I teach freshman anatomy and physiology and I see a huge difference. Unlike the past two years, this semester students are much more present, engaged and motivated. Much less need for handholding and explaining website navigation or how to read a syllabus. Much fewer drops. Many fewer Fs for being absent and not doing the work. I raised the level of the material and they rose to the occasion. Instead of 2-4 As I’ll probably have a dozen.
Not central to your subject, but I really didn't understand this part:
"The way our curriculum is structured we as a department don’t have a lot of contact with the first-year cohort (other than that one class) until Winter term"
Do you really have only one physics course offered to fall term freshmen?
We operate on a trimester calendar, but with the pretense that our courses are the same content as semester courses. As a result, the standard intro sequence for engineers starts in the winter, and since we piggyback our major track on that, we don't really teach frosh until the winter trimester.
Up until a few years before I got here, they literally didn't do ANYTHING in the Fall, but shortly before I started they created an optional fall-term course targeted at potential majors. It's a team taught course, five faculty doing two weeks each, and our only fall course aimed at first-year students.
Thanks! Are all of the subjects like that? Maybe the first trimester is supposed to let the students try a piece of each subject before deciding on a major?
I think it's mostly rooted in the need for a fair number of students to get one term of calculus under their belt before they can really start physics. That's true a lot of places-- when I was at Williams, the first course in the physics major wasn't offered in the fall, either, I suspect for the same reason.
Nah, not a comedown, just an agreement - I also think as a whole, we can be more resilient than generally assumed, but then of course, that also means there needs to be more and more readily available help for those that aren't, (and in any sort of situation, that can be any of us, at any given time), and a reminder that when covid came about, we saw a lot of people with inspirational messages of stuff like being kind to each other, giving each other extra time, being easier on ourselves, etc., etc,. In other words, varying messages of stuff we always should have been doing, and still should be doing, but because of a pandemic all of a sudden became acceptable. All of that still should be so.
I teach freshman anatomy and physiology and I see a huge difference. Unlike the past two years, this semester students are much more present, engaged and motivated. Much less need for handholding and explaining website navigation or how to read a syllabus. Much fewer drops. Many fewer Fs for being absent and not doing the work. I raised the level of the material and they rose to the occasion. Instead of 2-4 As I’ll probably have a dozen.
Not central to your subject, but I really didn't understand this part:
"The way our curriculum is structured we as a department don’t have a lot of contact with the first-year cohort (other than that one class) until Winter term"
Do you really have only one physics course offered to fall term freshmen?
We operate on a trimester calendar, but with the pretense that our courses are the same content as semester courses. As a result, the standard intro sequence for engineers starts in the winter, and since we piggyback our major track on that, we don't really teach frosh until the winter trimester.
Up until a few years before I got here, they literally didn't do ANYTHING in the Fall, but shortly before I started they created an optional fall-term course targeted at potential majors. It's a team taught course, five faculty doing two weeks each, and our only fall course aimed at first-year students.
Thanks! Are all of the subjects like that? Maybe the first trimester is supposed to let the students try a piece of each subject before deciding on a major?
I think it's mostly rooted in the need for a fair number of students to get one term of calculus under their belt before they can really start physics. That's true a lot of places-- when I was at Williams, the first course in the physics major wasn't offered in the fall, either, I suspect for the same reason.
Nah, not a comedown, just an agreement - I also think as a whole, we can be more resilient than generally assumed, but then of course, that also means there needs to be more and more readily available help for those that aren't, (and in any sort of situation, that can be any of us, at any given time), and a reminder that when covid came about, we saw a lot of people with inspirational messages of stuff like being kind to each other, giving each other extra time, being easier on ourselves, etc., etc,. In other words, varying messages of stuff we always should have been doing, and still should be doing, but because of a pandemic all of a sudden became acceptable. All of that still should be so.