Overextended Term in Review
In which I make extra work for myself
I was aware that I had not been posting anything here of late, but was a little surprised to check in and find that it’s been over a month, since the Kendrick Lamar trip report. Not that surprised, though, because it’s been a term from Hell.
This is, awkwardly, entirely self-inflicted, because as Chair I set the teaching assignments. So I’m the asshole who stuck me with the schedule I had this past term: teaching intro Newtonian mechanics for engineers in a larger-than-usual format while also co-teaching our advanced lab course to a larger-than-usual cohort of students. On top of that, I also agreed to do an afternoon lecture for our continuing education program, and a three-hour introduction to quantum sensing for a workshop in California in early June. The former was at least a simple matter of adapting an existing public lecture, but the latter was entirely new.
And on top of everything else, it was The Pip’s school team baseball season during most of that, which meant a lot of afternoons/ evenings dragging around the Capital Region to watch 7th and 8th graders play baseball. And taking pictures of same— the season album for the team ran to 649 photos.
In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing I was able to hold the blogging line as long as I did before admitting that I couldn’t continue carving out time to post here and switching over to class prep, grading, and writing my talk. I posted the final grades yesterday, though, so I have a bit of free time back, which I’ll use to do some brief recaps of various components of my badly overextended term.
Part I: Matter in Motion
For as long as I’ve been at Union (24 years and counting), we’ve taught intro physics for engineers in “Integrated Lab-Lecture” format, with lots of sections capped at 18 students, and the same professor doing both the lectures and the labs. This has a lot of nice features, but is a huge headache from a staffing perspective, so we’re considering making a move to larger sections in the future.
This is not a thing to be done lightly, though, especially since it’s probably not reversible, so this year we ran trial sections of the two intro courses in the larger format. Both of these were in “off-sequence” terms— the standard track for engineering students is to take Newtonian physics in the Winter term and E&M in the Spring, but we offer both courses every term to pick up students who can’t do the default sequence for whatever reason. So a colleague (who is also a former student, because I’m Old) taught a 36-student lecture and two 18-student labs of E&M back in the Fall, and I taught a 36-student lecture and two 18-student labs of mechanics this Spring1.
This was… kind of a lot. I realize that will provoke some eye-rolling from a lot of folks teaching 200-student lecture sections, but it’s the change that’s the problem— I’ve been doing things a particular way for a quarter century, and scaling up by a factor of two is a big disruption. It’s not impossible by any means, but it meant reworking a bunch of things and a lot more grading.
One of the bigger headaches of the term was the fact that the rooms we control as a department are set up to hold 18 students in a lab-type format, and can’t comfortably fit 362. Which meant that I needed to lecture in a room drawn from the general classroom pool, which seats 40, but not all that comfortably. It’s also on the second floor and not connected to our lab and demo stockrooms, which made it a giant pain in the ass to do demos or hands-on activities in class (which forced a bunch of re-working of lecture material). I ended up with a big bag of props that I carried back and forth every day— balls to throw around for basic motion demos, markers for whiteboarding (markers left in the room tend to disappear overnight), etc. Happily there wasn’t anybody teaching in there before my class, so I could go in and arrange everything to my liking.
Other than that, the biggest headache was the grading. I’ve learned that I absolutely have to assign and grade free-response homework problems through the course of the term. There are online systems with automated grading and feedback, yes— I use one to assign practice problems— but the feedback to students isn’t that great, and while in principle I can look at the responses to the assignments to identify points of confusion and such, in practice I know I just won’t. So I collect and grade a handful of problems every week, and that’s a big hassle.
How did it go? Kind of a mixed bag, really. The participatory stuff I try to do in class— using “clicker questions” as prompts for students to discuss and answer on whiteboards, basically— worked better than I feared. The close packing of the students in the room made it hard to engage with all the groups, but they did generally do the things they were supposed to about as well as I usually get in the smaller sections.
The one issue was that everything was sloooow. I can’t tell how much of this is purely statistics (some of it is— just calling the roll took forever), how much reflects the population of students (many of them are “off sequence” because they needed to start at a lower level in Math that doesn’t meet our prerequisite for the Winter term mechanics course), and how much of it is a Kids These Days issue with post-Covid cohorts. I don’t really enjoy being the Yells At Clouds guy, but there really did seem to be a difference in the student approach from several years back— the number of students who would casually saunter into class or lab 15 or 20 minutes late just blew my mind.
That’s enough factors to make it unwise to draw any sweeping conclusions from the trial of the larger enrollment. It’s absolutely not my preferred option— especially given what we charge students to come here— but given [expansive gesture at the state of higher education] all this, I suspect our hands will be forced. And if they are, I think we’ll be able to make it work with a bit of tweaking; I’m going to run another trial section next Spring, and already know some things I want to change, so we’ll see if it goes more smoothly then.
Part II: Modern Experimental Physics
The other teaching piece of my Term From Hell was being one of two faculty teaching our advanced lab course (for juniors and seniors, usually, though this year we also had some sophomores who came in with a bunch of AP credits). You might be thinking “You idiot, why did you agree to double those up?” and you would be right to do so, because I was doing that myself.
The answer is that the advanced lab course is usually pretty small (8-10 students) and relatively low impact— we give them an intro to the experiments and then card access to the labs, and they do the work on their own time. While the individual labs can be pretty complicated3, and grading written reports is a pain in the ass, in a typical term I mostly need to just be available to answer questions if they come up, and there are weeks when they’re doing an experiment with the other faculty member and thus Not My Problem. I had taught it last year for the first time in quite a while, and figured that it was only right for me to do it again this year, and it’s usually not a horribly heavy lift.
