Self-assessment time!

We’ve finished the third week of classes, I need to pause and think about my eco-devo class. You know, teachers do this: a class isn’t a set of railroad tracks taking us to a destination, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to reassess.

My goals with the course are clear. We’re studying a fairly new interdisciplinary science, we’ve got a good solid textbook, I’ve got a dozen smart students, let’s explore. I explicitly want to avoid turning it into a lecture course, where I just stand up and tell them what they need to know, so I constrained myself with some serious guardrails. I only lecture once a week, on Monday, and I don’t just tell them the answers, but give them a lot of questions that they have to answer as a group on Wednesday. I also give them a primary research paper to take apart on Friday.

Does it all work? Yes, mostly.

It wrecks my weekend, though. My Monday lectures have to cover some complex material while focusing the students on relevant questions. I can’t sink comfortably into a flurry of detail, as would be easy to do, I have to bring out the broader issues while simultaneously fleshing out examples with an appropriate amount of detail. This week we’re discussing developmental plasticity, for instance, and while the textbook sings a siren song of numerous examples that I could just recite, I have to provide context and ideas and questions that will motivate discussion on Wednesdays. I think this part of the class is going OK.

I think the students are doing the actual learning part of the course on Wednesdays. This is the day I do things like put them into groups, put stuff on the whiteboards, show that they are actually engaging with the material they’re being exposed to. It’s all on the students, and these are all smart students, so I’d really have to be bad at my job to screw this part up. I prime them with a few ideas that they get at the start of the week, and then let them go.

Fridays…I’ve got to work on my Friday class. I’ve got two problems here. One is that I appoint two students to lead the discussion of a research paper, which is fine, except that these danged ambitious students charge in to do all the work. I tell them to split it up, delegate, and put the rest of the class to work figuring out what is going on in the paper, but no, they try to do it all, and then the whole class sits quietly listening along. I may have to change how I organize those days.

The second problem is me. For instance, last week the theme was about the importance of integrating multiple perspectives to answer complex question, going beyond reductionism. And then I picked what I thought was a good paper that did exactly that, trying to identify the ecological factors behind snake evolution. It was too much. It started with a phylogenetic analysis, then applied a principal component analysis to skull morphology (uh-oh, bio students don’t get much experience with PCA here), added a bit of development/heterochrony work, and then tied all of those approaches together in a nice bit of synthesis. Cool, but too much for some undergrads to handle all at once. I am challenging them, at least, but I think I’d better take next week’s paper down a notch. While my goal was to make them read primary research, maybe I’ll have to ease them in with some review papers for a while, and give their brains a chance to release some pressure.

When I say it all mostly works, that’s entirely from my perspective. Maybe the students hate it, but because they’re all polite Midwestern people, they’re too nice to say it. I’m going to have to put together some kind of student evaluation form to hand out next week so I can find out if I’ve gone off the rails.

This is where I’m at on a Saturday morning at the end of the third week of classes, and now it’s time to immerse myself in background reading and lecture prep. One source I’m finding extremely useful for this course is Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, which is a wonderfully rich source of ideas…but also would have undergraduate brains melting out their ears if I tried making this their textbook. One of my aspirations for this course is that they should be able to emerge from it at the end of the semester and be prepared to read West-Eberhard’s book without having a nervous breakdown.

That would be a fun graduate-level class to teach. Also about ten times more work than this one.

Oh no! It’s Monday!

It happened again. Monday rolled around. When will Science master the ability to predict these cataclysmic disasters? Surely there is some cause that we can treat. Vaccinations, maybe? Monday shelters, buried deep underground? Is there a pesticide that will selectively kill off all Mondays?

Once again, I’ve done it to myself: I set up all the material for my classes for the students on Monday, which effectively means my weekends are shot. This week we’re finishing up The Triple Helix with a conversation about the limitations of reductionism, Wednesday we discuss strategies for answering thorny research problems, and Friday we’re reading a paper about snake ecology, development, and evolution that takes a multidisciplinary approach. I’ve got it all queued up, almost as if I have a plan and know what I’m doing. I’m also tired, bleary-eyed, and I have a headache.

