Almost done

My intro class (the half I teach) has its last class meeting today, and I’ve stuck to my guns on the non-lecturing thing. There has been strong resistance from some students, though some have loved it, and on average I would say there’s about the same level of happiness/lack thereof as I would expect from this class as if I’d lectured.

Will I do this again? Absolutely. I still think we all spent our time more efficiently, that is, learned more, and taught more. What would I do different? At the moment, the following spring to mind, in some random order:

(i) As I did during the last couple of weeks, I would absolutely ensure that some subset of the class is required to send questions. It changed their sense of engagement palpably when I did that.

(ii) Students need narrative to make sense of ideas. It’s something I enjoy providing, but for some reason I lost track of this issue during the second week. By ‘narrative’ I mean a background story, a sense of the larger context for technical ideas, all that.

(iii) Remind them periodically why I am doing things this way. More steadily and pre-complaints :-).

(iv) More examples from biology/bio-physics early in the course, for motivation, if nothing else.

(v) Introduce the spring force immediately after gravity. It’s not ‘constant’. It allows one to talk about internal degrees of freedom, as well as about the Normal force (model surfaces as very stiff springs) which would enable one to stop hemming and hawing when hit with the questions ‘does the normal force do work? If not, how do things come to a halt when they hit the ground? Or how can you jump off the ground?’.

(vi) Other issues? Something I didn’t mention earlier is that, unrelated to my decision to try something new in this class, I had been shanghaied into asked to volunteer for a pilot project on the Carleton campus to film some of our classes, and two of my classes are on film at the moment. At some point later this term I will sit down and record an interview/rumination about my teaching technique as a voice-over for these films, which would force/allow me to watch the classes and re-consider my ideas. And I’m spending a week this summer writing all this up for my colleagues during which time I will probably flesh out some of the points above and discover new ones.

(vii) One last point, in response to Chad’s comments. I agree with the issue of temperament, and all that. But there is no way that lecturing allows you to cover more material — not lecturing is significantly faster in this regard. The only way I cover more material when lecturing is to speak faster (and believe me, as a New Delhi-bred English speaker, I can speak very very fast — Texas didn’t slow me down that much). But when not lecturing, I am able to pick and choose what I do in class versus what I expect students to read and understand on their own. Moving to the trimester/term system in Carleton has reinforced this particular perspective even more strongly for me. In these last five weeks, we have ‘covered’ some or most of 11 chapters in our textbook. Mastery? That’s a whole different question :-).

$1.5 Million to spend

The till-recently-embargoed good news from the grant I’d mentioned earlier? Here’s the official press-release. Fernan even got interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio — as I needled him when I heard, not only are we now rich, he’s even famous :-). I look forward to helping spend it.

Refusing to throw stones

The fatal pedagogical error is to throw answers, like stones, at the heads of those who have not yet asked the questions. - Paul Tillich

My intro class took their first test, and generalized fear and panic hit during the Dynamics section. This is predictable, perhaps, since I’ve seen that year after year, no matter what method I’ve taught (except the matter and interactions course, but there we selected for a particular kind of small cohort, so it’s not a fair question).

Intellectually it comes down to the fact that kinematics is sheer description, while dynamics is explanation. To understand why something behaves the way it does in the Newtonian paradigm means that you have to get (a) the notion of force clear in your head, (b) create the appropriate catalog of courses and then (c) learn to deploy them correctly, while (d) getting geometry and (e) algebra right throughout.

And some of the things we tell them are absolutely counterintuitive, particularly if they involve any aspect whatsoever of Newton’s 3rd Law.

So it’s not surprising that the frustration level in the class rose. And it was easy at first to blame the whole ‘refusing to lecture’ thing that I was doing. But I thought about it for a while, talked about it with colleagues (I found what was written in response to Chad’s post — thanks for picking this up, Chad — and in the comments to my last post very useful, incidentally), looked through my notes and realized: Aha! I bet they’re not reading the book. And of course they weren’t — I could tell the moment I probed lightly. They weren’t reading because they haven’t been trained to read books the right way.

