The most valuable lessons I learned (or relearned) in 2011

1. Having the right tools at your disposal makes your life as an experimentalist much easier.

When I decided to become a faculty member at an undergraduate institution, I knew that I’d have to get by with less research equipment than what I had grown accustomed to in a research university setting. At Carleton, I nominally have what I need to do the research that I want, but to make things work, my research program requires using resources at the University of Minnesota. I’m grateful that I have access to those facilities, but scheduling the use of that equipment can create a real bottleneck in my work. Also, it’s much harder to involve students when equipment is not available on campus. This year, I was reminded just how much extra effort that off-campus work requires when Carleton purchased a multipurpose x-ray diffractometer (XRD) with an NSF MRI grant that I helped write. Previously I could only make needed XRD measurements at the University of Minnesota. Getting a suitable XRD system at Carleton has been a blessing for my research projects. The experience has served as a reminder that working with the limited research infrastructure available on campus can be a very real source of stress, and opportunities to acquire key pieces of large instrumentation make a huge impact on my research life. Now if Santa would just deliver a Quantum Design MPMS system for Christmas…

2. As lofty as our ideals and as plentiful as our good ideas, at the end of the day, the college budget must be balanced.

In the past year, I’ve begun to learn more about the business side of the college. My education has been by necessity (as a member of the college budget committee and a member of the strategic planning working group on faculty/staff compensation) and by choice (participating in a discussion group about the book Why Does College Cost So Much?). I appreciate the education I’m gaining about the economics of the college, even though at times it can be incredibly sobering. Ignorance may be bliss, but the additional perspective I’ve gained helps me make sense of a broader range of issues and situations that I encounter as a member of the Carleton community.

3. Gendered service expectations and roles are alive and well…

…and some days that makes me mad as hell. I like how Katie Hogan frames the issue in her essay in Over 10 Million Served: ”While most human beings, myself included, would not want to escape the opportunity to serve others — after all, human connection usually deepens emotional, creative, political, and intellectual development — in the academic world, an insidious and invisible economy of service has for years exhausted the energies of women, with women of color being particularly pressed into service roles.” I’ve long known about the studies showing that women do more service work in academia than men, so this isn’t news for me, but recent experiences have made the issue more personal.

4. You must be true to yourself and your professional goals

When I first started on the tenure track, several people told me something to the effect of, “Make the decisions that you want to make in your career, not the decisions that you think you ought to make to get tenure. In the end of the day, if you don’t get tenure, you still want to have built a professional career that reflects who you want to be.” Although it was difficult advice to take to heart as a junior faculty member, it was valuable to hear. This past summer I had the opportunity to participate in the PKAL Summer Leadership Institute, and it gave me space and structure for reflecting on my professional trajectory and where I want my next steps to lead. However, I still struggle to remember that the decisions I make should be authentically me, not what I think I ought to do or what I think my colleagues think I ought to do. I am trying to carry Polonius’ words with me, “To thine own self be true.”

What are the lessons that you will carry with you from the past year?

Choose your own course evaluation

My colleague, Amy Csizmar Dalal, has a blog post about her favorite course evaluation question. As Amy notes, at Carleton we don’t have a standardized, college-wide course evaluation system. Course evaluations are developed by each faculty member, and faculty, even junior faculty, do not have to share the results of course evaluations with anyone else. For tenure, student evaluation of teaching is done independently of whatever course evaluations you have used in your classes. As a junior faculty member, I loved that I wasn’t hamstrung by a college-wide course evaluation form that didn’t fit well with my teaching goals or help me address my teaching concerns, but some junior faculty find the lack of a more standardized course evaluation process to be stressful.

With complete freedom in my course evaluations, I’ve experimented with a number of different approaches. Over time I’ve developed a course evaluation that I’ve found is helpful to me and provides the kind of information that I need to revise and improve how I teach a course. All my evaluations have four categories: 1) background and expectations 2) course topics 3) course structure 4) Melissa’s strengths and weaknesses as a teacher. The exact questions in each category vary depending on the course, but by dividing my evaluations in this way, I find I can make more meaning of the responses that I get. In particular, by having four different sections to my evaluation, I encourage students to separate their opinions on the course and its content (sections 2 and 3) from their opinions on my abilities (or lack thereof) as a teacher (section 4). Thankfully, I’ve found that students are able to do this quite well.

What type of questions do I ask in each section? The background and expectation questions help me know what type of course the students thought they were signing up for when they took the class. I bluntly ask what their expectations were for the course and in what ways the course did or did not match their expectations. I also ask why they took the course, and whether they felt they were well-prepared for the course. These latter two questions aren’t that interesting when the courses I’m teaching are core courses for the major, but for electives or intro physics, the responses to questions about why a student took the course and whether they felt well-prepared help me put the rest of their responses in context.