It is all my fault. The easy thing to have done would be to trundle through a series of lectures in which the students sit back with glazed eyes and absorb my wisdom, but instead I’m setting up frameworks and making the students do most of the work, at least two out of three classes. It turns out that’s far more work than just telling them what they need to know, so Mondays are going to be my days of pain.

The rest of the week, though, is cake. Mostly. Then this weekend I have to prep for next week, when we dive into the first chapter of our eco-devo textbook. Plasticity. Plasticity, plasticity, plasticity. That’ll keep us busy for a while.

Also, every day is grading day, and Tuesdays and Friday mornings are my spider days. I’ll recover tomorrow.

First round of Survivor: Morris cleared

Class went fairly well this afternoon, mainly because I’ve got a good, engaged bunch of students. The omens bode well for a good semester.

Me, lecturing

One catch: I haven’t spoken in over a month. Little bits of conversation, sure, but I haven’t used my voice in a sustained discussion in all that time, and I think it’s atrophied a bit. I made it through an hour, but at the end, it was all rough and gravelly and actually starting to hurt a bit. I’ve got to practice more.

I was also feeling a bit dehydrated. I’m going to start bringing a water bottle to work and take regular swigs throughout the day. Minnesota winters don’t help much, either: humidity bottoms out when it’s this cold, as my spiders will attest.

Evolution is the control of development by ecology

Today is my actual first day of classes. We had MLK Day off, and I have no classes on Tuesday, and today I get to meet the 12 students in my Ecological Developmental Biology course. It should be fun. I plan to present that famous aphorism by Van Valen, “Evolution is the control of development by ecology,” and then I’m done for the entire semester — once they’ve grasped that, there is nothing else left to teach, so we can just coast through February, March, April, and May.

OK, so maybe we should also think about the details. We’re going to spend the first two weeks diving into Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. It’s short but clears the stage beautifully of any vestige of genetic determinism and primes us with an introduction to some fundamental concepts. Everyone ought to read it!

The rest of the semester we’ll work through Gilbert and Epel’s Ecological Developmental Biology. We’re going to talk about plasticity, epigenetics, symbiosis, developmental physiology, and the book has lots of material on teratogenesis, cancer, and aging (those are all developmental concerns, you know — we’re doing all the interesting and important stuff).

We’re also going to dig into the primary literature. This week, we’re reading a review by Sultan, “Development in context: the timely
emergence of eco-devo” to get everyone filled in with the background, but subsequent weeks will be mainly about primary research papers. There’s going to be a fair amount of reading in this class!

I’ve also made the radical decision to abolish all exams: about 60% of the grade is derived from just showing up, alert and ready to contribute. We’ll see how well that flies.

I’ll let you know. I’m thinking I’ll try to post a weekly wrap-up here, so that if I fail it’ll be visible.

Should I take attendance in my classes?

I’m working on my class policy for next semester. Last semester was rough — I had bent over backwards to provide maximum flexibility, with an online option and no mandatory attendance, and it was fairly typical to have only half, or less, of the class show up. I considered changing the policy mid-semester, but it was written into the syllabus, so I had to stick with it. There will be changes next term, I tell you what.

This little video illustrates my problem.

I really like the prisoner’s dilemma twist in the middle — if only one student shows up, they pass the course and everyone else fails. There was one day fall term where that could have been invoked.

To answer the question in the title: yes, I’m going to take attendance, and it’s going to count. My big class this spring is going to be heavily interactive, and I’ll need people to show up.

The problem with Zoom…confirmed!

I was complaining about the effect of Zoom on students — it doesn’t encourage engagement and leads to apathy — and oh, look, someone did a study on “zoom fatigue”.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, looked for physiological signs of fatigue in 35 students attending lectures on engineering at an Austrian university. Half of the class attended the 50-minute lecture via videoconference in a nearby lab and a face-to-face lecture the following week, while the other half attended first in person, then online.

Participants were monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) instruments that recorded electrical activity in the brain and their heart rhythms. They also participated in surveys about their mood and fatigue levels.

