A teaching manifesto of merit

The tattooed professor is new to TPP, but TPP likes this guy, and we likes his teaching manifesto as well. For the first 2/3 of his career TPP taught in large introductory biology classes, both majors and nonmajors, and how well he remembers needing summers to recharge until finally it got to the point where that burned out feeling would not go away. Only then did TPP begin a second career teaching botany to people who wanted to learn it. 
As a long-time observer of higher education here in Lincolnland, the cost of higher education is not because of the high salaries paid to lazy faculty, it's not because of having too many administrators, and it's not because of inefficiences and waste, it's because a long time ago, 30 or so years, our legislators decided to shift the responsibility of paying for higher education to the student and their families. They did this by simply gradually withdrawing state support. So tuition had to cover the difference and real cost increases and unfunded mandates as well, as a result tuition has been rising faster than the cost of living.  TPP has seen state support drop from around 60% of the cost to 16% of the cost, to no state support at all this past year.  So higher education is no longer affordable to many people, and this was a choice our state made, but not by coming right out and saying it. Cleverly the very people who made these decisions found it easy to criticize the educational institutions themselves, blaming the educators!  State supported colleges and universities have been great equalizers, and TPP appreciates the opportunities they afforded him; no ivy-league or private schools in TPP's background, just plain blue-collar botany bought and paid for by his own effort.
But at least it was possible. It should be again.

A science missionary in dangerous country (state)

Teaching if done well is a difficult task, although it does get easier with practice. Teaching is also easiest when the students are interested, eager, and willing. When they aren't one or more of those, it can be very difficult especially when they view some of your subjects as wrong or even evil, as in evilution. However, for TPP it has never even been slightly dangerous even in those large, non-majors lectures where you almost failed the star basket ball center. Not all of us are so fortunate to live in an area as enlightened (??) as the upper midwest.  Here's a link to a blog of one of my colleagues living in a "different country". Best if you read his story in his own words. He's a brave fellow; personally rednecks are best left alone.

Weirdly strange and strangely weird

TPP is suffering from some disconcerting feelings. Usually things just sort of happen and TPP tries to just take them in stride, but nonetheless today feels strangely weird.  Yesterday, Friday, was the last class day of the semester, another fine semester and academic year shot to hell, and rather than just a regular class (Friday 1 pm) TPP took his students to visit the Missouri Botanical Garden, always pleasant and educational thing to do. The seniors also enjoyed having a non-traditional last day to their college career, so a nice symmetrical situation. The weirdness arises because this was TPP's, actually his academic counterpart's, last class ever because he is retiring later this year. Of course the summer will be pretty much the same as always, but it feels quite strange to suddenly realize that this is the terminus of teaching even though the botanical career is not over by any means, and without question TPP, the blogger, is just getting started. So there it is. Somehow the semester and a very long teaching career (over 40 years), at least in terms of actually being in the classroom with students, has ended, and this proves to be sort of surprising in its abruptness in spite of the fact that this was not a sudden or last minute decision. TPP has plans to do something quite different this coming August, something to help his adjustment to not starting another academic year, but until then this will remain something for readers to wonder about. But somehow this actually happened; this is the end (1970), which is actually when it began.   

Life isn't fair; science isn't fair

TPP is in a bit of a funk. This happens to many people who anticipating some hints of spring wake up instead to an overnight snow fall. First, my watch thinks it's Jan. 1, 2005, and then my toast gets overdone. How much can one human stand? A scan of the news finds a both laughable and yet depressing item: creationists in the USA, mostly fundamentalist Christians, want equal time because the new science program Cosmos isn't being fair. Well, science isn't about fairness. What is most troubling is that there are that many people who think science is just a "belief", an "opinion", on an equal footing with 2000 year old creation myths. Will they being going to see the movie Noah and think it a documentary?  Well, TPP is not up to it this AM, so here's a quote from the Botanical Society of America's statement on evolution (get the full-text here) with which TPP is intimately acquainted.

