My grades are posted.

My students have received their grades.

I am 3 forms (paperwork will kill me) from starting my summer.

And I plan to play a bit, write a lot, travel too much, and try and remember how to jump horses over itty bitty fences designed to restrain dachunds.

w00t

Heineken Grill

As I think I’ve mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching good old fashioned physics. More specifically, I’m teaching the second semester (E&M) half of calculas-based physics for scientists and engineers. I somehow ended up with a class of 47 boys. While this course generally is predominantly male, the zero girls is unusual and it has led to an interesting dynamic. The machismo of this group was in full play yesterday when they presented their electronics projects. Their assignment was simple: In groups of up to 5 students, while spending no more than $5 per person (although they were welcome to dumpster dive anything they wanted), build something that had atleast three components. This meant they could do anything from build a simple motor or generator to building a coil gun or taser.

Seriously, coil guns and tasers appeared in large numbers. I’m really really glad my students generally like me because if they’d wanted to they could have totally taken me out. (Admittedly, they are on average bigger than me, so they could have taken me out anyway, but it is even more intimidating when they have scary looking homemade, giant spark generating tasers).

To get a good grade, students didn’t have to do anything amazing. In a class that has both electrical engineers who graduate in May and Bio majors in their second year, I have to allow for differences in background and skill level. Still, while I wanted to have level playing field as far as grades are concerned, I’m not above encouraging creativity via alternative means. Specifically, I told the students I’d let them vote for the best projects, and I’d buy gift certificates for each member of the winning team for a local restaurant. At the end of the class there were three projects that stood out from the rest, and with 47 people voting, 28 votes were split between these three projects.

And they earned their status.

The two tied for runner-up projects were radically different. On one side we had the above pictured Heineken Electric Keg Grill. They took apart one camp grill and reassembled it inside a half Keg and added a light to indicate when it was on. They quite happily heated a handful of wieners, and the room smelled like a nice friendly tailgate. On the other extreme, a student built a hydrogen generator.  There is nothing quite like creating explosive gas on demand!

And these were just the runners up.

The winning project made our classroom smell like burnt deodarent. Seriously. I kid you not. Burnt deodorant. I really wish I’d had my video camera. One group of guys built a low power rocket from a disposable camera, some wire, an empty soda bottle, and, um, deodorant. They basically used the plans for taser but built it so that it sparked when triggered. They then had the two wires that did the shocking come out through a soda bottle mouth-sized container mounting pointing. To turn it into a rocket launcher they sprayed a bit of deodorant into the soda bottle, mounted it, and then fired the camera to send a spark into the deodorant filled container. When the deodorant ignited (that would be the smell of burnt deodorant), the bottle launched toward the ceiling. It Was Cool. When asked, “Why deodorant?” the guys responded with sheepish grins that they just didn’t have any hairspray. (It was Tag deodorant for those who worry about such things).

All in all it was a fun day. If there was a booby prize for riskiest project, I’d have to give it to the group that built an iPhone charger (that worked!) and tested it using an iPhone instead of going and finding a voltmeter. And if there was a prize for masochism, it would go to the group that demonstrated their taser worked by shocking themselves!

Students are fun. I love teaching and project days tell me they can have fun with what they’re learning.

Tonight, when John McCain said we should send soldiers into the classroom, he scared me on many levels.

Teaching requires preparation. I have a doctorate degree in astronomy, and preparing for class is still hard,  takes time, and requires me to continually learn new techniques to improve the craft while at the same time requiring I keep up with the newest in what has been discovered in the universe. Teaching is hard. It’s hard because you bleed for your students, and what they go through as they struggle to make their dreams reality. Teaching is hard. It’s hard because your knowledge in many ways determines what your students are able to do in the next step. As teachers, we may be the limiting factor in our students’ futures.

I get a lot of amazingly bright students in the classroom who’ve come from high schools where their teacher was trying to teach too many classes all at once without the proper education to teach any of them. These wonderful students have the potential to run anywhere: Caltech or MIT  might have been possible  for some of my engineers. They’re creative, they’re driven, they’re all the things a teacher dreams of having. But they’re small-town kids,  from small-town schools, where it might have been one teacher teaching all the subjects. That teacher is probably doing the best he or she can without the tools he or she may need. An English teacher was never meant to teach physics. And I, as a astronomy/physics teacher, shouldn’t teach literature. To allow our students to be the best they can be we have to give them the best teachers we find and train.

