I was recently told that to see stars that are farther away you need a longer telescope. I am taking this little tidbit slightly out of context ………. but …….. it is a perfect example of a statement that serves to bamboozle you. It seems to me that I could construct a telescope that was a mile long and I would be just as blind to the wonders of the sky as before I built it. If I want to see objects that are farther away, some things that might be useful to do are* (i) collect more light (maybe by observing over a longer period of time) or (ii) magnify the image of interest. In a telescope that uses lenses for magnification it seems probable that more magnification requires more lenses (perhaps separated by longer distances) and that this would result in a longer telescope. The statement “to see objects that are farther away you need a longer telescope” isn’t just opaque, it is dangerous. These types of statements are often said with great confidence and young (as well as old!) inquiring minds are usually discouraged from questioning further. A more informative statement might go something like: “One strategy to see objects that are far away is to magnify them, this can be done by using a sequence of lenses separated by carefully caculated distances. This is why the telescope in front of you is so damn long”.

*Disclaimer: I haven’t actually checked if these hypotheses are correct, so use at your own peril.

This semester, I find myself teaching for the first time. Having had the benefit of an incredible and intimate university experience and not being in the nature of doing things by half measures, I have ambitions to create an understanding of and even a little passion for my subject. That said, I need to ‘Get ‘er (PhD) Done’ and have a passion for my own endeavors. So a tension arises: how can I teach well enough to satisfy The Higher Ups and my slightly megalomaniacal ambitions to inspire a generation, while maintaining a clear focus on research? To solve this tension I did what I always do when presented with a problem – collate the knowledge of others; take their ideas for a ride;  pick holes in them; create a new way, if needed.

So, here’s a two parter. First, all the advice I collated on saving time while remaining an effective teacher and then, at some later date, an insight into what works at PSU and what doesn’t as well as any nuggets of my own. After all, its good to see things through the eyes of one’s students and I hear two-part blogs are all the rage among the undergraduate populus…

The First Day

• Be authoritative, even strict.
• Think about what you expectations of students are before teaching, set them out clearly and stick to them for the duration of the semester.
• Make it clear from Day 1 that no question is a stupid question.

Preparation & Scheduling

• Spend a maximum of one day preparing – preparation will fill the time you allot to it.
• Given the above, arrange to teach at the beginning of the week. This will leave the rest of the week free for research.
• If you have the opportunity (and you may not if you heed the above) watch another more experienced TA teach the material, before you do. This will help you to gauge the timing of the lesson & get a sense for where the students trip up, preventing you from having to explain misunderstandings over email etc.
• Teaching is exhausting – don’t expect to do anything productive for at least an hour afterward.

Grading

• You will never want to do grading so just suck it up and do it.
• Don’t let grading build up, its so much worse when its 3 days worth.
• Establish your marking technique/rubric and stick to it.
• If marking a writing assignment read a good selection of your students’ papers (including a known good, average and poor student) to set your rubric and then grade. This will help when trying to justify why you graded in a certain way.
• Keep grading away from your office, take it home (making sure to make copies before doing so).
• If you can split your grading with other TA’s, pick a page each and grade just that page from all the students. Less page turning, just one answer to remember.
• Do not accept complaints about grades for at least 48 hours after the assignment is returned. If a student wishes to contest their grade ask them to explain in writing why. You’ll be amazed how few complain.

Office hours

• Establish a position on how much you want to help with topics that come up in lectures (assuming that you are only paid to help with the labs) and stick to it.
• Book a room for office hours near your office.
• If allowed, make office hours by appointment to save you from spending hours alone in a room that it took you 15mins to get to.

Attitude

• Be enthusiastic – it will make it more fun for you & your students.
• You need only be better than one other TA in your cohort.
• Try not to be lousy.

This is the best available video on Youtube. I have rewatched George Carlin discuss the fear of germs more times than is still appropriate for me to mention, particularly because even after eight times I still cry from laughing.

The video clip comes in use for many purposes. You can use it to remind roommates, housemates, family members about the hygiene hypothesis. You can force-watch it with friends to preemptively avoid complaints about any of your less than sanitary habits. You can show it to your office mates if they get suspicious about your post-running shower (or lack of one).

