Currently on schedule

Deviations will not be allowed, or the whole course train will crumple in a tremendous crash.

So: Mondays I give the lecture I prepared the day before, and get the genetics lab ready, and grade student problem sets. Tuesday, prep the lecture for Wednesday, and teach the lab. Wednesday, give the lecture, compose a new problem set, also work with my biocomm students. Thursday, second lab…also the day the university throws meetings at me. Friday, all spiders. Saturday, run through the next genetics lab, make a video summary. Sunday, write Monday’s lecture.

Can’t stop all semester long. The routine rules me now.

Except this week, I have to write the first take-home midterm, which I’ll then have to grade over the weekend. I’ll cope. Today, for instance, I got up at 4:30 and got the lecture done early, to give myself a little time to put together a first draft of the exam. The trains will run on time, or a head will roll. (I’m a fascist to myself, not to the students.)

I’m also anxious about this stupid pandemic and how it’s going to try and derail me. That’s why I’ve got all these contingency plans in my pocket. I have a timetable. Death and disease must not disrupt it.

You may ask, this is only the third week of a 15 week semester, why a midterm now? One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that if the students don’t the simple fundamentals early on, their train will crash and burn when we get to the hard stuff, so I do an early check on their comprehension.

Long day ahead

I keep telling my students about what I call Fly Time — the idea that these genetic experiments we’re doing require that we carry out the steps on the fly’s schedule, which may sometimes be inconvenient for the human experimenter. We’ll be flexible, but the work does require doing things outside the formally scheduled class time. That’s about to bite me in the butt.

We had this minor fire yesterday that canceled labs for the day. But we’re on Fly Time! They don’t care about our lab schedule! I’ve got a big plan that requires starting on time, and if we don’t begin the experiment this week it won’t culminate before spring break. I can’t compel students to stay and do lab work over their break, so if it runs over…I’m the guy who has to do all the final fly counts in the experiment. The students need to start the cross this week!

To accommodate our students’ busy schedules, I get to spend today in the fly lab helping a string of students coming in on Student Time to learn fly husbandry. All day long. Parked in a lab as students dribble in. Except for the time I get to spend lecturing them in class. And then I come home and put the recording of the lecture together and upload it. I also have to assemble a new problem set and post it on Canvas. Maybe if there’s a gap in the stream of students I can do that during the day?

Ha ha. The flexibility I’m trying to build into the course is coming out of my hide. There better not be any more fires this semester.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

I said I was going to optimize my classroom management for flexibility, but this is ridiculous. I’m supposed to be teaching a lab right now, but the science building caught fire.

It was more of a tiny smolder, but we did get a lot of smoke in the building. I heard that plumbers were soldering some pipes in the ceiling, and something caught fire, and now the fire department kicked everyone out of the building and are trying to make sure there is nothing else burning in that space before they let us back in. “A few more hours,” the fire person said. So I had to cancel lab.

Now the next few days are wrecked for me, because I’m trying to accommodate a lot of busy students and persuade them to come in at some other time so we can get this cross started. I’m going to have to provide supervised lab access all day tomorrow and Thursday.

I swear, this job is trying to break me, but honestly, I’m already broken.

Chromosomes!

I can see my future now, for at least the next four months. I have committed myself to record all of my lectures so the students have asynchronous access to the course content to maximize flexibility in case pandemic catastrophe strikes, so what I’ve got to do is:

  • Every Monday and Wednesday, record my in-class lecture, then edit it and splice in the Keynote images I use. That means I put in my regular workday, and then when I get home that evening I get to play with Final Cut Pro. Two of those a week means I won’t be doing anything fancy, just dubbing the slides and uploading it.
  • Every weekend, I put together a video to describe the lab experiment for the week. The last one might be the longest of the bunch at about a half hour, once the students get into the routine it may not be too bad.
  • Every week I also assemble a clutch of problems for the students to solve. Those go on Canvas, our course management system.