Questions in the second section of the evaluation ask about what topics in the course the students liked best, what they liked least, what they found the most difficult, and why. For some elective courses where I have more discretion over the content, I use these responses to tailor what material I teach in future years, and for all courses, these questions help me think about how I present various topics. The third section of the evaluation on course structure varies depending on the course, but I generally ask students whether they found labs/problem sets/in-class activities/lectures/major project/textbook useful and engaging. In addition, for each component of the course, I ask what aspects the students would like to see changed. This can become nitty-gritty, but it gives me perspective on how the students experienced particular aspects of the course, from the textbook to the use of computer simulations in class.

Only after I have asked about the course do I ask students to comment on my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher. I’ve found that most students’ assessments of my strengths and weaknesses align well with my self-assessment.

I do occasionally include a few questions on my evaluations that don’t fall into any of the four categories. For example, the question that Amy finds to be her most effective course evaluation question is one I’ve used with my intro students, although I haven’t gotten the particularly insightful responses that Amy has. I might have to try using it in a broader range of  courses.

I’m impressed by the thoughtfulness of Carleton students in responding to course evaluations. The students are generally astute and substantive in their reflections. It is rare to have any student completely dismiss my teaching and the course with a uniform bashing. By a similar measure, I almost never have reviews that are homogeneously positive. I appreciate the frequent thoughtful suggestions I receive from students, and those suggestions do impact how I teach the course in the future.

What kinds of questions would be on your ideal course evaluation?

Why a physicist needs speech team and wind ensemble

Not long ago, someone asked me if I thought my high school prepared me well for becoming a physicist. The short answer is, “Definitely.” I was lucky to attend an excellent public high school in the Chicagoland area that offered an array of honors and advanced math and science courses taught by talented and committed teachers. My classmates and I had the opportunity to take two years of biology, two years of chemistry, two years of physics, and math through calculus II. While I didn’t overload on the science track, a number of classmates did. We all went off to college well-prepared to tackle the rigors of college-level math and science courses. However, as a practicing physicist, it’s not the number or quality of physics classes offered for which I am most thankful, although I am endlessly appreciative of Michael Rolf, who first sparked my enthusiasm for physics in his classroom. The two high school activities which prepared me best for being a physicist were speech team and wind ensemble. Yes, that’s right, more than the academic classes I took, speech team and wind ensemble taught me key skills that I needed to be a successful physicist.

Speech team honed my public speaking skills in a manner that no academic class, in either high school or college, ever did. In particular, I competed in impromptu speaking. Under IHSA rules, competitors in impromptu speaking were given a topic (person, object, quote, event, etc) and then given 8 minutes to prepare and give a speech on the topic. I could choose to divide the 8 minutes however I wanted, but the more time I spent preparing, the less time that remained for giving the speech. Ideally, I aimed to keep the preparation time to three minutes so that I would have at least 5 minutes to speak. The challenge of developing a creative, thesis-driven presentation incorporating the designated topic was excellent for teaching me how to think on my feet and how to create and deliver a clear, convincing argument in a limited amount of time. I also experienced the extreme discomfort that comes when trying to talk about something with which you aren’t familiar. When I didn’t know the designated topic, as a competitor I had to make up something to say, but I came away from those experiences with a profound appreciation that there are times when it is best to say nothing at all. Speech without substance should be avoided at all costs.

If the skills developed by speech team are self-evident, the role of wind ensemble in preparing me to be a physicist is harder to see, though perhaps more profound. After all, I haven’t picked up my clarinet since grad school, and my embouchure is of little consequence in the lab. So why am I profoundly thankful for wind ensemble? First, wind ensemble taught me immense amounts of self-discipline. Unlike my other high school classes where I had daily homework assignments and regular tests, wind ensemble imposed few explicit demands and deadlines, but it required much more consistent and dedicated work. I had to practice daily, but it was a choice I had to make for myself. It required discipline day after day to tediously review those particularly tricky passages, to make the time to practice, to push myself to play better. Wind ensemble required grit, and it taught me that one must be driven by internal desires rather than external reward. Wind ensemble also taught me about the importance of listening, and thinking about how my contributions fit into the whole. As part of an ensemble, one must always hear the other sections and adjust one’s playing accordingly, while in the lab one must think about how one fits in as part of a research collaboration and then how that research collaboration fits within the broader scientific landscape. One can’t simply make music without listening to the music that everyone else is playing.

Reflecting on the contributions that speech team and wind ensemble made to my preparation as a physicist leads me to be concerned about some of the discussion that surrounds public education today. US policy makers often wring their hands about not producing enough students who are interested in math and science, and when budgets get tight, I hear calls to eliminate the frills. Yet my experience would suggest that by eliminating fine arts or extracurricular activities, we aren’t cutting unnecessary extras. Rather we are cutting activities that teach key lessons that are invaluable for future scientists. I’m thankful for the lessons learned from speech team and wind ensemble — I’m a better physicist because of those activities. It’s my hope that future generations will continue to have those same opportunities as part of their public education.