Dread teaching

I’m caught up on a lot of grading, but today I now have to explain while they got so much wrong. The mean on the last exam was 75, which isn’t bad, but a lot of students are certain they deserve an A on everything, so I have to tell them today that the grade they got was the grade they deserve, and then explain how to solve the problems correctly. Many of the errors were due to invalid assumptions. For example, some people were confused by the term “wild type” — they had it in their heads, largely from their introductory population genetics course, that wild type was simply the most common phenotype in the cross, so for instance, whatever the phenotype of the heterozygotes was in a simple hybrid cross, that was “wild type”. Yikes. So now I also have to reset my brain and stop assuming they know all the basic conventions.

Next bit of fun: we’re wrapping up a standard complementation assay in the lab, so I have to talk to them about writing up a lab report, which means that, while I’ve finished a painful backlog of grading, I’m about to tell them to create a lot more work for me.

Somehow, in all that, I also have to teach them about deletions, duplications, and translocations this week, and then next week we plunge into the happy world of recombination and gene mapping, and more math. Sometimes I wonder how I can keep going, since I’m pretty sure that by the end of the semester all of my students hate me.

The lesson for the day is…

Sex. Today I have to lecture my genetics students about sex. On Monday I explained to them how simple Mendelian inheritance isn’t the whole of genetics, that it’s much more complicated than you can possibly imagine, and now I have to explain to them that everything they know about sex is a gross oversimplification. I’m hoping everyone comes out of this course confused and uncertain, since that’s the proper state of mind for learning.

Also, I’m giving them a take-home exam. Am I the most evil college professor in the universe or what?

For further confusion, I pharyngulated myself and put up a poll on YouTube. I’ll look at it later this afternoon and heed the voice of the people.

Fly Time was a bust

That was agonizing. My students have projects ongoing, so I leave the lab open so they can get in and work with their flies. I go in early in the morning specifically to unlock it.

Someone locked it back up again after I left!

Students were backed up, trying to get in, and were frantically phoning and messaging me!

While I was trying to teach my other class!

It was agonizing: non-stop ringing and beeping while I’m trying to deliver a lecture, and it wasn’t so much that the noise bothered me, but that I couldn’t just ditch one class to help another, and so I couldn’t answer or do anything about it. I finally broke down and ran into the other room to ask my long-suffering wife to take my keys and unlock it for them. I’ve now posted prominent signs telling people not to lock it during class hours.

I guess I should be grateful for diligent staff who maintain our security, and for eager, ambitious students, but wow was that a stressful class hour.

(For that matter, this pandemic has already pushed my stress levels off the charts.)

We’re on fly time now, boys and girls

My new regime begins today, and it’s one of the awkwardnesses of teaching a fly genetics lab. Mere human schedules don’t work; I informed the students from the very beginning that we’re going to be at the mercy of the flies’ schedule, and they have a roughly 9 day generation time, which doesn’t align well with our 7 day class cycle.

So what do we do? The class becomes more of an exercise in independent study. We have the regularly scheduled lab time, which I use to explain where we should be at and what to do in the next week, and then I open up the lab early every morning so they can come in whenever they want. I’m also posting my personal cell phone number on the door so they can call me at any time to come over (it’s not at all far, fortunately) — I’ll be requesting no calls after midnight, though. So starting now, I am on Fly Time and Student Time.

Which means I have to zip over to the lab right now.

Man, it would be handy to have one of those Time Tacos.

Flies have pretty eyes

I made a quick trip to the lab this morning (it’s -25°C! I walked quickly!) to take some fly photos for this week’s genetics lab. The students are doing a simple complementation assay with fly eye colors — can you tell which one is scarlet (st) and which one is brown (bw)? Every year it’s a struggle to get them to recognize even obvious mutations like these, but it’s not the students’ fault. This is their first time working with flies, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the alienness of Drosophila.

Me, I’m always impressed with how beautiful their eyelashes are.

Of course, immediately after their glamorous photo shoot, these flies were sacrificed on the altar of the spider gods.

Oh joy, first exam

This week, I gave my first exam of the semester — a take-home, with ten multi-part questions requiring lots of calculations and and statistical tests, and I required that all answers by typed and in a specific format. It was due last night at midnight.

Nobody took the hint. I got 100% on-time submissions, so this morning I’m looking at a big stack of pages of numbers and formulas and explanations and hard work that I have to get evaluated this weekend.

Why didn’t you guys tell me to make it all multiple choice and true/false? I’m blaming you all. You need to come to my house and grade them for me.

Last 3 weeks!

The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.

  • This week: cell signaling.
  • Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
  • Final week: cell origins.

It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.

Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.

Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.

I thought enrollments were supposed to be down?

Yikes. It’s the first day of spring term registration, first thing in the morning, and my genetics class is already full…plus I’m giving a few students permission to take it beyond capacity (I’m splitting all the labs to meet pandemic requirements).

Spring: all the anxiety and overwork of the fall, only with crappier weather. They better cure this pandemic soon, or I may keel over from the stress.

Oh, wait. Pandemics don’t happen anymore.

Well, if a Harvard Professor says so, it must be true.

Another perk for my Patreon patrons

For patrons only, I’m going to post the YouTube videos I’m doing for my courses during this period of isolation. Note that these are rough, I’m not doing any fancy editing at all, and abbreviated. I’m aiming too keep them under 15 minutes, and then they are supplemented by discussion sessions on Zoom…and by the textbook, of course.

I have to whip out a couple of these every week so when I say rough, I mean rough — they’re just recordings of Keynote presentations. Normally I’d hope to be interacting with students and handling questions and throwing out problems to solve, and these 10-15 minute summaries would expand out to an hour, but we gotta do what we gotta do during this pandemic.

I may have made a small mistake

In my struggle to get my classes back on track as quickly as possible after spring break, I wanted to get everyone thinking and focused again, so…

  • In my intro class, I assigned a set of homework problems, due on 30 March.
  • In my intro class, I gave a take-home exam on Friday, due on 30 March.
  • In my genetics class, I assigned a set of homework problems, due on 30 March.
  • In my genetics class, I gave a take-home exam on Friday, due on 30 March.

They were supposed to send them to me by email.

Today, you may notice, is 30 March.

I opened my inbox this morning, and recoiled in horror. So many of my students were industrious and on the ball and possibly bored out of their minds, so they got everything done early. There are others who are still working on them, so I expect even more to trickle in during the course of the day.

The next exams are staggered a bit, at least, but I should have done that this time. The shock of the sudden isolation event just put everything in sync.