There are always glitches. Last week, the audio recording of the lecture was unlistenable, so I had to re-record the whole thing. That was better (but far from perfect) today. Today, though, the in-class technology threw up a whole bunch of problems — nothing worked until I called in IT to fix it, so I lost over 10 minutes to annoying problems. I intensely dislike the way the university has configured the AV in our classrooms.

So anyway, here’s today’s lecture. It’s about chromosomes.

Genetics #1

Hooray for me! I got step #4 of my to-do list, and also step #3.

Tomorrow I’ll go back and get #2 (“Record a video summary of the fly culturing procedure”) done, and also #6 (“edit the fly culture video”), and then on to chromosomes, mitosis, and meiosis. I’m trying hard to build up slowly with a solid foundation before we get to the hard stuff.

Behold my mountain of digital papers!

All the final exams have been turned in, so now it’s time to sit my butt down and read them all. I’ve got two classes with about 25 students each, so here’s what I am to complete this weekend. These were all due on Friday, yesterday.

Comprehensive Final Exam for Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. This is the monster, 7 pages of questions in different formats that cover the topics in the title of the course and also a bit of the history and philosophy of science. FunGenEvoDevo is a first year overview course that doesn’t dig too deeply, but prepares them with the general background (there is also another intro course, Evolution of Biodiversity, that hits them with evolution again and also basics of ecology and systematics). I started on this one yesterday, and am a bit more than halfway through; I plan to finish it by this afternoon.

Lab Final for Cell Biology. Another longish exam, this one emphasizes basic quantitative skills they should have learned in the lab. So lots of questions about unit conversions, calculating concentrations, interpreting data, etc. For instance, they get some measurements of reaction rates, and they then have to calculate enzymatic Km and Vmax. There are a lot of parts to this one, too, but most of the answers are short, specific, and numeric, which are relatively easy to grade.

Required Final Essay for Cell Biology. Oh boy, this will be challenging. I gave them a paper to read (“How energy flow shapes cell evolution” by Nick Lane) and asked them to summarize it and relate it all to the content of the course. On this one, I demand high writing standards and coherence in addressing the subject, so we’ll see how that goes.

Optional Final Exam for Cell Biology. Another big ol’ comprehensive exam, but this one is optional for the students: whatever score they get on the final will replace their lowest midterm score. Everyone has a bad day, so this is their opportunity to vindicate themselves. It’s a long exam, but grading it might not be too bad — only about a third of the class has opted to do it.

So that’s my weekend! This is all I’m doing for a few days. I hope to get it all done by Sunday evening and get all those grades submitted to the registrar early.

Then on Monday I have one more class to grade, Biological Communications II, in which students spend the semester writing a 10+ page review paper under my tutelage, so I already have a good idea of what they’ve done — I just have to go over what is supposed to be the final polished draft of the paper. And then I’m ALL DONE!

I guess I better buckle down and get to work now.

10:45 Saturday: FunGenEvoDevo done! Grades submitted! Students mostly did OK, but a few of them may have learned that skipping an exam or two is a good way to fail a course.

3:45 Saturday: Lab final done! Starting on the required final essay.

1pm Sunday: Required lab final done! Now to polish off the optional final.

The lull before the storm

Good for me! I got all of the finals for all of my classes composed and sent off to the students (they’re all take-home exams). Now I’m all done with this semester except…all three of them are due on the same day, Thursday, which is just by chance the officially scheduled day for all of my class finals. Friday and this weekend are not going to be happy times for yours truly.

Until then, though, I’m kind of at loose ends. Four whole days with no class obligations hanging over my head, which feels very strange, and like there’s something wrong here. So I started getting ready for my spring genetics course, ordering flies, organizing my calendar, thinking about rewriting a bunch of my lectures, etc., etc., etc.

And just generally feeling like I’m heading into a savage storm a few days from now…

In about an hour, I get to teach my last lecture of Fall 2021

Yes! Almost done! I get to dismiss the class, and then move on to … composing the final exam, and then grading the exams next week. And then getting ready for Genetics in the spring.

I won’t be saying goodbye to the students, though. They’re mostly 2nd year students, and this is a small university, so we’ll all be seeing each other again (cue groans from the class who are struggling with the material right now.)