The university has this big unsanctioned, unapproved holiday that all the students call “Unofficial”… as in… Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day. Supposedly the local bars started this several years ago because St. Patrick’s Day (typically a big drinking holiday for stupid Americans) invariably falls during Spring Break when all the students are gone. The bars felt they were losing money because students were getting drunk in Puerto Viejo or wherever it is they go on spring break, so somehow this “Unofficial” was born. I never really remember it when I was an undergrad here; I think its just reached epic proportions in more recent years. Some people skip class to party, some people come to class falling-over drunk, decked out in green St. Patrick’s Day themed costumes. As you can imagine, professors hate this holiday. The university has done some mealy-mouthed things to try to put the smack down, but it seems to keep growing instead of dissipating.
At any rate, I was a little nervous about this holiday. This year it was to be an especially big deal, because whoever decides these things had placed it on Leap Day—a day that only comes once every 4 years. The students have been talking about this for weeks, obviously the excitement was high. All sorts of university warnings were issued to instructors, such as, “Call 911 in the event of an emergency.” Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have figured that one out on my own….
So I was a little nervous about today. I had originally planned on giving the exams back today, but pushed that back to last Wednesday in order to avoid inciting antagonism when students were likely to be drunk. Less than half showed up for class today, and at least one of them had had a few. But he’d told me ahead of time that he’s a friendly drunk, and true to his word, he was.
All in all, class went really well. It was such a small group, and we were able to joke around while learning some about Apolipoproteins too. At least I hope they learned some things about Apolipoproteins. They were all asking me if they could get extra credit for coming to class today, and asking me to put something on the test that only they would know and the absentees would never guess. They said I should tell them some random fact about myself and put that as a question on the exam. After some brief consideration, I thought that maybe I could do that, so I asked them what they wanted to know. They thought for a moment and then one student asked if I had favorite monkey while I was in Nicaragua, and if so, had I given it a name.
Perfect. So I told them all about you-know-who, and they seemed to enjoy my stories (and impersonation). I told them not to mention this monkey to the other students and I will reward them for coming to class today by giving them the following extra credit question (which they’d all better get right): What is the name of Melissa’s favorite monkey? ______________________. I know that everyone reading the blog knows this answer!! Let’s see if the students can remember this and get it right! Thanks for reading.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Friday, February 29, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Throwing rocks at the creek (a long one)
Last Friday I gave the first exam to my class. I actually thought it was way too easy for them. I thought that there was no reason why anybody should miss any of the questions on it. Everything came verbatim from what I had said in lectures. I wasn’t even asking them to apply concepts… just basic information regurgitation. As I handed out the exam, I was thinking I really should have challenged them more… it seemed more like an exam for grade school children than for college students.
After everyone had finished, I paged through the exams, just to quickly glance at question number 2: “True or False: A chimpanzee is an example of an Old World Monkey.”
The answer is false, of course. I had made a slide about this that we went over in lecture. At the top of the slide, I had written in bold letters: "This will be on the exam!!" I gave them a hand-out about it. It was on the review sheet and I even specifically mentioned it again at the review session on the Wednesday before the exam. So, you would think they all got it right, wouldn’t you? Not so. A full 38% of them missed it. I was crestfallen. How was this possible? Cara’s sixth-graders all know that a chimpanzee is not a monkey. But college students at what is supposed to be one of the best universities in the country? Apparently not. If these are our nation’s best and brightest, we might as well throw in the towel.
But still. I didn’t give it that much thought. I assumed it was just a fluke and they had done well on the rest of it, and I went on my merry way. On Saturday was there a symposium at school all day. I was presenting a paper in the morning and was part of a panel in the afternoon. The paper I presented (“Dog attacks on mantled howler monkeys living at La Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua”) was pretty much a revision of the poster I had presented at a different conference last fall. This presentation went pretty well. It was a multi-disciplinary symposium—larger than just biological anthropologists. Much to my surprise, the cultural anthropologists in attendance were very receptive to this issue. After my talk there was a 10-minute break, but I didn’t even get to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water because people were coming up to talk to me about this. A cultural anthropology grad student told me she had never realized that primatology could have such a human dimension (the issue is really one of tourism and human encroachment rather than dog predation per se). Honestly, that means a lot, because sometimes I feel that biological anthropologists are vilified by other members of our department as “evil scientists.” And the irony is, of course, that some biological anthropologists have vilified (or at least picked on) me for even bothering to describe this instance because its simply not “sciency” enough. The thing that meant the most to me was when a cultural anthropology professor in the department told me—in front of everybody—how important and useful this was and how I really should publish this incredibly rich, detailed account. The cultural anthropologists were surprised that I hadn’t seen the same support from members of my own subdiscipline. Sometimes I feel like biological anthropologists are so afraid of not being taken seriously that they take themselves way too seriously and end up looking like idiots. Have we really become so jaded that the observance of an extremely rare, stochastic event (such as dog predation) is not deemed publishable simply because it doesn’t conform to the same cookie cutter format of every scientific paper?