"The fairness argument implies that creationism is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution, and that is not true. Science is not about fairness, and all explanations are not equal. Some scientific explanations are highly speculative with little in the way of supporting evidence, and they will stand or fall based upon rigorous testing. The history of science is littered with discarded explanations, e.g., inheritance of acquired characters, but these weren’t discarded because of public opinion or general popularity; each one earned that distinction by being scientifically falsified. Scientists may jump on a “band wagon” for some new explanation, particularly if it has tremendous explanatory power, something that makes sense out of previously unexplained phenomena. But for an explanation to become a mainstream component of a theory, it must be tested and found useful in doing science."

"To make progress, to learn more about botanical organisms, hypotheses, the subcomponents of theories, are tested by attempting to falsify logically derived predictions. This is why scientists use and teach evolution; evolution offers testable explanations of observed biological phenomena. Evolution continues to be of paramount usefulness, and so, based on simple pragmatism, scientists use this theory to improve our understanding of the biology of organisms. Over and over again, evolutionary theory has generated predictions that have proven to be true. Any hypothesis that doesn’t prove true is discarded in favor of a new one, and so the component hypotheses of evolutionary theory change as knowledge and understanding grow. Phylogenetic hypotheses, patterns of ancestral relatedness, based on one set of data, for example, base sequences in DNA, are generated, and when the results make logical sense out of formerly disparate observations, confidence in the truth of the hypothesis increases. The theory of evolution so permeates botany that frequently it is not mentioned explicitly, but the overwhelming majority of published studies are based upon evolutionary hypotheses, each of which constitutes a test of an hypothesis. Evolution has been very successful as a scientific explanation because it has been useful in advancing our understanding of organisms and applying that knowledge to the solution of many human problems, e.g., host-pathogen interactions, origin of crop plants, herbicide resistance, disease susceptibility of crops, and invasive plants."

Professor or entertainer?

An article on Slate asks "how entertaining does education have to be?"  The answer is simple; not at all.  Entertainment is a diversion; education requires engagement. Very little entertainment requires more than your passive attention. The most entertaining professor TPP has ever personally witnessed, a colleague, was quite amazing; he would roll out a steady stream of titillating stories and salacious factoids, and, oh, did the students think he was great. And his exams were easy, so in combination, his "teaching" evaluations were astronomical.  TPP is no slouch as a lecturer, but in comparison, when team-teaching with my entertaining colleague, my evaluations were more than 1 point lower (on a 5 point system) than when teaching with a variety of other colleagues. Statistics also demonstrated that TPP's portion of the course was determining the grade for 4/5s of the class because my colleague's exams were not discriminating.  Education should be engaging, interesting, and if you like learning, fun. Of course, now, especially in larger classes many students would rather engage with their smart phones and aren't even passively attentive. So anytime you think you must be entertaining as a teacher, you're heading the wrong way. Put something interesting in the hands of students; get them to engage with it, and you won't have to be easy to get good evaluations. TPP isn't a hard professor, although he is reasonably demanding, and botany isn't rocket science (it's more important and more interesting actually) and a solid work ethic almost always yields good results. Lazy students, students who avoid engagement, students who try to low-ball learning are in trouble, and fortunately in the minority, way less than 10%, but then TPP is mostly teaching upper division undergrads in elective courses.  It wasn't always that way and for nearly 2 decades TPP taught freshmen biology courses to both majors and non-majors. TPP was interesting but not entertaining.  And yes, his evaluations are higher than the Slate article's author.

Need help understanding photosynthesis? This may help.

Here's some help understanding photosynthesis in the form of a graphic comic book starring a super hero scientist.  TPP will have to get a copy and see how it does, but it wouldn't have to be too good to be better than most pre-college biology books.  College biology books suffer from another problem, too much information and detail obscures a more general understanding.  If someone has read this, let us know how it is.

Crap! Student finds a way to ruin my day.

