Stereotypical liberal college professor

Today I’m handing out the first exam of the semester in genetics, and some of the students are a bit anxious. I’ve been getting all these email questions about how to prepare for this exam, do I have to complete it in a set amount of time, am I allowed to talk to other people when I’m working on it, are there security things I have to do (man, high schools are warping students’ minds), etc., etc., etc. They seem discombobulated by the fact I don’t run the class like a drill sergeant, and that the exams are all open book, open notes, all this slackness you ought to expect from a liberal college professor.

So this morning I had to post a note to the class explaining that yes, it’s true, I have some rather loose and tolerant policies in my teaching. It’s OK if you work with other students on the exam, it’s not cheating, it’s called learning. What a weird thing to have to spell out!

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I am prepared!

Genetics class begins this week, and I am ready for the first week. Syllabus: done. This week’s lectures: done. This week’s lab: done. I can sit back and relax and maybe go for a walk today, that bit of stress is gone.

Now the lab for the second week…that’s another story. That week the students are supposed to start breeding flies, and I got my fly stocks all set up in December, and I was supposed to be at the stage of expanding the colony to have a surplus in time to hand them out. Some of the lines have been duds. Wild type flies are doing fine, the scarlet mutants are proliferating like gangbusters, but the white miniature forked mutants are barely getting by, and I’m down to a handful of brown flies, because they keep dying off. Fresh stocks have been ordered, but I’m going to be cutting it close — every step in these crosses has to be carefully timed in order to get results that don’t conflict with those stupid interruptions in our schedule, like spring break.

So I’m fine this week except that I’m going to be panicking about next week. There’s always something to elevate my anxiety.

Oh no! Classes begin one week from today!

Also, candidate visits for our chemistry position start in one week.

My genetics class is fairly well organized except for one thing: the stocks of brown (bw) eyed flies have almost completely crapped out. That’s always been a sickly line, but this year they’ve been pathetic. I’m desperately trying to nurse a handful of flies into vigor, and if they don’t get it together real soon now, I’m going to flush them all and order fresh flies. I’ve got a backup plan to do a different cross to keep the students busy for 6 weeks or so, but it’s also more difficult experiment, and I prefer to do the bw x st cross as a warmup.

We also have the board of regents visiting in March, and they’re being invited to sit in on the lab. Our students aren’t very happy with the regents as it is, and if they use it as an opportunity to ask pointed questions, I’m going to allow it. I’ll probably encourage it.

Today and tomorrow are the local high school science fair. I’m one of the judges. That should be interesting, around here we get a mix of brilliant kids with creative ideas and kids who like an excuse to shoot things.

I’m feeling mildly distracted right now — and this stupid cold, while gradually abating, isn’t helping much.

Student Evaluation of Teaching

For you non-academics unfamiliar with life at the university, yesterday was the day I got my evaluations. Yes, it’s true, the students get to turn everything around and grade the faculty on their performance. I can’t actually fail — tenure, you know — but these things do matter when it’s time to determine raises and that sort of thing (which will be roughly in mid-March). The department gets a tiny pot of money that the chair will dole out to the good little boys and girls, and she will use student evals as part of the determination, which also includes research and service.

So yesterday I cracked the virtual envelope to get the results, and they were fine. On a scale of 0 to 6, I got all 5s and 6s, which might translate into a raise of a few tens of dollars in a few months. It probably isn’t worth it, because I have to bust my ass for a year to get biology across to the students.

What’s more interesting is the comments students write, which I take far more seriously than numbers punched into a Likert scale, and are far more likely to get me to change things in the course. I got a few criticisms that made me happy.

Students said, “wasted too much time on creationism” and “I want to learn more biology, not creationism.” For context, I give ONE(1) lecture out of 30 that addresses religious objections to evolutionary theory. One. And this audience of smart millennials is just completely over it. That makes me so happy.

OK, have it your way. I’m cutting that lecture out of next year’s curriculum, and replacing it with more straight-up unvarnished biology, with no regrets. I hope this class is representative of their generation, because it’s about time we could ignore that nonsense.

Frantically rewriting lectures

Aaargh, neglecting the blog again. My big distraction today: as always happens, I looked over last year’s notes and grumped at myself and said this will not do, this is totally inadequate, I need to rewrite the whole thing. The plan for tomorrow was to talk about the pentose phosphate pathway AKA the hexose monophosphate shunt AKA the phosphogluconate pathway because this stuff is important and, weirdly, our textbook doesn’t even mention it, so I can’t even punt and tell the students to go away, don’t bother me, just read Chapter X. As is common in cell bio, all we talk about is how we burn sugar to make ATP, and very little about essential anabolic reactions. And that bothers me.