At any rate, the symposium caused me to miss out on my dad’s birthday celebration in Roscoe, but at least after I got done with it, I talked to him on the phone and heard Logan’s antics described to me in real time.
On Sunday, I ended up getting up early and doing most of a 12-mile training run with the running club. Rather than starting out with them, I’d planned on cutting across town and catching up with them about 3 or 4 miles into it. The problem I hadn’t counted on was that nobody had shoveled their sidewalks after our latest snowstorm, so I was running through ankle deep snow (with a layer of ice underneath). Whenever there is the slightest hint of ice, I dodder around like an old lady; needless to say, the going was very slow. I finally managed to catch up with the group around Centennial Park, and I ran with them for the next 7 or 8 miles. It was nice; I had forgotten how much fun it is to do a long run with other people. There were only about 5 or 6 runners who had shown up for the training run, and everybody had stayed together, at the same pace. We talked, laughed, drank Gatorade, and the miles just whizzed by.
On Sunday night, I finally set about to grade the exams. As I graded, all I could think about was my high school English teacher from junior year, Mrs. Sullivan. She had a gold-lettered sign hanging in her classroom that said, “Excellence Expected.” Everybody loved her. She worked so hard for us and she was so sweet. She told us that when she was grading our term papers, she would get so mad at the sloppy way we’d written, that she would go out and throw rocks into the creek to diffuse her anger. Well, I really needed a creek to throw rocks into last night. I’ve spent about a million hours preparing my lectures, trying to make them as entertaining and as clear as possible. I have been pouring my heart and soul into this, in a way that I really thought was getting through to them. And there were some of them who did really well. But there were too many of them who did not. Some of the things they were missing, like the chimp question, there’s just no excuse for it. I feel like its just arrogant, disrespectful, insulting, for some of them to so flippantly blow it off. In the end, I realize that there are some who will be engaged and plugged in and motivated, but there will be others who will not be no matter what you do. Today some of them came to talk to me about the exam and I realized that even those who didn’t do so well aren’t really arrogant or rude. They’re just kids. And this stuff is hard for them. Its new material, and they don’t know what to expect. So I still stand by them. The class, overall, really is great and teaching continues to be a great experience. They really are good kids, even if they can’t remember the difference between a monkey and an ape.
Thanks for reading!
After everyone had finished, I paged through the exams, just to quickly glance at question number 2: “True or False: A chimpanzee is an example of an Old World Monkey.”
The answer is false, of course. I had made a slide about this that we went over in lecture. At the top of the slide, I had written in bold letters: "This will be on the exam!!" I gave them a hand-out about it. It was on the review sheet and I even specifically mentioned it again at the review session on the Wednesday before the exam. So, you would think they all got it right, wouldn’t you? Not so. A full 38% of them missed it. I was crestfallen. How was this possible? Cara’s sixth-graders all know that a chimpanzee is not a monkey. But college students at what is supposed to be one of the best universities in the country? Apparently not. If these are our nation’s best and brightest, we might as well throw in the towel.
But still. I didn’t give it that much thought. I assumed it was just a fluke and they had done well on the rest of it, and I went on my merry way. On Saturday was there a symposium at school all day. I was presenting a paper in the morning and was part of a panel in the afternoon. The paper I presented (“Dog attacks on mantled howler monkeys living at La Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua”) was pretty much a revision of the poster I had presented at a different conference last fall. This presentation went pretty well. It was a multi-disciplinary symposium—larger than just biological anthropologists. Much to my surprise, the cultural anthropologists in attendance were very receptive to this issue. After my talk there was a 10-minute break, but I didn’t even get to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water because people were coming up to talk to me about this. A cultural anthropology grad student told me she had never realized that primatology could have such a human dimension (the issue is really one of tourism and human encroachment rather than dog predation per se). Honestly, that means a lot, because sometimes I feel that biological anthropologists are vilified by other members of our department as “evil scientists.” And the irony is, of course, that some biological anthropologists have vilified (or at least picked on) me for even bothering to describe this instance because its simply not “sciency” enough. The thing that meant the most to me was when a cultural anthropology professor in the department told me—in front of everybody—how important and useful this was and how I really should publish this incredibly rich, detailed account. The cultural anthropologists were surprised that I hadn’t seen the same support from members of my own subdiscipline. Sometimes I feel like biological anthropologists are so afraid of not being taken seriously that they take themselves way too seriously and end up looking like idiots. Have we really become so jaded that the observance of an extremely rare, stochastic event (such as dog predation) is not deemed publishable simply because it doesn’t conform to the same cookie cutter format of every scientific paper?