It’s critical they read the book and ask me questions — both. Consider that the author’s someone who’s put a lot of thought and energy into getting precisely the right explanation for a certain concept — why do I think that I can present the basic script any better? What I can do is find out how students react to the ideas, and use my time to help them with the ideas (it’s the “guide on the side” VS “sage on the stage” perspective).

The reason they weren’t reading was because I had forgotten one of my cardinal rules of teaching: Do not expect anything from students that you have not explicitly asked them to show you, explicitly linked to their grade. Because your grading system is your way of telling them what you value.

So I sent out a note asking them write me questions before class (a subset, so I don’t get drowned), and reminded them that this was part of the implicit contract (the syllabus).

And I’m getting some superb questions as I sit at my email. Tomorrow is going to be *so* much better — I know what they don’t know, so I have some idea of what to tell them! Cool.

Stable and unstable lectures

As I’ve said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during ‘lecture’, and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving — and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don’t know.

I see this as directing the class’s and my energy at the biggest road-blocks to mastery. The traditional method of (i) presenting a lecture in class, (ii) asking students to respond to the lecture presentation with questions, and then (iii) go home to work on problems, seems to me to be quite inefficient.

This, I argue, is because (i) the lecture is usually being spent telling people what might be relatively simple, or missing the troublesome issues. This is because no matter how hard I’ve tried to do figure out what’s easy and what’s hard, every year and every class turns out to have different blind spots and troublesome issues (apart from the blindingly obvious things like, say, Newton’s Third Law for intro mechanics students). (ii) The students haven’t had time to think about a presented point when I ask for questions, so I am not really clearing up confusions for anyone but the fastest thinkers or the best prepared students. And (iii) when they are trying to solve problems, and true confusion pops up, they are on their own.

The way I choose do things means that I always walk into a classroom feeling slightly unstable. That is, I don’t quite know what I will be talking about and never know how the time will be spent. I figure this is a fair trade-off for the gains I’ve noted above, and on a good day, I feel like improvisation is my strength ( well-prepared lecture notes, while I can do those, certainly isn’t a strength, so something’s gotta be!).

But there is another downside that I periodically forget about: What’s happened at the end of a long discussion about ‘problems’ and ‘confusing issues’ is that unless these have been completely and totally nailed by the discussion, we’ve spent the whole class out of the students’ comfort zones, and they’ve also felt unstable through out. They haven’t had the opportunity to sit back and listen to someone tell them something they sort of know already, or find easy to understand, and as a result, their mood can be somewhat grumpy and discouraged.

I haven’t yet figured out how to deal with this, to be honest. I am fully aware that this sort of discomfort with the material would’ve been there in any case, just hidden from public view in the standard chalk and talk class and I should probably feel pleased that I am getting to confront it. But I can’t help wanting to change it some. Usually I resort to short lectures for a few classes after I hit one of these particularly discombobulating classes — I find that it reassures the students and me, stabilizes the dynamics, as it were — and then I can drift slowly back to my preferred style again. But that seems inconsistent to me, and I am going to try to come up with other ways of getting this stability this term. Any thoughts, advice, pointers from readers?

Goodbye, and thanks for all the mistakes

John Archibald Wheeler passed away yesterday, and there will be personal tributes in many fora from all sorts of people — he was a legend. I arrived in Texas a little late to be as heavily influenced by his ideas on quantum mechanics as a previous generation of students, some from my group (Wojciech Zurek, Bill Wootters, Ben Schumacher, for example) were, but his presence there was still strong. Since Wheeler wrote papers with Wojciech, who of course wrote papers with his Ph.D. adviser Bill Schieve, and Bill is my Ph.D. adviser and co-author as well, my ‘collaboration distance’ from Wheeler (generalized version of the Erdos number) is 3, and that’s pretty much as close as I got to doing physics with him.

