Tuesday, April 20, 2010

reflections on teaching

Last week I sent out an email to my students asking them to fill out course evaluations, which are now online. Like all instructors, I pressed for written comments instead of filling in bubbles ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree," since most of them are probably going to fill in "neutral" for every single question. I'm kinda curious as to what they have to say about me, although I'm not going to be surprised if they all say I'm some sort of cruel dictator and a walking advertisement for my lab.


My intentions have been driven by interest in the subject matter, especially when it came to the frog module (and metamorphosis!), but it's hard for me to recognize that not everyone who's taking the class is going to be in love with thyroid hormone-dependent changes in morphology. A lot of the time during the metamorphosis unit I pushed for "correctness" based off of what I learned in lab (like particular signaling pathways, changes in the timing of metamorphosis, past and current research findings) without caring about whether or not it was TMI for the students in the class. At the same time, I justified it to everyone by saying "metamorphosis is cool and everyone should learn about it."

It's been less than two years since I was in undergrad (I graduated April 26, 2008), but I feel like I'm starting to forget about the undergrad work ethic and the expectations that come with it. As an example, I had to grade 22 term papers on various chemicals and how they caused developmental defects. If someone were to just look at the class average, they might say that (a) my class doesn't know how to write a term paper properly, or (b) I'm a harsh grader.

I admit I was a little harsh in grading the term papers. I never graded undergrad papers before, and the only thing I knew about science papers was the stuff I read in journal articles and the comments my advisor gives me on my own writing. I remember writing science papers in college, but they were few and far between, and it's not like I kept any of my work. So the only thing I was really going off of was what I experienced the past year of grad school.

When writing my prelim grant proposal, I was really careful about what stuff to omit and what stuff to include. The rule of thumb was that if I didn't want to be questioned extensively on something, I didn't mention it. The same rule applied when I was prepping for my seminar, and I used this rule of thumb extensively when I was grading the term papers for my class. A lot of the comments I wrote on their papers involved them mentioning some term and not defining it, which really got me confused (and possibly a little frustrated in trying to decipher what they were saying).

Anyway, it's been a fun, abeit sometimes frustrating, experience. One of the students (a guy who acted like a smart-ass at the beginning of the semester) wrote a short note at the end of his lab report which said "I had loads of fun this semester. I hope I wasn't too much of a pain!" I thought it was kind of amusing. :) As for the frustrating part, I think it makes for really good stories.