Finally

Well, it’s been a crazy week here in my corner of the universe. I’m still trying to find the time to break off from several things in order to update you on things from last week and the week before. Meanwhile, new things have this way of happening anyway, and sometimes I’d like to mention them too. So it is with teaching matters. Two Fridays ago was the last lecture of my electricity and magnetism class. We’d done magnetization, they’d waded through another couple of class worksheets I prepared for them on the topic, we’d remarked upon similarities and differences with respect to polarization in the electric case, and with a few hints about what phenomena were to come when they do electrodynamics (the second part of the course – we’d strictly been dealing with statics) a feeling of some sadness came over me as I said the last words of the class. I’d liked this group. They got it. I was going to take them out of their comfort zone and get them to work a bit harder and stretch themselves a bit harder, and the benefits (I hope) became apparent to them when they could see further, run faster, and jump higher (with respect to their abilities as physicists, I mean). (See some earlier thoughts on that here, as I prepared to start teaching the class.) They responded well by not whining about the extra effort required, but instead rolling up their sleeves and having a go, with good humour, a good sense of camaraderie, and remaining reasonably engaged and interactive right down to the very last lecture. They got it. I love it when that happens.

Monday of this week was really the end – they had their final exam (see photo above – (clickfor larger) -the composite’s edges don’t match since I was rushing to snap them before anyone noticed. Yes I asked the class’ permission to use these, afterwards.). They were all (except one student who would take it immediately after) there, bright-eyed and ready to go at 8:00am. I arrived at 8:09am (after a bit of last-minute printing of the final I’d finished writing the night before), and at 8:10am they were off! They had one hour and fifty minutes to show that they understood some of what we’d been doing together. I decided (sort of on a last minute whim during the lead up to the first midterm) to make all the exams for this class open-book exams, where they can bring the textbook and their class notes. The idea was that they had to solve some specific problems, and no amount of being able to look up formulae will make up for knowing how to use them, how to tackle and solve a problem, stepping back from it and doing the basics (that I always emphasize) such as drawing a nice big clear diagram, choosing a sensible coordinate system, and so forth (it is amazing how easy it is to write pages and pages of junk if you’ve not drawn a clear diagram and organized what you’re going to do before writing even one equation). This seemed to work rather well, and (although it does make for harder setting of exams) I think I’ll be doing this more in all my upper-division classes.

While they worked I worked too, constructing a nice neat clear solution to be used later, most immediately to serve as a guide for the grading. This was also a good chance to quickly double check that I’d done my computations right for the formulae displayed in the questions – there’s a lot of “show that the field is…” followed by an equation. If you’ve got the equation subtly wrong, a student can lose a bit of time trying to show the wrong thing, and also subsequently using it in later parts of the question. So this is a good place to check everything one last time. This time there were no errors at all (except a hat missing from a unit vector in the z direction – which brought welcome snorts and other noises of derision what I announced it – a good sign that they were in good spirits).

Overall, even though I’m glad the teaching part of the semester is over (and so I can get back to trying to remember what new physics I was trying to do in my research) I’m going to miss this group. Every now and again (more often than not, I’m happy to say – a bit of good luck is involved, no doubt), one gets a group where the classroom dynamic, the attitude, and the work ethic all come together nicely. It’s a whole lot of fun teaching such a group, and this was one of them.

-cvj