Training is important.

The United States military would never send a soldier into a situation they hadn’t at least tried to train him for.  People aren’t thrown out of planes without learning proper technique, and they certainly aren’t asked to fly those planes.  Our soldiers are trained in how to use their guns, and in how to pack their packs.  Part of the “be all you can be” is giving them all the training our tax dollars can afford. I have to say, many of the students who I have respected the most have come out of the service. The are still working to every day be all they can be.

One of these soldiers who had come home, and who is going to college on the G.I. Bill, was one of my elementary education majors. He was  the only boy in the class of 25, and he took  all the girls teasing with a smile, although on one day when they were particularly giving him shit he brought up what life was like for him in Afghanistan.  He came home from serving in battle and decided to become a early elementary school teacher. And he’s going to be a really good one. And he’s getting a college degree make that happen.

Senator John McCain served in the military, he flew planes, he took the training, he did the time in training. I don’t understand: at what point did he forget that education matters especially for the educators?

I think there’s a lot to be said for taking people who served in the military and who have a passion for children  and training them in college via the G.I. Bill to be a next generation of schoolteachers. If this is what a soldier wants to do, let’s find a way to let them do it. And while we’re at it, let’s find ways for soldiers coming home to get any college degree for free.

Training matters.

For soldiers, for students, for all of us.

Training matters. Period.

As I prep for classes, I also find that I need to get my schedule under control. A wonderful graduate student I work with wrote to me the other day, “Warning…when your schedule becomes complex enough it will become a “living gestalt entity” and begin to control you….BEWARE!! Oh no..maybe it’s too late….;-)” Yes, it’s too late. IYA is approaching fast and the number of different things I’m working on seems to increase in number weekly (but thankfully not daily.) Adding to the scheduling complexity, I’ve re-taken up horseback riding as a means of staying sane (It is impossible to be freaking out about work while riding a horse. If you try, the horse will remove you). Part of making everything work is going to be living a more regimented life, whether I like it or not.

I’ve decided I need to take a page from the biography of Chandrasakar. While I can never hope to come near his skill as a scientist, I am hoping I can at least achieve some semblance of his time-management skills. If you haven’t read it already, I strongly recommend reading Chandra’s Biography. At one point, while trying to manage his research, students, and being editor of the Astrophysical Journal, Chandra was renowned for dividing his day into segments dedicated to specific tasks and asking people to come back at the appropriate time, even if they only had a 1 minute request. I don’t know if I have Chandra’s will power, especially when students or friends show up at my door or in my Skype, but… I’m going to try. (And I purposely kept the times I normally gab with friends free.)

Part of regimenting my time includes setting aside time to write. It is my hope to take this blog back to being daily starting with this post. Astronomy is moving fast and furious, and I do better keeping up when I’m helping you keep up through what I write.

Tomorrow starts a new semester, a new schedule, and hopefully a new, more organized, way of getting things done.

At least, here’s to hoping.

Then I realized it was July 18, not July 25, and that I actually had 1 week and 3 days.

Let me just say eek.

My summer has been fairly productive if I ignore how little I’ve blogged. Plans for the International Year of Astronomy are coming along nicely, I got with the help of some friends colleagues frolleagues a grant written, and I have lost track of how many research projects have had steady progress made on them. Life is good (ignoring the blog). I still have a lot I want to do this summer though: 1 more grant, some website theme dress ups, and some general hard drive cleaning. There are also some things I need to do, like, oh, writing next falls syllabus.

Next fall I’m teaching the second semester of calculus based physics for the first time. I’ve taught the algebra based version several times, and everyone tells me this will be easy for me, but this algebra to calculus change means I can’t use the same syllabus. These are also going to be students that had someone else for the first semester, so they are going to come into my class with a set of ideas about “this is how physics is taught” that I’m going to be judged against. As I write my syllabus, I get to give them the first document by which they can judge me, and I get to set the tone for the class.

In today’s wireless, cell-phone enabled, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr world, teaching takes on a whole new set of rules. Any of you remember when the biggest question was “would chewing gum be allowed in class”? Today’s instructor, which would be me, has to worry about technical interruptions, invasions of privacy, and all sorts of new ways for cheating.