Grading exams has always been TPP's least favorite academic activity, unless you can use it as an excuse to get out of a faculty meeting, and then you had to grade them anyways, but at least that way you're using your time well.  The thing that TPP dreads most is cheating; it's so disappointing, it's such a hassle, it's so foolish, and if not for a feeling of obligation to protect the efforts of honest students, TPP might avoid dealing with cheaters altogether.  Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this is that the cheater is basically treating TPP as a dummy.  With most students you can spot a change in their writing style in nanoseconds, after all it basically goes from basic undergrad semi-illiterate to well written suddenly.  And so it was.  It took 5 words, a short phrase, and it was immediately obvious that the student did not author those words, and since this was an in-class exam, perhaps they were memorable and thus memorized, but the entire series of terminological definitions all read just like a dictionary.  So you Google the term, and sure enough, the 1st or 2nd item to pop up had the verbatim definition in each and every case.  And nobody is that good at memorization; a word here or there "or in some manner" changes.  The lack of errors, the lack of changes, is almost irrefutable proof that they were copied directly (a simple test can confirm or refute the "I memorized it hypothesis").  TPP is famous for testing the identical twin "we look alike, we dress alike, we think alike, we study together, so naturally our work is alike" hypothesis (they failed completely to create any alikeness under controlled conditions).  Smartphone technology and wifi reception throughout our buildings makes such cheating totally possible.  This isn't a big class and the students are upper class and graduate students, and at a certain on point you think you shouldn't have to wander around and peak over their shoulders as if it was junior high.  So much for that assumption, but in decades of teaching this course, this is the first time cheating has been detected, and probably it's partly because TPP doesn't necessarily see or use this technology the way his students do. Now comes the forms, the meetings, the hassle of seeing this thing through all the channels. This is necessary because if this student is a serial cheater, this is the only way the institution can know and deal with them appropriately.  And to show that there are no hard feelings TPP will help them pack their bags.   

Who took the preserved ginkgo?

Specimens are always a problem, and how can you teach students about organisms if you can't put the organism, or at least significant pieces thereof, into their hot little hands?  Let's say you want your students to understand the reproductive structures of a ginkgo, using them to compare to those of conifers, so you have to have specimens.  Now with this in mind, TPP had collected pollen cones and ovulate structures from ginkgo trees and preserved them in ethanol, two half gallon jars of pickled ginkgo, enough to last for years.  The other reason this is necessary is that ginkgo trees don't produce these structures except once a year, usually in the last week of the semester on average, and the lab class is always at a different time of year.  So you go to the cupboard, and there's only one jar; it says ovulate ginkgo on the lid's label, but it's actually pollen cones. Where the bloody hell is the other jar?  Someone used them, and accidentally switched the lids, but for reasons as yet undetermined, did not replace the other jar.  The problem with this is that by the time you figure this out, it's too late.  Even if this had been know at the beginning of the semester, it makes no difference because you can't just go out and buy pickled reproductive structures of ginkgo.  They're only good for just one thing, teaching, and nobody who teaches knows anything.  Something is very suspicious, very suspicious indeed.  There are only so many classes that would use such specimens, and only certain people instruct those classes, so the number of suspects is pretty finite.  Some wandering gypsies didn't make off with them and no ransom notes have been received.  Ginkgo?  Oh, yeah, them trees.  Seems my colleagues have pretty good alibis or very convenient memories.  Guess some things should be kept under lock and key, but TPP is just so trusting.  Now to remember that new specimens are needed when the ginkgo pollination season rolls around again. 