This was screwed up by two things. One is that last year’s cohort of students was exceptionally bad at time management, making all the labs a frantic last-minute rush. Accordingly, as discussed in a previous post, we added a lot more structure to the syllabus, with defined tasks for every class meeting, and a lot more well-defined deadlines.
By itself that probably would’ve been okay, but we also ended up with an exceptionally large class— we hit the enrollment cap of 18, which basically never happens. That meant that rather than rotating the whole class through the experiments, providing weeks where I’m not actively running an experiment with them, we had to split them into three groups and both of us teaching it were on the hook every week.
This made the course a lot more work than in a normal year, and combined with the double-size intro section just killed me. The “extra structure” part was also quite possibly overkill— this year’s cohort seemed to be generally better with managing their time. Not perfect, by any stretch— we still had to bend every deadline for a sizeable chunk of the class— but there wasn’t the same degree of freakout as last year. Had this been my only teaching assignment for the term, or paired with something less labor-intensive, I think it would’ve been fine, but in this term it was an absolute grind.
Part III: California Speakin’
As discussed in another earlier post, I was asked to present a workshop on “quantum sensing” at a meeting this summer in Long Beach. When I did that thinking-out-loud blog post, I was contacted by another Californian running a workshop, who said “That sounds like a perfect intro talk for a workshop we’re having in June…” Since this isn’t one of my standard presentation topics, I happily agreed, because having the chance to do a trial run of (the first half of) my quantum sensing workshop would be a real benefit.
There were two down sides to this: 1) My workshop talk was scheduled for the same day as the final exam for intro mechanics (a colleague covered it for me), and 2) I had to write the talk during the Term From Hell. Which is what happened to my blogging, in the end— the time I otherwise carve out for writing on my own projects had to go to researching and making slides about the basics of quantum sensing.
In the end, I think it went well— you get a decent preview of it from the blog post linked above: start with Michelson, move into the changes wrought by quantum mechanics, then tie it back to LIGO. It was also fun to be in California for most of a week, with a smallish group of smart and interesting physicists either doing quantum sensing work or eager to learn about it in order to be able to teach it at their primarily undergraduate institutions. I got some good feedback from giving the talks, and some good information for the second half of the workshop for July, which I’ll be writing this summer.
San Marcos turns out to be well supplied with breweries that also serve good food, so it was a fun trip. The Friday night red-eye back to Albany, on the other hand… It was necessary to get back for a travel baseball tournament, though, which brings us to:
Part IV: Modified Rounders
Last year, The Pip’s big goal was to make the modified (7th and 8th grade) baseball team for his school, which he did. He then injured his right wrist in gym class the day before the first game, and spent the whole season in a cast.
This year, he was more confident about making the team, but there was a bit of a question about playing time. He didn’t get in all that much early on, a situation that was not improved by the fact that the kid who was playing first base was the coach’s son. To top it off, he started in an awful hitting slump, with some uncharacteristically bad strikeouts and weak contact when he did hit the ball.
To his credit, he kept a generally good attitude throughout, and things got better. When he got in to field, he played solid defense at first, and even when he wasn’t hitting well, he walked a lot. He ended the season on a hot streak at the plate— 4-7 plus a walk in the last two games— and when he got on base he stole bags and scored runs4. So on the whole I think he came out of it feeling good, which we hope can carry into next year at the high school.
For now, we’re on to travel ball. Which did not get off to an auspicious start— he missed the first game with a stomach bug, then got shaken up in a collision at first in the first game of the tournament after my red-eye flight, then took a four-seam fastball to the triceps in the second game (getting pulled from both as a result). He had a good game Tuesday night, though, reaching base all three times he came to the plate (on an error, a walk, and then a line drive to left that he wants to call a double but was really a single with him advancing because they threw home to try to stop a score). Which we hope is the start of a good baseball summer; at least, if it ever stops raining…
So, yeah, that’s a quick summary of Why I Haven’t Been Blogging. The posting frequency will unquestionably pick up now that I’m not teaching every day; if you want a front-row seat for that, here’s a button:
And should you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
The vague plan is to try to keep as many of the good features of the integrated format as possible by having the same person do the lectures and the labs. This may or may not survive contact with the realities of setting teaching schedules, but for the trials it works.
If we make the jump to bigger classes, we’ll reconfigure one of them to be a lecture room, but that’s not a thing we can do on the fly.
Though I try to keep the complexity down to allow more weight for the writing portion. The labs I do are a simple video-analysis lab (so they learn how to use Tracker) and then a measurement of the Fresnel reflection and transmission coefficients as a function of angle and polarization. The students also propose and independently complete a final project involving video analysis of something.
Because we have GameChanger: he finished the season with 21 plate appearances, an OBP of 0.619 and an OPS of 1.15, with nine runs scored. That’s tied for the team lead with some kids who batted twice as many times as The Pip. An odd quirk is that he ended up with zero RBI, largely because the kids in front of him in the lineup were really slow runners, not the type to score from second on a single.
> the rooms we control as a department are set up to hold 18 students in a lab-type format, and can’t comfortably fit 36².
Reading this in my email, the footnote wasn't underlined, and the first thing that I thought was, "It must be tough to fit a thousand people in a room designed for 18, but why write it like that?" Maybe I should start drinking coffee ....