As I write my syllabus, I’d really like to make it just 4 lines long:

1. Please don’t do anything that will distract me or your classmates from learning
2. Please don’t cheat in anyway. When in doubt, assume what you’re doing is cheating
3. Please don’t record anyone’s audio or image in anyway without permission
4. Attendance is strongly encouraged, but not mandatory, and if you miss class but not an exam due to illness or a family emergency, I do not need to be notified.

In reality, my syllabus has an entire page of carefully detailed rules and regulations that every semester get a little bit longer as people find new and more interesting ways to break the system or break me. For instance, students been conditioned some where along the line that if they get sick they need to provide the details to the instructor. I can tell them until I’m blue in the face that I don’t take attendance, but I don’t need details, but they don’t believe me. I do know the profs who require details and documentation. I am not one of those instructors. I do not want to know. I really don’t want you to send me pictures detailing you injury. Please, if you are sick, just tell me, get the lecture notes from someone else, and let’s just move on. Eeewww. Really, I don’t need to know. Thus I have the, “If you are sick and it does not impact your ability to attend a test, I do not need to know. Please remember, your lowest homework is dropped and most students will get sick at least once during the semester. If you are ill for more than a week and need special accommodations, please talk to me, but understand I do not need medical details. I respect your privacy and trust you to be honest.” I’m sure there will still be at lesat one case of two much sharing, but… Is it alright that I am appalled at both the level of documentation some profs require and the fact that students don’t see this as an unnecessary invasion of privacy?

Facebook also presents a whole level of student-professor confusions. I welcome my students “friending” me on Facebook (it makes it easier for me to remember them when I have to write recommendation letters). I do not welcome students to challenge me on quizes about “whose hot” and “Which pinup model are you?” That’s just creepy. This means I have to detail Facebook rules in my syllabus as well.

With Facebook and all the other content sharing sites, I also have to detail that students may not record and then share anything that happens in class without permission. I can’t think of a time when I wouldn’t give permission, but still.

And I know I’m going to forget something. For instance, what should my late homework policy be when the homework is internet-based and the site goes down for the three hours prior to the homeworks due “date” (which is really a due time)? I encountered that for the first time last semester. There is no fair response? And how do I write a rule that states, “If you ask so many pointless and stupid questions that I and all the students want to duct tape your mouth shut, you will not be allowed to come to class.” That is not a political correct thing to put in the syllabus, but I’ve had more than one student who both made me feel unsafe because I was not convinced they were stable, and who made learning/teaching difficult because of their constant badgering.

I’m getting ready to teach a new semester. It’s time to write a new syllabus. I’m confronted with an empty sheet of digital paper.

Chewing gum is allowed in my class.

That’s at least one rule I don’t have to write.

Abstract: Looking for something entirely different? Take a tour through our ever changing universe that is (loosely) guided by Monty Python’s “The Galaxy” song. In this colloquium, students will explore the cosmic history of our planet, how we are evolving and revolving though space, and where we and our galaxy are headed in the future. Basic geometry and algebra will be used to understand the math a physics behind our planet’s position in time and space, and to understand why the numbers that apply to England don’t apply to Ecuador!

Not familiar with the song? Check out this rated [PG] google video.

In truth, universities are just places that strive to be more, but often struggle to make their dreams reality. As places run by humans and often open to the public, they aren’t as secure as we may desire. While the majority of crimes are related to random strangers entering campus to thieve, and peep, and sometime grope and rape, the most tragic crimes we see are the ones perpetrated by the students and staff who become broken as they try to run the academic gauntlet.

At the University of Texas as a graduate student, I learned in the shadow of the UT tower. In August of 1966, Charles Whitman (a former UT student) went on a shooting spree from the top of that 307-foot tower and over the course of 96 minutes shot and killed 14 people while injuring dozens more. Earlier in the day, he had killed both his mother and his estranged wife. The day ended with a a police officer killing Whitman. By all accounts, he snapped after experiencing one too many personal failures, including academic failures.

At the University of Texas as a observational astronomer, I took data through the McDonald Observatory 107-inch telescope. In February 1970, a night assistant had a mental breakdown, fired a shot at his supervisor and then shot up the mirror of the telescope. The day ended with a local law enforcement officer talking him down and taking him away in hand cuffs. The stories I’ve heard from people who were there attribute his breakdown to frustrations in part or in whole related to research problems.