I have a few disconnected memories of Wheeler, though: Mostly from running into him a few times in the corridors of RLM (which housed the physics, astronomy, and math departments at UT-Austin), when I was always struck by the intensity of gaze and his smile. The one time I spoke physics with him was while attending a seminar given by him in the Philosophy Department. In response to a question of mine, he turned on his smile, and threw me a penny — I gathered later that this is how he rewarded interactivity in his seminars. I’ve stolen that trick of his for my own courses for majors –of course my students don’t get quite the thrill out of getting a penny from me that I got out of getting that penny from him, but hey, it’s worth a shot.

There’s are a couple of quotes of Wheeler’s that I have frequently used and would like to re-evoke here: “The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible.” As well as: ‘We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.’

Biased epistemology

Or seeing what you want to see.

For the 1st lab in my intro mechanics class, I gave them an assignment I have stolen shamelessly from my talented junior colleague Melissa Eblen-Zayas: The students are given a sham theoretical paper (no jokes about redundant terms please) about a simple phenomenon and asked to construct, perform, and analyze an experiment to see if it’s true [I am eliding details because while I have Melissa's permission to use/adapt her lab, I certainly don't have that permission to distribute it].

There’s a lot of coaxing involved to help them figure out how to take data, to consider how much data you might take to account for random error, what amounts to enough variation in parameters to test a theory, why it makes sense to try to plot linear graphs rather than quadratic graphs, etc. The whole process is an excellent exercise in helping them understand how and when we accept our models of the material universe and all that went well — particularly with some of these discoveries coming after the fact, after the groups had come to some sort of conclusion about how the theory was supported by their data or not.

What was really compelling yesterday was to see how many groups (8 out of 10) found that the theory was right, even when the data in 4 of those cases was clearly telling them that it was wrong. And after I told them that the theory was wrong in general even though it worked all right in a limited range of experimental parameters, it was remarkable how none of the groups were unable to see that their data supported the theory (since they’d stayed in that limited range).

Not exactly a newsflash, but students are so used to ‘verifying the theory’ that they really have a hard time seeing anything other than what they expect to see. I am hoping their experience helps them get a little more wary of this sort of bias.

Of course this bias holds true of most of life for most of us so it’s a battle against ‘natural’ human behavior.

Update (courtesy Peter Morgan): This is similar to some ideas developed by ZapperZ. 

So far so good

As promised, the time I spend in front of the class ‘lecturing’ for my introductory mechanics class remains minimal — well below 1/3 the class time. Today was a case in point: As the students walked in, I handed them a card from a well-shuffled deck of playing cards, asked them to find people with the same number and to sit with them. I asked them to talk with each other for a few minutes and generate questions from the reading that they had that they would like me to discuss. I talked about these questions at the board when I had collected the few that were voiced. Once that was done, I turned them loose on the problems I had chosen for this section — and which I had mailed to them before class — and away they went. I should probably note that I have a student assistant in the class with me, circulating with me.

After the last two classes, there are a few crucial house-keeping things that I have concluded are necessary to this kind of teaching and made sure to do today: (1) The groups needed to be assigned groups, and in the absence of any strong reason to socially engineer, I went with the random method. (2) I told them why I was insisting they work in groups (because it is pedagogically valuable; I will tell them about the ‘real world’ and how they can’t avoid working in groups very shortly). (3) I also told them that they were all to turn in an evaluation at the end of the class that would comment on their contribution to their group, as well as the group’s value to them, including how they felt they were treated by the group. And (4) I asked for the standard ‘one thing you still don’t get’ feedback.

The responses were excellent — they overwhelmingly liked the groups, were surprised by how well the randomly-generated groups worked, and expressed a great deal of comfort with the structure. The point I have made repeatedly to them is that the way we test grasp of this material is through problem-solving and as such, they like that they get to practice it. And they love being most of the way through the homework so early.

A few weren’t very sure they preferred this to the standard lecture, but didn’t really see any major reason to complain yet. Except for one student, who doesn’t understand what’s going on, doesn’t feel like he’s contributing to the group, and is lost and worried. I think I know what to do with and for him, but given only 1 student complaint — so far so good. I like how I am spending my time, and I like how the students are spending their time.

