And we’re done hunting

Carleton College announced its new president today. I was late getting to the official presentation, and in taking a short-cut there, had to cut through a group of students planning to streak through the ceremony (yes, some of their clothes were off) who were being hauled off by campus security …

It has been a hard few months of work, and it was not made easy at all by the many superb candidates who applied. But there you are, we’re done.

The importance of colleagues

Tomorrow the junior faculty affairs committee is hosting a junior faculty discussion about collegiality. Collegiality is an often used word in academic circles that can carry many veiled meanings. Regardless of how one defines collegiality, departmental colleagues have a huge impact on the life of a junior faculty member. Interacting with senior colleagues can be fraught for junior faculty members because these colleagues play a significant evaluative role in the tenure process. Despite the asymmetry of the relationship, senior colleagues can also be invaluable in providing support, guidance, and critical feedback to junior colleagues. I appreciate that I’m in a department with supportive senior colleagues, individuals who care about students, about physics, about the departmental community, and about junior faculty.

As he just posted, Arjendu was appointed associate dean today. While it’s a fantastic professional opportunity for Arjendu and the college will benefit as he shares his talents and interests with the broader community, I’ll miss having him around the department on a daily basis. Over the past five years, Arjendu has been a wonderful colleague, giving me helpful suggestions or providing a sympathetic ear at some times, challenging my assumptions or pushing my thinking at others, knowing how to be both supportive and critical. It’s going to be different not having those informal chats at the coffee pot, but it’s also a reminder of how lucky I am to be in a department with great colleagues.

The dark side

This is only relevant if you aren’t on the Carleton campus, or aren’t a Facebook friend of mine. Below is an extract from an announcement that went out from the Dean of the Carleton College earlier today. I’ll follow this note up later with a different ‘what on earth was I thinking’ post.

It is my pleasure to announce that Associate Professor of Physics Arjendu K. Pattanayak will be our next Associate Dean, assuming the position that Associate Dean Liz Ciner will leave on July 1 to become Director of Student Fellowships.

<some nice words about my career before and at Carleton snipped>

Professor Pattanayak will assume the associate deanship on July 1, 2010, for a three-year term. Among his most important duties as Associate Dean, Professor Pattanayak will provide oversight and guidance in managing the curriculum; leadership on matters of educational policy and implementation of our new graduation requirements; and leadership in diversity issues. The qualities that make Professor Pattanayak such a terrific choice to take over the Associate Deanship are those that will make him sorely missed by his home department of Physics and Astronomy. I am deeply grateful to the Physics and Astronomy Department for the goodwill with which they have accepted his move to the Dean’s office.

Please join me in thanking and congratulating Professor Pattanayak on his new appointment. The College is very fortunate that he is willing to take on these responsibilities at such an important moment in our history.

Beverly Nagel
Dean of the College
Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor of Sociology, Science, Technology and Society

So. Leaving Carleton Physics after all, even if it is just temporary, and just across the Bald Spot (the “quad” at Carleton) to Laird (where the “dark side” resides).

Advanced E+M

I am teaching the course we call ‘Advanced Electricity and Magnetism’ at Carleton, which most schools would recognize as ‘Griffiths’ or ‘Baby Jackson’. It’s an elective, usually populated mostly by seniors and some juniors (this year I have 6 of one, and 3 of the other), and fulfills no requirement for graduation or the major whatsoever. It’s a hard-nosed look at Electricity and Magnetism at a level well beyond the first exposure to the material, and serving as a review as well, in keeping with Carleton Physics’s weirdly valuable spiraling curriculum. If I haven’t said this on the blog, I believe that Carleton’s somewhat unusual curriculum prepares students as well as it does largely because we allow multiple opportunities for exposure to the same material — for classical mechanics, for e+m, in some ways for quantum mechanics, for relativity, etc.

Apart from my ‘research group’ meeting, this is about as close to a graduate class I am going to teach at Carleton, and I took advantage of that, some flexibility in my schedule, and the students’ requests to move it from the originally scheduled 8:30 MWF meeting time to suggest that we do it by meeting once a week 7:30PM — 10:30PM on Mondays. I’ve also assigned 2 classes each to each of the students (which works out to two students per meeting). These two students and I meet on Thu or Fri and sometimes as late as Sunday to talk over the material coming up (everyone else is supposed to read the material on their own before our Monday meeting and email questions to the entire group), and we work out what they are going to present — usually it’s some hard example problems, a sketch of the material as presented in the book, and some banging our heads against the more complicated issues.

We’ve had some interesting variations: In one case we decided to look at induced eddy currents by dropping small powerful magnets through conducting tubes (and then decided it would be fun to cool these tubes with liquid nitrogen to see how much the dropped magnets would slow down — it was a hoot); in another case, someone who had just done, as part of his comps, the tensor version of Maxwell’s equations, presented that to the class for our edification.