These events aren’t unique. In grad school, we all hear the stories of abused graduate students breaking and killing themselves or their advisors. I suspect we all hope never to experience this happening at our home institutions, but at the same time we all have or know someone who has thought “what if I…”

In 1998, the year I defended my master’s thesis, Harvard graduate student Jason D. Altom, one of the best of his field, killed himself. In a note published in the Harvard Crimson after release by Altom’s parents, Altom wrote, “This event could have been avoided. Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students,” the letter continued. Having a committee of professors involved earlier in the evaluation of a student’s work would “provide protection for graduate students from abusive research advisers,” Mr. Altom wrote. “If I had such a committee now I know things would be different.” (Taken from linked Chronicle article.)

If our best can’t thrive in our Darwinian “survival of the fittest” academic community, … .

Yesterday, a new and tragic crime joined the list of events we can not afford to forget.

In April of 2007, the spring of my first year possessing a title containing the coveted word “professor”, Virginia Tech senior Cho Sheung-Hui killed 7 faculty and 23 students before turning a gun on himself. In a note, he railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus. (Taken from linked News Day article.)

I’m not a psychologist, a sociologist, or someone who can pretend the slightest training in the mental workings of the human mind. But, I am a human who has survived the US educational system. When I hear of these shootings, I don’t ask why, I thank God it doesn’t happen more often. The upper tiers of academia, to which Harvard and Texas and Virginia Tech all belong, appeal to a certain type of person. They welcome the student who chooses to study astrophysics because they are told it’s the hardest major. They nurture the student who believes anything less then perfection is failure. They push and push and push, trying to get each student to jump over a bar so high most of us can never reach it. They push, because occasionally someone can jump over the bar, and that person, when pushed to become the best they can be, just might save the world. And hey, there is a curve (often unspoken) to make sure everyone else still gets a mostly passing grade.

But just passing can be an emotional failure. The pressures put on students pulverize self-worth and crush the understanding that mistakes are okay.

I was one of those freaked out students who feared every B would keep me from college. I was so freaked that I vapor locked on exams. The only semester I actually got straight As was my last semester of my senior year (when it really no longer mattered). As early as 8th grade, I was being pressured that my occasional Bs would keep me out of the MIT I dreamed of attending (in reality, I suspect the D I got in German and my less then perfect math SATs had more to do with it). Today, I hear parents freaking out that if their child doesn’t attend the correct private pre-school, they won’t get into the elementary school that will get them into the right high school that will get them into the right college.

Parents are hiring college admissions advisors to shape their children into what colleges want. In one of the sadder examples, would-be Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was assisted by her admissions councilor in getting a book deal that would have her writing her first novel while she tried to finish high school and complete her first year of college. She was accepted at Harvard, but her first book was retracted after it was discovered that she had somehow plagiarized large amounts of text from her favorite authors. I don’t know how anyone thought this brilliant young woman could balance so many things. Phil Plait, a brilliant astronomer needed to quit his job to write his second book, and he is an experienced writer. Viswanathan was an 18 year old who should have been busy having fun learning to be an independent co-ed.

We are all guilty of occasionally perpetuating higher than necessary standards. In mentoring students, I hear myself advising them to seek research opportunities as high school students and to try and publish research as undergrads. That is what I did, and it worked for me. But… aren’t normal high school students supposed to be flipping burgers and don’t normal undergrads just focus on finding a good summer co-op, but otherwise worry more about what they are doing Friday night?

Oh yeah – being normal is the same as failing. At least that is the impression any student trying to replicate my career path might be tempted to believe. It is even what I believed. At Harvard, I decided I must be too dumb to be a professor. After all, many of the profs I dealt with got their PhD in their early 20s and had tenure by 30. Here I am at 33 and still not on the tenure-track. To some, that is failure. In truth, we all chase our dreams at our own rates and if I think about it, I haven’t failed.

And I need to remember, as I place myself in the awful position of potentially getting mistaken as a role model, that I shouldn’t put pressure on the same students who are already putting pressure on themselves. We in academe need to tell our students stories of the successful people in our lives who never saw college as a need. We can’t forget to praise our students for trying. We need to tell them to enjoy life. We can’t simply push them as we were pushed. Academe can be a cycle not too different from any other cycle of abuse – but each of us has the ability to break the cycle. We’ll make mistakes – on our thoughtless days, we’ll write “See me” on failed exams without writing praise on perfect papers (isn’t perfection simply meeting expectations? No – it’s not.) We’ll forget to say, hey, you may not make it the first try, and that’s okay – it was hard for us too, and we struggled too. But hopefully we’ll learn to nurture as we teach.