The PPP is cool beans, too, so I rewrote the lecture from the ground up to cover more of the details, expanding what used to be a short aside into the whole dang talk, and I’m probably going to terrify them all with a peek into more advanced biochemistry (this is a class for 2nd year students, so it’s introductory level) and the way all of biochemistry is tangled and intertwined, but hey, they’re smart students. They can take it.

Unfortunately, it’s stuff that isn’t going to entertain a more general audience, unless you think filling in the details on this introductory slide would get you excited.

Man, I was so into biochemistry as an undergrad, and then I got distracted by neuroscience and development. I need to begin a second lifetime so I can catch up.

Now I have to finish grading, which is far less enthralling.

What do scientists do over summer break?

Well, today Mary and I scrubbed up the genetics lab all morning, I cleaned out a lot of fly bottles and emptied the incubator, and now those bottles are sitting in the autoclave getting a super-sauna. The lab is now mostly sparkling clean and ready for the next class in the Fall!

This is what I get paid to do, and what my degree qualified me for. Mary, unfortunately, doesn’t get paid, although she too has an advanced degree, and helped out so I wouldn’t have to spend all day in the nasty drudgery. So many dead flies and pupae!

This is exactly what it looked like, after we got done cleaning it.

No, I’m not done!

I got out of the house to celebrate the end of the semester yesterday, but it was slightly premature. Next week is finals week. I have to slap myself to attention and buckle down and write the genetics final and post it on Canvas.

It shouldn’t be too bad. I’m planning to take full advantage of the Canvas autograder, so I mainly have to invest time this morning in setting up the problems with discrete answers and plugging the answer key into the software, and then grading next week will mainly involve updating the grade sheet.

I slept in until 7am this morning! The stress is fading already!

Kinda sorta almost done with classes

The end is in sight! Then…SPIDERS!

This week is in a curious kind of limbo. It’s the end of the semester, which means the students have lost focus, and I’ve helped them do that. Here’s my general grading strategy:

  • The final exam is cumulative and optional. Whatever score they get on the final replaces the lowest midterm exam score. The point of that is to give students an escape hatch if they unavoidably missed or screwed up on one of the exams.
  • Their final lab report is due today, but lab scores are independent of exam scores, and the grade they get on it won’t influence their final exam grade.
  • They had their last midterm last Friday. I’ve already graded it and gotten it back to them.
  • They are all smart upper-level students. They have all their exam and homework and lab scores, less this one lab report, and I’ve told them exactly how to estimate their final grade.

They’ve got all the information in hand right now to know whether they need to show up for class, and whether anything they learn will be at all helpful in improving their grade. I also announced that Wednesday will be just for administrative sorts of things — final chance to scavenge a few points by arguing with me, or just to discuss whatever they’re curious about in genetics.

So less than a quarter of the class showed up today, I expect it’ll be even less on Wednesday. I’m hoping it’s a calming, quiet part of the term that they can use to study hard for their other classes.

I’m not quite through myself, though. A pile of lab reports will be thrown over the virtual transom at midnight tonight, and I have to get them all graded by Wednesday morning. Then I have to write the final exam, which I expect only a quarter of the class (again) will take, and which will be due on Thursday the 12th, prompting a final, brief flurry of grading, and that’s it. Really, I’ll be officially done next week, but it’s mainly just coasting along for me. Then SUMMER BREAK.

I have plans for that, too. I’m going to be doing some regular spidering stuff, and I have also vowed to strip all the wallpaper from our dining room and master bedroom and repaint by 31 May. It helps to give myself deadlines for the mundane boring jobs.

My terrible awful horrible no good day

I give up. I’m going home early.

To start the day, we had more soggy wet snow come down overnight. Come on, Nature, I want my spiders to emerge!

I went to teach my class. This involves setting up a little camera to record the lecture for the students who are taking it asynchronously, and then connecting my computer to the video projector, two routine tasks that take only a few minutes.

I couldn’t get the camera to work. It crashed, and crashed hard, and wouldn’t restart. Yikes. I’ve got the in-person students waiting! So I charged ahead sans camera, figuring this means I just have to record a voice-over at home. More work, but I can do it.

Then the evil idiot classroom projection system gets flaky on me. I log in to the class software, which involves firing up the projector and entering a code into the software on my laptop, which then displays my video. Worked fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. I do so, works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code.

You get the idea. I was getting nowhere. I finally told the students this wasn’t going to work, go home and we’ll try again Monday. There was much weeping and wailing and tearful moans about really, really wanting to learn about maternal effect inheritance and imprinting today, but I was strong…no, I’m lying. It was all laughter and smiles. I should do this every day.

Except we’re just starting to get into the really fun stuff in genetics! I need to get past this so I can talk about developmental genetics! And signaling! And cancer genetics! Maybe a little bioethics, too!

Oh well. I’m gonna go home and dismantle a camera. Or maybe swap in the backup camera I’ve got. And finish grading. It’s not like canceling class means I get any free time.