Of course, this is only kinematics. On Wed we hit Newton’s laws, and that will be a crucial test of this technique.

Administrating

As I’ve mentioned in passing before, this year I have acquired a new role as an administrator — as co-director of CISMI (the Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Mathematics Initiative). The first few months I was still getting used to doing it, mostly consumed by the excitement of participating in the writing of a giant proposal, and getting some new ideas off the ground. But this last week, as I’ve attempted to get back into the groove for the new term, CISMI-related activities are very visible, more routine, and hence feel very much administrative. The administrative assistant for CISMI is also the Physics Department’s admin, and there was a morning last week when I was trapped in a loop for what felt like half-a-morning but was probably a lot less: I was stopped with a CISMI-related question when I stepped out of the office for coffee, had to go back to my office to shoot off an email/make a phone-call to sort things out, and when I headed back towards to the coffee machine, stopped again, and so on. All that administrivia made focusing on physics a little difficult, to say the least.

Why did I say yes to the Dean (Scott Bierman) when he asked whether I would take on this position? He made the request/offer to me a week after calling me to let me know I had tenure — he claimed that this gave me a fair shot at saying no. (Full disclosure, as a smart game-theorist economist, he asked for service on multiple fora when he did this, and I said ‘no’ to all the others. We’ve joked about his strategy — that Scott was banking on it being easier to say yes to one of many requests if they were presented all together.)

As is typical in academia, it’s not because there’s enormous rewards associated with it. Actually, on the surface, none. There are course-releases associated with it (for me and Fernan, the Director of CISMI) but they barely compensate for the added work, something I hadn’t really appreciated from outside.

And it’s not because I am done with being a professor and itching to move on: I love teaching and doing physics, and have plenty of other college-wide involvements, thank you very much. So what, then? The following are my musings on motivation, apologies for some of the ambiguities inherent.

One reason stems from something Scott has said repeatedly: There is an enormous amount of Carleton College’s activities that relies on this kind of ‘volunteer’ work from faculty. Which means that either one of us has to do it, or it doesn’t get done. The pool of people who could fill this spot isn’t that large, so really it’s a question of ‘doing your tour’, in some ways. I have often characterized myself as being pretty good in the role of ‘heckler’ — someone who is happy to hang back and comment (constructively, one hopes) on ideas put forth by the people nominally running things. It felt like time to try the role on the other side.

It’s the same reason why I’ve felt like teaching the Cross-cultural studies course was beneficial for me, or why I write a column for the ‘The Indian American’, and why I am maintaining this blog, in some ways. Apart from my research field, and of course my courses, I haven’t been asked to take a stand or create the target for criticism about much. It’s about time to see if a coherent story can be made from the scattered thoughts I’ve generated about all sorts of things.

Another is that I get to push/facilitate the growth of/ two ideas that are close to my heart: (1) Complex systems thinking as embedded in interdisciplinary science (through the curricular development funds that we get to disburse) and (2) broadening access to education and to science for under-represented minorities, again through curricular issues, as well as through helping guide conversations on classroom climate and pedagogical techniques.

All of what I get to do is facilitation and suggestion rather than direction, really, given that everything goes through an advisory board composed of some very smart people with strong opinions — yes, hecklers — and that it’s directed at moving faculty along (which, as we all know, is somewhat on the lines of herding cats, particularly when you have no power over them at all).

So it’s about making meaning, creating a story, on a larger scale than your discipline and your teaching, and for a place I definitely feel like I belong to, and which perhaps has begun to ‘belong’ to me. Which compensates somewhat for taking care of the paperwork and the logistics. I also get to have long chats with Fernan, which I have begun to enjoy greatly — they are officially about CISMI but land up ranging all over the place, as you probably experience in conversations with any collaborator.

And a short while ago we heard back from that big grant we had requested: We were approved! It’s still not officially announced (so more details later) but it means that we — the Carleton science community specifically — will get to do some of the things we had hoped to do, and it’s nice to feel like one has helped facilitate that.