And we’ll remember our youth and what it was like to have a dream and fear every day that one bad homework, one mistake on an exam, could crush that dream forever. Dreams should be treaded on lightly, and we need to care for those who are hurting as they struggle toward a dream.

I will never forget the stories of the students academe has broken and the world has lost. I will always be here for the student in need. To you, my door is always open.

When I teach about equinoxes and solstices in class, the observant student may notice a slight discrepancies between what is taught and what they find in their newspaper. For instance, I’ll say that on the Equinox, the Sun rises exactly in the East and sets exactly in the West (totally true). I’ll say the Sun passes directly over the Equator at the Equinox (also, totally true). And, I’ll say the day and the night are equal on the Equinox (kinda sorta true). What I don’t do is define sunrise and sunset, and this is where that last “kinda sorta, huh?” moment comes into play.

In a logical world, we might say that when the mid-point of the Sun crosses horizon, the Sun (depending on direction of motion) has risen or set. Based on this definition, the equinoxes have equal amounts of day and night*.

But who said we live in a logical world? The technical definition of sunrise is more in line with a vampire’s definition: as soon as a single beam of sunlight creeps over the horizon we have sunrise. This moment of daylight occurs well before the midpoint rises, and makes the day a bit longer than my more geometry-minded definition.

Sunset seems to have been defined by an hopeful kid who has to come in at sunset: The Sun is considered up until the very last beam is blocked by the horizon. The Sun’s last edge, for obvious reasons, sets well after the midpoint, and this too makes the day a bit longer.
Put together this means, based on newspaper rise and set times based on the above definitions, the equinox is going to have more than 12 hours of Sun, and the date with equal amounts of day and night falls before the spring equinox.

Now, even by correctly defining sunrise and sunset, I still don’t get at the newspaper definition. The problem is the atmosphere. While good for life, the atmosphere is bad for astronomy. It has some bad habits like blurring stars and bending light. When light rays pass from one substance to another, they will bend if the substances have different refractive indexes. This is how glasses and magnifying lenses work. Air and glass (or plastic) have different refractive indexes, and as a light ray enters glass (or plastic) its path changes direction. Until within my lifetime, real glass (silicate-based stuff) was used to make prescription eyewear, and to bend the light enough to correct for really bad vision, really thick glasses were needed. Today, thanks to plastics, we can produce materials that bend light more effectively than glass, and make thinner, lighter weigh glasses for the vision impaired.

As sunlight passes from space (a vacuum) into the Earth’s atmosphere (not a vacuum) it sees a change in refractive index and its path changes direction. The direction of this change causes light that enters the atmosphere below the horizon to get bent such that the Sun will appear above the horizon. This works for both sunrise and sunset, and has the effect of making the Sun appear to speed up toward the zenith and slow as it nears the horizon (it doesn’t really change speeds) and to set after logic and the Earth’s rotation rate says it should have set. This means that our atmosphere makes our days longer by bending light toward us. This is probably a good thing for our sun addicted society, but it is a bad thing for vampires, astronomers, and people trying to figure out just when there are equal amounts of day and night.

So when, if you bring in all these extra definitions and facts, is there equal day and equal night? Sadly, there is no one answer. It depends on where you are on the planet. According to the US Naval Observatory, at mid-northern latitudes (around 40 degrees) the days of equal day and night are around March 17 and September 26. This would imply that for mid-southern latitudes, the dates of equal day and night are around March 24 and September 19.

So, go out and play in the flowers, any of you lucky enough to have flowers, and if you are in the Norht, know that day now out lasts the night.

(Oh, and if you’re curious, the longest and shortest days, even with all these extras, are still on the solstices).

*if you ignore the atmosphere

As well as getting their ideas, I thought I’d ask what you, my often silent non-student readers, think are useful ways to remember the planets and stars. So, in the comments, give me a sentence to remember you and the stars and planets by!

What do I use?
For planets (M V E M J S U N): My very evil mother just served us nothing.
For stars (O B A F G K M): Oh, be a frightening Godzilla. Kill Mothra!

