14 Years Before the Class(room)

This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on my experiences to this point, which in turn is a good excuse for a blog post. So, here are some things I've found out over the last 14 years of being a college professor:

-- Teaching is really hard. My first year, when colleagues from other schools asked how I was finding it, my standard reply was "It's a lot more work than it looks like from out in the classroom." Fourteen years in, that's still true. Even a class I've taught a dozen times before still involves a huge amount of outside-of-class time. I've gotten more efficient at this over the years, but it's still a whole bunch of work.

-- Shaking things up is good. I've taught our intro sequence more times than I care to think about, and found that I'm good for about three passes through a given course before I need to change things up in a big way. By the third time using the same notes, I find that I'm starting to bore myself, and need to blow it up and start over. This is part of the motivation behind moving to more "active learning" stuff in my classes-- I was losing interest in the lectures I was giving, and needed to do something new.

-- Students are generally very good. I told both my intro mechanics sections this past Spring that I am consistently amazed at how cheerfully they do the huge amount of stuff we ask of them. This isn't true for all classes, mind, but generally speaking, I find that most students are willing to put in a significant amount of effort. Particularly if you explain why it matters.

-- Not all "kids these days" stories are wrong. Having said that students are, in general, very good about doing what we ask, there are some subgroups who are not. And that's changed a lot just in the time I've been here. This is most pronounced in the pre-med class-- they've always been highly motivated by grades, but my first few years, they were often willing to do extra work in search of that good grade, while more recently, they've shifted that effort to lobbying to get out of things. The number of students who expect us to re-work our class schedule to make it easier for them to take organic chemistry just boggles my mind.

-- Most "kids these days stories" are garbage. While there have been a number of changes in attitudes over the years, a lot of what gets said about "millennials" is just crap. In both directions. They're no worse about paying attention or doing work in general than students of my era-- it's just slightly more obvious when a student is tuning out of a lecture by web surfing on their phone than when they start doodling in their notebook. They're also not significantly more tech-savvy than any other crop of students-- they're very good with the narrow range of things they use a lot, which happens to be different than what faculty use a lot, but this does not magically transfer into an ability to use technology in general.

-- Student course evaluations are just this thing, y'know? There are lots of arguments in faculty circles about whether student course evaluations are a threat, a menace, or the WORST THING EVER. In reality, though, they're just kind of... there. While there are always a few outliers, they generally track pretty well with my general sense of how a class went, when I think carefully about it. There are occasional surprises-- I ran afoul of a particular set of expectations this past fall that I didn't realize was a Thing-- but mostly, when my numerical evaluation scores come in low, I can generally understand why.

The written comments are generally more useful, but also harder to sort through. For every student who writes something good and thoughtful there are three or four who write "Fine," or just scribble illegibly. But as much as I roll my eyes about some of the useless comments, I've also found good and perceptive stuff in there.

(For the record, I should note that in the last three years of looking at other people's evaluations for performance reviews, I find the same general pattern holds. I also haven't seen any significant number of racist or sexist comments directed at our faculty, not even of the "she needs to dress better" sort of variety. From horror stories online, I was expecting much worse, but again, our students are generally good.)

-- Research with students is a great thing. My original main research project has been pretty dormant over the last few years, because being Chair, having kids, and writing books didn't leave much time. this is the first summer since I've been at Union, though, when I haven't had at least one research students. Most years I've had at least two. I've been putting them on smaller projects that are tangential to my original research plan, for the most part-- developing new labs, building optical tweezers, etc.-- things that require somewhat less direct intervention from me, but are still enough to give a sense of how experimental AMO physics works.

While it's kind of exhausting, I also find these research projects really rewarding, and think they work out well for the students. And that kind of one-on-one in-the-lab experience is what put undergrad-me on a path toward my current career, so I'm glad to pay it forward a bit. For reasons that don't really bear talking about, I'm not likely to restart my laser cooling project in the very near future, but I'm going to give some thought to finding new and improved "side projects" to keep students in the lab.

So, that's some of what I've been thinking about as I head into an extended break. I have Opinions about things more on the administrative side, too, as I wrap up my time as Chair, but the vast majority of that wouldn't be appropriate to discuss in public under my own name. So, you'll just have to try to figure out how to find my angry pseudonymous Tumblr blog if you want to know what I think about that...

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(Note: I do not have an angry pseudonymous Tumblr blog. Though I'm sure if you went looking, you could find someone saying more or less what I think about issues relating to academic administration...)