We’ve also read a book I recommend strongly to anyone interested in such matters, Daniel Fleisch’s “A Student Guide to Maxwell’s Equations” – an outstanding review of the material.

My usual trick of trying something new and interesting for courses when I can has paid off handsomely for this one: I think I can safely say that I am working on things a lot less than I would be in any ‘normal’ format, I see absolutely no lost opportunities in student learning as far as I can tell, and only benefits, to be honest, and the students themselves assure me repeatedly that they are having a blast.

And so it goes.

Writing across the curriculum from one physicist’s perspective

Earlier this week, Chad Orzel had a poll about what characteristics of technical writing students most need to learn in introductory classes. The leading response was “organization: a clear logical progression from one idea to the next” followed by writing that is “empirical, specific, and accurate”. The comments are also interesting, and one idea that came up repeatedly in the comment thread is audience analysis.  I would contend that both organization and audience analysis are key characteristics of all writing, not just technical writing, and with some loose interpretation, “empirical, specific, and accurate” could also be deemed important for much writing beyond technical writing. While organization is key to successful writing, I think writing for an appropriate audience is one of the hardest aspects to learn.

This week, I was part of a panel for Carleton’s Learning and Teaching Center about responding to student writing and managing student drafts efficiently. I enjoyed learning about the varied perspectives of my colleagues on teaching writing, as well as discussions about writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. During questions, someone asked me whether I included writing in my courses because it was what we were supposed to be doing to contribute to writing across the curriculum (externally imposed) or whether my commitment was more genuine. To me, the answer is a no-brainer. I genuinely believe being able to write well is critical to students’ long term success, so critical that it can’t be left to one or two writing intensive courses. Additionally, including writing in my courses provides me with an alternative assessment tool to probe my students’ conceptual understanding and their ability to contextualize and transfer knowledge. Nevertheless, I acknowledge this sentiment is not shared by everyone.

I’ve known physicists who feel the only writing assignments that they can be expected to include in their classes are lab write-ups. These hesitant individuals report that they don’t know how to teach writing. A physics course is certainly not a replacement for a writing course, but every course that includes a writing component need not provide a comprehensive treatment of how to write lengthy, beautiful prose. Rather courses across the curriculum ought to provide varied opportunities for students to write because writing truly is a craft that develops with practice. Even physics faculty can design assignments and provide feedback on four or five aspects of written work that they think are important. Developing rubrics for my formal writing assignments helps me identify the key elements I want students to focus on for any specific assignment. Beyond formal writing assignments, informal writing assignments provide an opportunity for my students to explore their understanding of concepts and can spark efforts to make connections between concepts.

Often when colleges require a “writing in the major” course, the course focuses on developing formalized techniques for approaching focused types of writing (ie a PRL-style paper). While these courses are useful in honing a particular type of writing, they can produce the impression that physicists only need to be good at writing for other physicists in a physics-approved format. At the undergraduate level, where our goal is not solely to produce future research physicists, I dislike this narrow focus. Not all of my classes include a significant writing component, but when they do, I include writing assignments that vary immensely, ranging from the traditional lab write-ups and research reports to personal letters, commentary pieces for the newspaper, memos, or informational pamphlets. Whenever I give a writing assignment, I also specify the intended audience for the students because of the importance I place on being able to write for varied audiences. Over the five years I’ve been at Carleton, the audiences I have asked students to address have included parents, friends at Carleton who are not science majors, other Carleton physics majors, a boss at a particular job, members of Congress, high school physics teachers, high school physics students, elementary school students, the newspaper-reading general public, and a grants board at a private foundation. The range of audiences is large, but not inappropriate considering the varied paths my students might take.

After seeing a review in Science News, I recently read Communicating Science: Professional, Popular, Literary by Nicholas Russell. Unlike some books, this is not a how-to-communicate-science book nor is it a polemic about what kind of science communication is most effective or needed. Rather, the book explores the origin of the efforts to improve science communication and discusses the benefits, problems, and complexities of science communication in three contexts: 1) communication among science professionals, including peer review, journal articles, and grant writing, 2) popular communication to the general public and the mass media, including considerations of public understanding of versus public engagement in science, and what the changing media landscape means for science journalism, and 3) science themes in fictional works, including an interesting look at the genre of science fiction. While a good read for anyone interested in science outreach or gaining a perspective on the interactions between science and society, I’d also highly recommend the book for anyone who teaches writing in their college level science courses. It serves as a useful reminder of the breadth of science communication in which our students might engage, and why science communication is both complex and valuable.