What do you use?

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work a lot of different places. The universities I’ve haunted have ranged from the Big Ten (MSU), to the Ivy League (MIT and Harvard), to the Big 12 (UT), to the unheard of (SAO), to a small state school (SIUE). My students faces have ranged in age from the 10-year old prodigy learning college-level astrophysics to the late 50s chinese immigrant working through freshmen physics toward a dreamed of PhD. The students I have worked with have ranged from students so smart and together that they can run 1500 person programs without traumatizing their grades, to students who are just trying to figure out how to just get through their next homework set. To me, the measure of my career is counted not in the number geniuses I can help loose onto the world, but rather it is counted in the number of students for whom I can make just one idea click and who I can help find their dream that they want to make reality.

As an instructor there are certain moments when I know that something has clicked – that moment when I know my students don’t just know the route material from memorization, but that they actually get it. Last Thursday I had one of those magical everyday days when my students just seemed to keep going click around me. In physics, I had just finished covering the theory of capacitors. My plan was to get to class 10 minutes early, set up equipment, and during class let my students play with electronics kits containing batteries, capacitors, and light bulbs. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, the group that had the room before me kept going and going and going, such that I didn’t get started setting up my laptop until class was officially already 3 minutes in. Frazzled and frustrated, I drew a quick circuit on the board – battery to light bulb to capacitor, all in series – and asked them to build it while I tried to setup. After about a minute people started complaining that their batteries were all dead or getting dead fast. Their light bulbs were fading away and blinking out. Then, one of the students asks, “Hey, Dr. G? Is it just that the capacitor is charging up and cutting the circuit?” Click. The student got it. The connection locked into place between theory and reality. We unclicked the batteries and the students all clicked in as their light bulbs flashed on before fading away again as we got down to work.

Later, the same day, that same good everyday Thursday, the air was crystal clear and not too cold, and I decided astronomy would be outside under open skies. We were discussing the colors of stars and I plotted a path around the sky and though the spectral types. As a class, we went out and visually walked from the Orion Nebula and it binocular ready white hot O stars to Rigel’s regal blue B-ness, and then dropped down with the dogs and observed Sirius’s A-type teal color and F-type Procyon’s puky-yellow disposition. From there we turned to Capella and discovered tue yellow in its G-type Sun-colored goodness. With two types left, we turned back toward Orion and Taurus, and saw Aldebaran, the orange K-type eye of the bull, and Betelgeuse, the blood red M-type shoulder of the hunter. We were guided on out journey by planispheres, and my students went click click click as they found their own way from object to object. And in the end, we turned north and walked our way hand-over-hand from the horizon to the north star and they giggled – click click click – as they found that astronomy worked. Four hands up and straight on ’til morning, the North Star does sit where science says it should sit.

That was a day. Just a day. It was one for which I could easily articulate the moments that mattered. Other days are harder to explain. There are the moments when I completely lose my class (we all have those) and am able to figure out why they’re lost from the questions they ask and then click them back into understanding the lesson. There are moments when a students stops to talk to me about how to get where they want in life and I can just point them to a website that helps them click pieces of potential into motion forward. And there are just the simple moments, like plotting to launch rockets when the weather turns warm.

Moments like these that add up into everyday days can’t be found everywhere. Days like this are why I am here.

Today, that sense of student responsiblity in learning has diminished as consumerism has grown. Now, sitting on the other side of the student-faculty collaboration, I try to abide by a few simply rules learned from my student experiences. I don’t waste my students time teaching them things I expect anyone accepted into college to know (unless forced by a classes required curriculum). I articulate what I am going to do, and I teach to multiple learning styles. I don’t stand in front of the room regurgitating the text book. I use research on good presentation technique and learning to define my teaching style. What I do in the classroom is thought out, and there are reasons for everything I do.
Unfortunately, what makes for good research-based teaching and what is responsible, doesn’t also make students happy. The consumer mentality that I witnessed as a student has grown into a belief that a college education is something that is purchased. Period. Good grades are expected, and the need for hard work doesn’t seem to be anticipated. What I have been told by students (plural, very plural) is that in a good class I should stand in front of the room, copy key points and specific examples involving numbers onto the chalk board or display them in a PowerPoint. Everything that I want them to learn should be written down. I should not expect students to know how to take notes on what I say. Homework problems should be gone over in class before they are due, and even when I provide homework answer keys, I should spend time in class going over solutions to past homeworks in detail.