Introduction
Hypothesis
Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusions
Seriously, if you act like you’re testing an hypothesis, you can publish the biggest loads of crap.Hypothesis
Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusions
At any rate, the symposium caused me to miss out on my dad’s birthday celebration in Roscoe, but at least after I got done with it, I talked to him on the phone and heard Logan’s antics described to me in real time.
On Sunday, I ended up getting up early and doing most of a 12-mile training run with the running club. Rather than starting out with them, I’d planned on cutting across town and catching up with them about 3 or 4 miles into it. The problem I hadn’t counted on was that nobody had shoveled their sidewalks after our latest snowstorm, so I was running through ankle deep snow (with a layer of ice underneath). Whenever there is the slightest hint of ice, I dodder around like an old lady; needless to say, the going was very slow. I finally managed to catch up with the group around Centennial Park, and I ran with them for the next 7 or 8 miles. It was nice; I had forgotten how much fun it is to do a long run with other people. There were only about 5 or 6 runners who had shown up for the training run, and everybody had stayed together, at the same pace. We talked, laughed, drank Gatorade, and the miles just whizzed by.
On Sunday night, I finally set about to grade the exams. As I graded, all I could think about was my high school English teacher from junior year, Mrs. Sullivan. She had a gold-lettered sign hanging in her classroom that said, “Excellence Expected.” Everybody loved her. She worked so hard for us and she was so sweet. She told us that when she was grading our term papers, she would get so mad at the sloppy way we’d written, that she would go out and throw rocks into the creek to diffuse her anger. Well, I really needed a creek to throw rocks into last night. I’ve spent about a million hours preparing my lectures, trying to make them as entertaining and as clear as possible. I have been pouring my heart and soul into this, in a way that I really thought was getting through to them. And there were some of them who did really well. But there were too many of them who did not. Some of the things they were missing, like the chimp question, there’s just no excuse for it. I feel like its just arrogant, disrespectful, insulting, for some of them to so flippantly blow it off. In the end, I realize that there are some who will be engaged and plugged in and motivated, but there will be others who will not be no matter what you do. Today some of them came to talk to me about the exam and I realized that even those who didn’t do so well aren’t really arrogant or rude. They’re just kids. And this stuff is hard for them. Its new material, and they don’t know what to expect. So I still stand by them. The class, overall, really is great and teaching continues to be a great experience. They really are good kids, even if they can’t remember the difference between a monkey and an ape.
Thanks for reading!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
The weirdest weather ever
It was almost spring-like this weekend; temperatures were in the mid 50’s on Sunday afternoon. When I went running in the park, there were so many other people there that I was constantly dodging baby strollers, dog walkers, roller-bladers and toddlers on trikes. It was positively balmy; more like April than January. It was still warm today; around 50˚ by mid-morning. Then in the afternoon, the sky turned a very weird combination of green and gray and yellow. It was dark inside even with all the lights on, and I thought it must be getting nighttime. Not so. I looked at the clock and it was just around 3pm. Then the floodgates opened. Rain pummeled down from every direction and the wind was gusting almost 40mph. The temperature started dropping. 40˚… 34˚… 30˚… Once it dropped below freezing, the wet sidewalks and streets turned to ice. According to the UIUC weather page, the temperature is now 9˚ F and the windchill is 13 below. Yikes. That’s about a 40˚ temperature change over the course of 8 hours. Not to mention the 59mph wind gusts. This is truly the weirdest weather ever. A while back I know I said that with the snow tires on my bike, I felt prepared for anything. Now I’m not so sure. I’m wondering if I can cancel class for tomorrow… but I’d probably need to clear that through the head of our department first.
Speaking of my class, its going surprisingly well. These students are out of this world. How did I get so lucky? Last semester was a total drain—with students asking questions like, “Do I have to come to lecture?” and beginning emails with the salutation, “Yo Dawg.” In contrast, the 20-some students in my class this semester are fantastic. They’re asking questions all the time—but really smart questions 1, that shows they are thinking about what they are learning. I hope it stays this great. If so, I might have just chosen the right career path afterall.
Okay, I’ve got to go watch Jon Stewart distill last night’s State of the Union address and get ready for class tomorrow and also hopefully get some sleep. Thanks for reading.