TGIF Big Time - Introducting students to research

Today is the last class day of the semester; how appropriate it's a Friday.  It always seems to work out that way.  One of my classes was an introduction to research, a seminar with the goal of introducing 2nd year biology majors to real science, a new class.  Firstly 18 students is too many for a good seminar because it lets the passive students be passive no matter how hard you try to force class participation.  So the class dealt with misconceptions and definitions of science, and things like science denialism, opinions versus reality, and science news and the media.  When asked about their opinion on fracking, and what they'd heard and where they heard it and how their opinion was formed, none of the 18 knew what fracking was.  One fellow who opposed it said, "Fracking, it just sounds wrong."  Does that make you feel good about the future of our country and world?  How many earned extra credit for attending a public forum on fracking held immediately adjacent to campus two days later?  None.  They had a hard time wrapping their brains around denialism.  "How can you deny facts," asked one?  Indeed.  However, some of them did a quite credible job of critiquing research posters and research seminars often showing some real insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the presentations.  Wonder if my colleagues will want to read them?  They did a good job when conducting an interrogative interview of a professional scientist, yours truly, TPP.  They really liked looking for cartoons that made fun of science, and explaining why they were funny.  But best of all, most of the class now thinks getting involved in research while an undergrad is a good idea.  They have a better idea of what types of research their "teachers" do, and what it takes to be a successful researcher.  On the whole the class was pretty satisfactory, pretty successful, from the instructor's perspective.  Now to see what the students think.

Rainforest field trip - not this year

Sixteen years ago TPP initiated a rainforest ecology class with a field trip which is now taken over the 9-day long Thanksgiving break plus a day or two.  Owing in part to its popularity, and in part to wishing to be around for holidays with family, every now and then, a rotation of instructors means that now TPP only teaches "his" course two out of every four years.  It was a wonderful weekend in Lincolnland to mostly finish up fall yard work and begin helping Mrs. Phactor with holiday decorations.  But as beautiful as it was TPP found himself wanting to take a walk through the rainforest, not necessarily teach the class, but just to soak in the sounds, smells, and sights that are rainforest.  It's just such an endlessly fascinating place, and having spent so much time there, the things that put off many people just go unnoticed, but these days the majority of people are not actually comfortable out in nature so accustomed they are to totally tame human environs.  A few emails have arrived from students to tell TPP what a great time they are having, or what wonderful thing they've seen, or that it's been raining.  A colleague reports that a study tree of our interest has stiffed us once again by not flowering when one of us is there.  One of the best things we do is provide such experiences for our students, even though it represents a considerable undertaking for the faculty involved.  Foreign travel with college students remains fraught with real and potential problems, logistical nightmares, but when you put students in a stimulating environment you find that it becomes very easy to teach.  The image is from an area in the middle of a long-time study site that has an improved trail for quicker access. 

new semester + new course = unprepared

Uh-oh! Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a train headed your way! In 8 days, a class of bright, eager, faces will be wanting to learn some botany, and all that other course stuff like a syllabus, grading, a lecture/lab schedule, and the like. This is not usually a problem, but in an effort to help a colleague and help the department provide the best array of courses, the Phactor got talked, nudged, cajoled, blackmailed, into teaching a new course - basic plant biology. How could this be a problem? Well, let's see when was the last time the Phactor taught general botany? Hmmm,let's think. OMG, 25 years ago!? Yikes! So now to come up with 40 some odd new lectures and a dozen or so new labs. To demonstrate his desperation the Phactor actually looked to see if any of the end-of-the-world predictions might bail him out. But no, May 27th is too late; that's nearly 3 weeks after finals. But what was that? You find new material in the funniest places. Plants were created in heaven and just transported to the garden of Eden! Well, let's grab that link and work it into a lecture. That doesn't explain a lot of things, actually it explains nothing, but when you're desperate, you do desperate things. So, first off, plants are not uniformly green; all the green is in itty-bitty green things that without a microscope you cannot resolve as individual points of green. It's a start.
Image from Botany Blogs.