If I spent the time my students wanted going over just the homework, I would never do anything other than going over homework.

One of the older faculty here explained to me that students seem to believe that if I work enough examples for them, I will eventually work all the problems that may be on homework or exams. This means, when they see a problem, they will not need to think but can rather simply repeat what I said in class. One of my students explained that students don’t know how to take notes, they simply know how to copy what is written on the board. Put together, what this tells me is my students want me to copy by hand or by PowerPoint the entire Schaum’s Problem Solver for them so they can copy it into their notes.

That’s not teaching. (But it would be plagiarism.)

So, students aren’t going to get in my class what they want. As consumers, what they are paying for is the obtainment of a set of skills that allow them to perform future jobs while at the same time receiving a socia-scientific framework that allows them to make informed decisions in fields outside their specific realm of expertise. This means that an engineering major should be able to understand the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an English Major should be able to grasp the dangers of Bird Flu without over-reacting. A college education should create literate people capable of combining ideas to solve problems.

Feel free to call me Pollyanna.

In my college classroom, I work hard to give students information that is framed historically, applied to the world around them, and demonstrated in representative examples. Recognizing that people learn best in different ways (some need to read things, others to hear things, others to watch things and others to do things), and that everyone learns best if they read, hear, watch and do things, I use multiple techniques in class. Because I am human, I can not convey any one point in more than two ways at once, and in general I can’t write and do anything else involving my hands. (e.g. I can speak and perform a demo, I can speak and write, etc, etc. )

The problem I am facing – the problem that is driving me crazy right now – is that many of my students have learned to discard any information that isn’t written down by me for them. This means that when I do a demo and explain verbally what is going on (often I do a verbal set of questions and answers with them) that content is generally discarded after class. This semester, I have verbally done many of my homework problems in class as demos, asking my students questions as I went (If the moon is here, and the Sun is here, what season is it). The students could consistently answer the questions in class. This semester, after those demos and verbal questions, my students said I hadn’t covered the material on the homework. What they meant was I hadn’t written down the verbal questions, written down the answers, and drawn all the demos on the chalk board so they could copy the sketch into their notebook.
So the question I have to ask myself is this: As a prof, is it my job to write down everything I expect my students to write in their notes. The answer is no. There are three basic reasons: In life, the key points aren’t going to get written down for them; They have a text book for a reason; It is a waste of class time.

In life, bosses throw content at us verbally and we have to extract the key points for ourselves. When we listen to lectures, read books, attend seminars, the subject isn’t presented in a series of sound bites that are written down so people can copy them down. As humans, it is our job to sift through material to grasp the key ideas. My lecture notes (on someone else’s lecture) should be my summary of what was said that is punctuated by key equations, key diagrams, and bolded points. What is said is what the prof has decided needs to be said because it is important. He or she, just like future colleagues, isn’t speaking just to waste your time while you wait for the next item to get written on the chalk board.

My students all have text books. Text book authors are really good at writing end of summary blurbs that summarize all the content into 2 pages or less. If you want key points and sound bite definitions, just read the book. I do not exist to replicate the efforts of the text book author, so a student can replicate the text book author’s efforts in their notebook.

When I was an undergrad I got really frustrated when class time was wasted. If I have to pause every time I do a demo, setting down what I’m working with to write down exactly what I have said (usually multiple times), I am wasting time. If I say the Sun is farthest North in the Summer, and show this in a diagram, with a demo, and say it, I trust students to write down something from either the diagram, the demo, or what I said so that they retain for later that the Sun is farthest North in summer. Really, it’s not that hard to take notes. Try it, you might like it.

And here is where I look back and my undergraduate days and wonder if I’m being realistic in my expectations. I started life as a social relations major in James Madison College at Michigan State University (yes, a liberal arts major switched to hard science – it does happen). My freshmen year we all took these 250 person lectures on Democracy in America. There wasn’t a large chalk board, and while we were sometimes shown slides, in general, in those pre-PowerPoint days, the profs just stood up there and talked. They interpreted deToqville (sp?) and highlighted the context of the dialogues between Jefferson, Madison and Adams. We were expected to read, and they helped us see the connections between divers content, and then we were expected to take the big picture content and reflect it through detail rich essays. It was an academic conversation that at each turn took the content to a higher level. We were expected to listen, take notes, and learn, drawing our own connections based on the ones they showed us.