My housemate is a very clean person. I made him watch this video shortly after he finished clorox-ing our countertops and he said that he learned more about the immune system than he learned all semester in his nursing courses. Though I am hoping this comment was made with heavy sarcasm, it got me thinking about how to improve the teaching approach. Are teachers in front of a classroom any different than entertainers in front of an audience? I like the idea of thinking of class as a show, a form of educational entertainment with us educators on a stage. A recent article in the Monitor on Psychology put out by the American Psychological Association reported that laughing produces both psychological and physiological changes in the human body that make our brains more receptive to learning. Humor is memorable and could be an untapped method in today’s education system. Think about this: If George Carlin taught immunology, would you ever skip class?

I saw this picture of the brain “Connectivity Matrix” — it is a map of the known connections between parts of the brain — and can’t stop thinking “Wow.” Our brains are so beautiful.

Our culture emphasizes a divide between the sciences and the arts, we have an emergent tendency to divide everything into categories as though math were one thing, music another, biology another. When I see a beautiful figure that comes out of scientific research, I think more and more that knowledge is one big heap, impossible to subcategorize, and it perhaps even loses something when we do.

Two days ago I met someone who works part time as an artist’s model. She sits for paintings that he then sells at art fairs and festivals and things. It seems like an antiquated idea that people still hire live models outside of art school, I always imagined “sitting for a painting” to be an activity of the last century. The model said that the artist has tried to teach her how to paint multiple times on the premise that everyone can learn to do art; though he is an artist, painting was a learned skill just like reading and writing. We don’t only teach “talented” people to read, we teach everyone. He argues the same should be true for art. I agree that it is odd that everyone in America is required to read and write but no one is required to learn how to paint. In my experience the emphasis on learning art is lost in many education systems because of our aversion to subjectivity in the grading system or perhaps the lack of more concrete teaching methods on how to foster creativity. How do we teach creativity?

Not only do we categorize knowledge as being art, science, math, etc., we also categorize people as being artsy, science-y, math-y. Musicians rely on math to maintain rhythms, artists rely on the scientific proportions found in nature to capture realistic images in their works and as a scientist, I appreciate the beauty of a simple figure depicting a thousand words I would have otherwise had to write. With all this emphasis on inter-disciplinary learning we should teach a class on the beauty of scientific figures. I want to be an artist in addition to a scientist so I can make images that exude excitement and creativity, like the human brain diagram does for me.

Also: go to the “gallery” tab on the Human Connectome Project page and stare at a few more “wow”-inducing photos. The diffusion in the brain video is also wildly exciting.

“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such nature films as Earwigs: Eww! and Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.”

I’m feeling desperately uninspired to blog this week so I’m going to show you a video instead. Actually, I’m going to show you a lot of videos, assembled in one blog post by Meghan Duffy.

Since it seems relevant, I’m also going to share a teaching tip that was given to me by one of my mentors at Emory. If you’re showing a long video clip in class, break it up by pausing and presenting data from the research being highlighted in the video. This helps reiterate the point(s) of the video, keeps the students from zoning out too much, and gets the students used to looking at – and hopefully interpreting – actual data.

It’s hard to imagine life without internet, without computers, televisions, radios, cars, engines, light bulbs, electricity, the scientific method.  Luckily, we have those things, and so I don’t have to.

But what if I were sent back in time, one (or a few) thousand years?  How hard would it be to build a computer?  For me, impossible.  I’ve spent 80% of my life in school, nearly half of those years were focused specifically on science.  How can I not know how to build a computer (arguably the most important invention of the last century) from a pile of sand and a block of iron?

There is a substantial difference between knowing how something works and knowing how to make something work.  Which makes me wonder, if I did go back in time, what would I be able to do?  I could tell people to do things – wash your hands, heat your milk, test your hypotheses – but I probably couldn’t communicate why without being committed.

I think it would be really cool if there were a science course built around the advancement of scientific knowledge over the past 2000 years.  Starting at the beginning, and showing the interplay between advancements in different scientific disciplines through lectures and labs.  That way, if I were sent back in time, I would be able to build a computer from scratch.  But maybe that’s what History of Science courses already are.