The researchers searched for physical changes correlated with mental fatigue, including distinctive brain waves, reduced heart rate and hints the nervous system might be trying to compensate for growing exhaustion during the lecture.

There were “notable” differences between the in-person and online groups, the researchers write. Video participants’ fatigue mounted over the course of the session, and their brain states showed they were struggling to pay attention. The groups’ moods varied, too, with in-person participants reporting they felt livelier, happier and more active, and online participants saying they felt tired, drowsy and “fed up.”

Overall, the researchers write, the study offers evidence of the physical toll of videoconferencing and suggests that it “should be considered as a complement to face-to-face interaction, but not as a substitute.”

I know, that’s a tiny n, tested on a yet another WEIRD group. I also think that for Zoom to work, you have to completely revamp how you teach, and this is obviously just presenting the same content in two different media. Given those problems with the study though, it aligns with my personal experience, and I’ll use it to further justify my decision to cut Zoom out of my life next semester.

Lectures are boring unless you can get some questions and other interactions during it, and I’ve noticed that, when I make my in-person lectures simultaneously available over Zoom, I get zero responsiveness from the online part of the class. I suspect I’ve put them all to sleep.

Little victories

A few things made me feel good at work this week.

#1: We’re wrapping up the Evolution section of my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course. After a month of lectures and tree drawing exercises and discussions about good examples of evolution, I gave the students an overview of human evolution and a primary research paper, the Lee Berger stuff about Homo naledi. They were asked to critically evaluate the claims: did they really have fire? Did they bury their dead? Did they create crude art? As you probably know, Berger is emphatic about answering “YES!!”, but I urged them to think carefully…and they did. They stated some concerns and doubts, and talked about what they’d like to see to confirm the claims, like good little scientists. Then I gave them a paper by Martinon-Torres and others, “No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art,” and they saw what an active debate in science looks like. Warmed my heart, it did. This is what a good science class is about, tricking students into thinking for themselves.

#2: I’ve had nightmares about this one thing. Our university enrollment has been way down — I’m teaching a second year required course in cell biology, and I have TEN (10!) students enrolled. Most years I’ve had 50. Sure, a small class is nice in many ways, but not so great if you want to get active participation and discussion going. It took about 12 weeks to get the class warmed up and regularly asking questions! What was causing me some anxiety, though, is that I’m offering a 4000 level elective in ecological developmental biology next semester, the kind of course that lives or dies with student engagement, and really needs a critical mass of students if it was going to fly. I’d been dreading getting 3 or fewer students signed up (the administration would cancel it), or perhaps worse, 5 or 6 students, and I’d have to struggle all semester to get them active while not throwing too much of a burden on individuals. My ideal class size for this kind of course is 10-12 students, and I was dreading getting too few students for all the work involved.

Spring term registration started this week. I’ve already got 10 students enrolled! Maybe next semester will be fun, after all.

Sometimes there are little defeats, too. Our football team qualified for the NCAA DIII playoffs, and will be playing at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse tomorrow. This is a very big deal! So I get to my cell bio class this afternoon…I’ve got two students. One has to leave early for an interview. So I get to lecture to a nearly empty room.

This sort of thing happened early in the semester and I just cancelled class, but I warned them that next time I’d go right ahead and lecture to empty seats, so that’s what I did. At least now I have a set of questions that will definitely go on the next exam.

Grading…

My trial policy of taking care of grading the instant everything is turned in is biting back today: the first cell bio exam was thrown over the transom last night. I have been locked to my desk this morning. Will continue until it’s done.

The good thing about this practice is that I don’t have work hanging over my head all the time to feed my anxiety. The bad thing is that it demands bursts of focused work.

The crunch begins

I have resolved that this year, I will get all student assignments graded within 24 hours of their scheduled due date. Guess what? First formal assignment was turned in yesterday for cell bio. I also had to compose a practice exam for Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, which was posted this morning and will be due on Monday.

I can tell already that my discipline is going to be murderous, requiring intense bouts of activity, since I won’t allow myself to drag things out over several days. Periodically intense pain vs. chronic pain? Which is worse? I’ll find out.