So, I don’t think I’m insane in expecting my students to take notes. I don’t think I am insane to expect students to build ideas together to solve problems. I think education is something that comes in pieces where it is the student’s job to assemble the content within their own educational background and context. I’m simply here to make sure none of the pieces are left out of the box and to help sort them into little pieces that help the big picture come together easier. And like that puzzle, education should come with a little black label, “Some assembly required, small pieces may constitute a chocking hazard, recommended for ages 17 and up.”

Limited access to information (and the decision to actually access that information) acts in many ways to divide our society. It takes money to get the cable and satellite news feeds. Prolonged access to online content – the type of access needed to hunt down links and read background material – takes money or the right job. Knowing how to access information takes education, which is another way of separating the haves from the have-nots. And sorting through digital, video, and audio content takes that most precious resource of all: time. It takes effort to be informed, and one must choose to know what is going on.

With time and access often limited, many people rely on the main stream media to tell them what they need to know in 30 minutes a night (30 minutes minus commercials, minus special interest topics, that is). It scares me sometimes how much a person can miss by not having the time or desire to spend a few minutes checking the headlines on the sidelines: Bird Flu is back, China shot down a satellite, cows are starving in heartland snows, and citrus is suffering in the Sonoma ice. Sure, a lot of it doesn’t affect me. To make informed stock decisions, I don’t need to know the Oscar picks, but in understanding today’s transportation sector, it helps to know new laws now govern travel to neighboring countries and Virgin America Air was a US no fly.

So knowledge is power. We all learned that from School House Rock, right? So how do we get people to seek knowledge? And more importantly, how do we get people to be informed critical and skeptical thinkers? I have ~ 70 channels on my cable TV. I can tune my content to almost any whim. I can self-select to have people carefully “prove” the paranormal, demonstrate the power of prayer 24 hours a day, and show me ways to solve all the worlds problems with little magnetic bracelets. I can also decide to have the MythBusters demonstrate the scientific method as they take on the urban legends and old wives tales of US society. To get people thinking critically, we scientists need to somehow make people want to spend their time watching us. We need to make what we do cool and trendy. We need to make people want to be skeptical and think. We must somehow make people want to invest the time and resources necessary to be informed.

And I see this happening. The Skep Chicks and Skep Dudes calendars are showing that critical thinkers can be sexy too. Sex sells. The media is also letting scientists be more than thick-glassed geeks. The scientists in Numbers and Bones aren’t always the most socially adroit individuals, but they are sexy.

Its a start. Laura McCullough, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin – Stout, told me that part of getting women into science is showing them an environment in which they can (and want to) see themselves. I think this is true for anyone. By making the faces that portray scientists and who inform about different science fields a little more hip, a little more fun, and a lot more charismatic, perhaps we can inspire more people to follow us into the trenches of science. Perhaps we can inspire them to get informed and get skeptical and get online and get hip to what’s hot in Nature (or at least on their free podcast).

My Space Physics students, in addition to several students who are part of the SIUE physics club, all built rockets. Many of these rockets were of their own design, incorporating objects as odd as Budweiser cans and toilet paper (as well as toilet paper rolls). The rockets didn’t all behave in the most predictable of ways. The “Finless Wonder,” a rocket without any fins, flew a wild course that threatened to set us all on fire (never kneel on the hem of your jacket to keep warm during a rocket launch – it is impossible to not get tangled while attempting to run out of harms way!). A rocket with carefully angled fins corkscrewed its way skyward on multiple launches. An egg-craft protected its fragile cargo on two trips (one through the trees). Through out the experience, the students were talking about what might go wrong (discussions based on science), bemoaning the cancelled shuttle launch (which a couple had gone out of their way to try and watch), and overall laughing and plotting to repeat the experience next semester.

I just sat back, packed engins with ignitors, and enjoyed my students’ pleasure using knowledge to have fun. It doesn’t get better than this.

To see pictures, check out the album on my Facebook. SIUE network members can view even more pictures by visiting the group “The Physics Club.”

The delightful Chad Morelli from the Suburban Journals spent the afternoon with all of us, taking great photographs of the day. You can find his story here.