semester course evaluations were not surprising. On the Likert scale questions, my ratings went down – as expected for a larger class with more students not doing so well in the course. There were the usual comments about the speed at which we went through the material and the density of the material. A couple of students thought the twice-a-week format (with two longer rather than three shorter classes per week) was exhausting, and I see their point even with my three-minute break mid-class. Students found the study guides the most helpful; again not surprising. The chemistry and biochemistry majors liked my chemical emphasis and details. The non-majors did not like it. One made comparisons to the other sections which had “more MCAT applications” and another felt that while the other sections “skimmed through a lot of topics”, our class “felt like we learned the whole damn book”.
I don’t know when I will get to teach the class again. Recent staffing changes in my department might preclude my teaching it again anytime soon. If there is a next time, I would consider not using a standard textbook now that I am more comfortable with the material. One problem with following the textbook somewhat closely (which is a reasonable thing to do when you’re teaching something for the first time or two) is that you can get lost in the details and forget the big picture. A couple of students commented that this is how they felt about my class. I think instead of opening with review of G-Chem concepts and launching into amino acids and proteins, maybe I can start with some big picture metabolism (not the weeds) before getting into the building block molecules. There’s a logic to biochemistry and I’d like the students to see this. I thought I was trying to emphasize this, but many students found these details bewildering possibly because I had not spent enough time on the big picture or I was too abstract.
My self-rating for Round 2 is that I was overall mediocre; I’m not sure I did a better job teaching the second time around even though I was clearly more comfortable with the material. Perhaps that was the problem; I let the curse of knowledge slip in, and spending less time on thinking about the class showed.
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