How to teach politics and government

Uh oh! Some of the fine citizens and the upstanding high school principal in Ronald Reagan’s college home town of Eureka have decided that the Daily Show’s coverage of politics is not appropriate material for a high school politics and government class, so after parent and student complaints, a 1st year teacher has been suspended, at least for now. For those of you who do not known Lincolnland, our state consists of one great big city, a handful of small cities, and a whole big bunch of small rural towns nestled in the maize and soybean agricultural desert. The Phactor can certainly sympathize with these people. You certainly don’t want your children to ever encounter any different opinions, any discomforting ideas, or any material that might make them uncomfortable. Proper schoolin’ should help them to remain smugly assured that their views, values, and ideas will never be subjected to any criticism particularly when that education is paid for by taxes. Any first year teacher of politics and government should know that the correct way to teach is to drone on about the 3 parts of government and how it was an OK idea until the presidency got too big for its britches especially when the office is not occupied by the party of choice in these parts like back in the good ol’ days of Reagan. Bringing in current events and popular culture to stir up interest is terrible teaching. No teacher should openly disparage political candidates. They should use clips and quotes from news sources, perhaps even the Daily Show, so that students can actually hear what the candidates actually say, you know, all those historical, geographical, political, and constitutional gaffs, which of course is exactly what the Daily Show does. What teaching moments they provide! No teacher disparagement required; just let students listen to and evaluate what politicians actually say. But rather than suggesting to their children that they figure out how to respond appropriately, how to defend their positions intellectually, how to make a case for their support of a political position, these parents whine to the principal who suspends the teacher. If people want to know why the educational system in this country is not what it used to be, parents and principals like these are the reason. They don’t want education; they want indoctrination, oh, and their children admitted to our state colleges and universities.

What makes plants interesting to students?

A long time colleague used to say that it takes a certain mental and emotional maturity and sophistication to appreciate something as subtly interesting as plants. He actually said this to explain the behavior of some of his zoological colleagues, but the Phactor is certain that most of you agree! Here's a link to a nice science education article that attempted to answer the question posed above. Mostly this study found what those of us who have long labored in botanical education have known for a long while; the more like an animal the plant is, the more interest it will generate among the other little animals. For many people ordinary plants just don't register with their perceptions at all; they're plant blind. And as attention spans get shorter, it's getting more difficult to get even college-age students to study plants because even great stuff like tropisms "take too long"! To develop and maintain an interest in plants kids have to be exposed to them, grow them, watch them, have things pointed out to them, all along, not just for a week long science unit once a year. The Phactor had the advantage of having had gardeners for parents and having lived in a sufficiently rural area that exposed you to real nature. You learned early on what to avoid (leaves of three, Mr. Throckmorton's orchards and melons, etc.) and what fruits and nuts were edible. Do your children have pets? Do they have plants? And so our efforts to make plants interesting will continue, although as my colleague suggested, not everyone matures enough to like plants, and they will probably retain their plant blindness forever.

Deans, provosts, and presidents, oh my!

How does that song go? If you want to be happy for you academic life, never make a pretty woman your wife; no, that’s not right! For a happy academic life, never make a non-scholar your dean, provost, or president. It’s very simple, if not a scholar, they just don’t seem to get it, and in this case, the “it” they don’t get is that scholarship is both necessary and important to quality university teaching. Provost Plodder is an “educator” and seems to subscribe to the old, often criticized, characterization of universities as places where faculty research comes at the expense of teaching. This of course is often the case at big research universities, but at such institutions, no one is confused about the role of teaching and research, and prospective students would be well advised to figure out what faculty at such institutions do. However those of us who embrace the concept of an undergraduate research university would beg to differ with that characterization of research and teaching, and whenever we uppity faculty beg to differ with the provost, well, life can be difficult. At this stage of his career the Phactor has seen them come and seen them go; some just don’t go soon enough. Quality does not count with our provost, just those enrollment beans. Programs that have grabbed every warm body they can find are being rewarded with resources, and programs that have been selective and offered those students quality educational opportunities are being dunned. The cheap drives out the dear. No matter that the highest form of teaching is original investigation, and those who do not investigate themselves are in no position to teach students this skill. Do you disagree? Well, substitute “swimming” for investigate in the previous sentence to see how ridiculous your position is. It’s hard to maintain a research endeavor, it takes time and resources; it’s even harder to keep it funded, especially at smaller universities, but time spent on research just doesn’t count with our provost, although they always accept the indirect costs from research grants. The fact that our students are regularly exposed to and engage in not just little tiddles or keep-em busy projects, but participate in scientific scholarship of the highest caliber, makes little impression upon our provost. This doesn’t mean the provost is an evil person, but somewhere along the line they just lost sight, assuming they ever had it, of the fact that the highest calling of university faculty is to investigate so that they can teach not just what we know, but how we know it. So by all means, do find out what those job candidates think about the role of research in science teaching. Years ago, one dean hopeful said, “Research is encouraged, but not completely necessary at this type of university.” We all got up and headed for the door. The candidate asked, “Don’t you have any more question?” “No,” was the answer, “you got the first one wrong, so the rest don’t matter.”