1 Note, there is such a thing as a dumb question.
Speaking of my class, its going surprisingly well. These students are out of this world. How did I get so lucky? Last semester was a total drain—with students asking questions like, “Do I have to come to lecture?” and beginning emails with the salutation, “Yo Dawg.” In contrast, the 20-some students in my class this semester are fantastic. They’re asking questions all the time—but really smart questions 1, that shows they are thinking about what they are learning. I hope it stays this great. If so, I might have just chosen the right career path afterall.
Okay, I’ve got to go watch Jon Stewart distill last night’s State of the Union address and get ready for class tomorrow and also hopefully get some sleep. Thanks for reading.
1 Note, there is such a thing as a dumb question.
Monday, January 14, 2008
La Profesora
Day One. When I set out to make coffee this morning (decaf, but I still need it), my coffee grinder wouldn’t work. The thing is held together with duct tape, but its held out thus far. Today was the day it decided to quit. I was persistent, and with some amount of jiggling and shaking of the device, I managed to grind up enough beans to make a cup of decaf. Problem 1 solved.
I left for school and went to the main office to pick up the LCD projector. After taking it up to my office, I realized I had forgotten to bring the cord necessary to hook up my computer to the projector (Macs of course require a special cord for this). Luckily I had come 2 hours early and live only a 7 minute bike ride from school. So I hopped on my bike and headed home. Mind you the windchill was 11 F and winds were gusting at least 20 mph. I was kind of tired when I got back to school, but I had retrieved the proper cord and Problem 2 had been solved. I went to the classroom and hooked everything up and then just paced around until the students arrived.
They seem like a pretty good bunch. Really, this is a breath of fresh air after the drudgery of last semester. There is a huge difference between dealing with a class of 750 as opposed to a class of 18. When these 18 students filed in today, they really did seem to be fresh-faced and eager to learn. I forgot my intentions to be mean and put the fear of God into them. Everything went okay, but I am a little bit disappointed with myself for being too nice. I’ll have to be more stern on Wednesday.
In other news, I had an email from Eduardo yesterday. Just a few words. He asked me if there was still snow where I lived and he said that he missed me and to give his regards to Rob. The last time I'd heard from him was December 20, so I was really relieved and happy to have a message from him, bless his little heart.
Got to keep trucking tonight. Thanks for reading!
I left for school and went to the main office to pick up the LCD projector. After taking it up to my office, I realized I had forgotten to bring the cord necessary to hook up my computer to the projector (Macs of course require a special cord for this). Luckily I had come 2 hours early and live only a 7 minute bike ride from school. So I hopped on my bike and headed home. Mind you the windchill was 11 F and winds were gusting at least 20 mph. I was kind of tired when I got back to school, but I had retrieved the proper cord and Problem 2 had been solved. I went to the classroom and hooked everything up and then just paced around until the students arrived.
They seem like a pretty good bunch. Really, this is a breath of fresh air after the drudgery of last semester. There is a huge difference between dealing with a class of 750 as opposed to a class of 18. When these 18 students filed in today, they really did seem to be fresh-faced and eager to learn. I forgot my intentions to be mean and put the fear of God into them. Everything went okay, but I am a little bit disappointed with myself for being too nice. I’ll have to be more stern on Wednesday.
In other news, I had an email from Eduardo yesterday. Just a few words. He asked me if there was still snow where I lived and he said that he missed me and to give his regards to Rob. The last time I'd heard from him was December 20, so I was really relieved and happy to have a message from him, bless his little heart.
Got to keep trucking tonight. Thanks for reading!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Birthday Bash
Its been so long since I posted that probably no one is even bothering to check the blog anymore. I didn’t really intend to go so long without writing, but then the days turned into weeks. Plus, nothing overly exciting has been going on. So I decided to wait until something really great came along to make another post.
Today is Logan’s first birthday!! What a dear little boy he is. Rob and I made some time this weekend to go up and celebrate with our littlest nephew. Here are a few photos of the event:
Logan's first taste of cake.
In other news, tomorrow is the first day of the semester, and also my first day on the job as an instructor of a college course. I am trying not to freak out, but I feel like I need a horse tranquilizer to calm myself down. Tomorrow itself won’t be too nerve-wracking. I’m planning on handing out the syllabus and doing a brief introduction to the course. But still. The deluge will begin. I’ll try to keep up with blogging. If I fall behind again, maybe you can get caught up on the life and times of the Ragfields at Rob’s very own new blog!
Thanks for reading.
Today is Logan’s first birthday!! What a dear little boy he is. Rob and I made some time this weekend to go up and celebrate with our littlest nephew. Here are a few photos of the event:
Logan's first taste of cake.
Thanks for reading.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