Conifer Fun

The laboratory spent examining conifers (yesterday) is always quite a bit of fun. Even among biology students most think conifers and evergreens are synonymous. The worst even think pine and conifer are one and the same thing, as in, "See the pine tree", while pointing at whatever evergreen conifer it may be. And a local merchant got quite annoyed at me for pointing out that the basket of seed cones being sold were not "pine cones" but spruce cones, and suggested the Phactor had no way of knowing! Well! So that's why it's so much fun to provide my students with a generous supply of conifers of various sorts, and let them key them out to genus. Language is a problem. If precise, it's too technical; if more descriptive, then it's too imprecise, but that's the price you pay for trying to construct a non-technical key for wider usage. You wouldn't believe what different people think is "ferny" or "soft & flexible" or "broad". In particular part of the fun is betting on which among them will be bored, impatient and non-observant, or observant and thoughtful. It tells you much about their potential. One very bright young lady is quick on the uptake, but this has bred in her a frightful impatience with anything that isn't immediately clear or evident. Still most did quite well and two even commented on the sense of accomplishment they enjoyed for figuring these things out, and a recognition of the the tremendous utility of identification keys, and the ability to identify things where other people failed to see differences. On the whole a most satisfactory result. Still saved one curve ball for later when they'll have to decide what kind of plant this is and they are presented with Scaidopitys, which lurks in our garden and is so different looking it stops most people dead in their tracks.

Assessment versus teaching - again

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a commentary that chides teaching faculty for not embracing assessment. And if we don’t embrace assessment, how do we know our students are learning? Do “we rely on evidence that is dubious (teaching evaluations) or circular (grades)”, they ask?
Well, girls, why are you so interested in this issue? Oh, yes, their commentary is actually flogging their soon to be published book on assessment, so you know of their deep commitment to learning. Once again the Phactor will pull on his boots and wade into this issue because he continues to wonder why to these women presume faculty don’t know when students are learning? You think we read about it in student evaluations? Hardly. Why would you think grades circular when those grades reflect levels of learning in evidence after extensive assessment? Basically it means they don’t trust faculty to do their jobs. Or maybe things are way more subjective in their disciplines? Granted the ABCs are not a nuanced reflection of my extensive assessments, but graduate schools and employers don’t want to read my essays discussing those nuances about various students in various courses; they want a quick short-hand of relative learning, grades. When asked for recommendations, the long version is provided. No, what these twits want is what many administrators want; some sort of broad assessment "instrument" (their word, not mine) that can be used across disciplines, colleges, and universities, although they admit that neither the National Survey of Student Engagement nor any other standardized assessment instruments, blunt as they are, can capture disciplinary knowledge and approaches to critical thought. That ladies is why they bloody well need disciplinary experts like me! My basis for reaching a conclusion that students have learned something is based upon their relative abilities to meet learning measures of several sorts including their answers to exam questions.
Here’s an example from just one of my disciplinary exams for an undergraduate course in plant diversity in its entirety less the more objective portions (definitions, factoids, etc.).
1. Chloroplasts and mitochondria are two of the cellular hallmarks of eukaryotic organisms. Evaluate the hypotheses that account for these organelles based upon observations and testable predictions.
2. Complex metabolisms appear to be constructed of smaller, simpler, ancestral components, some of which adopt new functions. Use photosynthesis and phylogenetic hypotheses to illustrate this concept.
3. Relative to the chemistry of the Universe how usual are the elemental components of life?
4. Ribosomal RNA sequence data provided biologists with a new phylogenetic understanding of all living organisms and had a major effect on our definition of Kingdom Monera. Explain.
5. Chlorophyll is composed of what type of building block molecule? What does phylogeny suggest about the hypothetical origin of chlorophyll? How does it differ in function from its presumed predecessor?
6. What are extremophile organisms, and why might our perspective of what is extreme be somewhat skewed? Why is the biology of extremophiles important to our understanding of early life on Earth?
7. What is the carbon biochemical fingerprint of life and what does it tell us?
8. Why is actin and actin binding protein so important in the early evolution of eukaryotic organisms?
9. For the longest time no fossil evidence of life was known prior to the Cambrian when fossils of large conspicuous organisms suddenly appear. How was fossil evidence of ancient life found? How old and what kinds of fossils were found? Then evaluate the sudden appearance of fossils.
Now having read those do you think students who can answer such questions have failed to demonstrate any learning? Think you could pull the answers for an exam like that out of the air and BS me without having done adequate reading and study, and learned something? Do you think the instructor incapable of discriminating objectively among excellent, good, poor, and terrible answers? Oh yes, and then later concepts are built upon these concepts, so cramming and purging won't do the trick. Do you still think you can capture disciplinary knowledge and critical thought on some sort of assessment instrument that doesn't simplify it to the banal? Sorry ladies, you sound clueless about the depth, detail, and sophistication of disciplines and that is the only gap that exists between teaching and assessment, so best leave assessment to us, the real professionals.

Today's discussion - evidence & knowing

In a one last gasp exercise to transform students into thinking adults who know something about biology, we have senior seminar. Today's topic deals with how do you know something, and when it is OK to have your own opinion. And of course in science this all hinges on evidence. So to prime the discussion an essay was assigned about a 300 million year old rock. Now what makes this rather controversial is that most of the people who would deny the age of this rock are of a particular type of religious belief. Some blow back has already reached my email Inbox. So maybe it will be a lively discussion for a Monday in late February on a particularly gray day of falling temperatures all of which does so much to provide an uplifting attitude. So this will be a great day to hand back exams (mostly good, but with a few rather poor results) and essays marked up for revision (Hoo, boy, are they marked up!). This is always particularly amusing because in this day of spell checkers "they're misuses of simple words our to painful two bare even if there sound is write".

Can a boomer teach a millenial?

In an article on teaching the millennial generation, the author concludes, that "the onus is on teacher educators to develop pedagogically appropriate teaching and learning strategies for their millennial students". Should this worry the Phactor since he still thinks he has a few more years of teaching left before retirement? The answer is quite simply, no. Once again someone who studies education has got it exactly bass-ackwards. Now even a semi-Luddite such as myself has adapted to using new technologies in teaching and studying organisms. And no question this is a different generation used as they are to constant input and distraction, instant gratification and communication, social networking and other impersonal interactions, and their multitasking, all of which seems to result in frequently distracted, easily bored students who have trouble paying attention or concentrating on a problem for more than a minute. OK that's the problem, and you ain't gonna fix it by changing your pedagogy to accommodate it. Sooner or later you still have to know something, and in botany that means spending enough time working with plants, observing plants, and thinking about plants that the knowledge is deep enough and complete enough to be useful. So rather than worrying about how to pedagogically adapt my teaching to accommodate the habits of millennial, the Phactor is going to work at breaking their bad learning habits. Hey, it can be done; no one watched more TV during their youth, and some of us actually turned out to be productive intellectuals, or what passes for intellectuals these days.

Another fine semester shot to hell

As they say about flying, any landing you can walk away from was successful, so this was a successful semester. There will still be a few loose ends: a senior who wants to use all too familiar excuses in lieu of accomplishments. The day or two following a semester can be eerie on a college campus; the quiet, the emptiness. A quad that was bustling with people just a day ago is totally deserted, and if you don’t have some gizmo stuck in your ear or buzzing in your pocket, the quiet provides you with an opportunity for reflective thought, a dying art in an era of short attention spans, mobile distractions, and jingoism discourse. Where are thoughtful young people going to come from? Even in the university thought seems at a premium, and so my thoughts turned to a student commentator who opined that student evaluations of “teachers” were a sham because no matter how “bad” the evaluation the faculty never got fired. Indeed, what of student evaluations in this day and age? Speaking from a great deal of experience, you learn a lot about what students like and don’t like, but very little about what was effective teaching. After all, what do students know of teaching or learning? Do we ask students what was effective some 5 or 10 years post graduation? No, let’s get an opinion right now while those labor-intensive assignments are still fresh in their minds and they have yet to see what success in the real world is all about. And if you are one of those reviled professors, was it because you made them think, and it was hard, like really, really hard? Many moons ago my fate was intertwined with a senior colleague in a team-taught course, and his pandering, his lite-weight coverage of the subject, and his easy exams were shocking , and his teaching evaluations were sky high while mine languished at merely average. And he taught what seemed to be the behavior of baby zoo animals while genetics and evolution were left for me. Cute vs. dihybrid crosses, easy vs. hard, fluff vs. basic biology; clearly a no win situation when the scale is based on student likes and dislikes. In subsequent years, when partnered with another member of the faculty, my teaching evaluations instantly jumped over 1.5 points on a 5 point scale without changing a thing except the basis for comparison. So what do really high teaching evaluations tell you? And thus my expectations for teaching accolades are modest, and the grand thing is that they do not matter at all at this time of year when quiet reigns.

Science teaching: real and imagined problems

Teaching science is one of those things the Phactor knows more than a little about, and no question about it, science can be taught very badly or very well. Unfortunately science is more often taught badly, and this is a serious educational problem that no small number of people have been trying to fix, but it remains difficult. Yet science can be taught effectively, and relatively easily, if teachers can just learn how science is done and teach it accordingly.
No worse critic of science teaching and textbooks exists than the Phactor. Crap abounds. But here is a criticism of science teaching that is a huge load of steaming manure that only serves to demonstrate 1. that the author, Dr. Larry Dossey, presumably a physician, has never done science and has no idea how the teach science, and 2. the Huffington Post continues its love affair with alternative medicine.
His description of science is quite at odds with my experience, and no surprise because he quotes Jeremy Rifkin, whose dislike of science is well known, "The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world.” And silly me thought science was our one reliable means of learning and knowing about the nature of nature! Now what is missing is what exactly tells Rifkin and Dossey that science is so mistaken, so at odds with what it tells us? What more reliable method of knowing and learning should be substituted for science? Hmm, well, maybe it’s premonitions or prayer, both common topics in articles and books written by Dossey. In other words quesses and coincidences loom large in his magical thinking. No wonder science, based as it is on evidence, seems at odds with his world view.
Dossey employs an old rhetorial device; set up a straw man and knock him down. Provide an unflattering and inaccurate description of the scientific method and then criticize this description. In only one very tiny sense is the argument against science accurate; people do not innately think scientifically, so the application of the scientific method to learning, must be learned. The vast majority of people never learn this, and they only learn about science. Science is a process as well as a body of knowledge, so very few people understand science well enough to practice science. Most of us learned to do science by apprenticing with other scientists, and part of the science education problem, the real one, not the one Dossey had a premonition about, is that most teachers of science have never done science. And even a lot of the people who do science are not good at teaching science because they haven’t learned enough about this educational problem. So where do Rifken and Dossey get the idea that “an increasing number of scientists” have a disconnect between how they view the world and the scientific method? We clearly are not reading the same scientific literature, and here the Phactor ventures to guess that, oh, yes, clearly this is feeling true, they do not read the scientific literature at all. It just came to me. Wow! This premonition stuff is great!
Bottom line, Dr. Dossey is not a credible critic of science, and others agree, even when he sticks with medical science.
HT to Mike the Mad Biologist.