Entangled

This rather hot day sees me in more of a reflective mood, which is a rather good thing. I’ve been chipping away at the Project a bit, solving some issues concerning its final form, and looking around me and soaking up the Summer. I did some of that at Intelligentsia cafe before lunch, listening as I worked for a while to four filmmakers at the next table loudly plan a shoot, until I decided to switch to listening to music when it turned out that it was a porn film and they were exchanging ideas about what underwear the teenage star of the scene would be wearing and in what sequence it would come off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude, and certainly am not averse to underwear being removed in the right sequence and in the right circumstances, but it was distracting. And obnoxious. It is the price one pays for having coffee there instead of at Casbah, where the non-shiny people like me sit, mostly, but it is just too hot in the latter for me these days.

This is a very different day from yesterday, which saw me up at 5:30am, and then e-mail bouncing drafts of a paper back and forth with my collaborator Tameem all day until about 10:30pm, when we decided we’d done enough and submitted it to the arXiv. I focused on little else that day and did not leave my lair at all, so today is sort of an antidote to that.

Going on in background is a bit of preparation for the start of classes on Monday, the beginning of the new academic year at USC. I’ve been looking at a draft of a syllabus for the big class I’ll be teaching on introductory physics (for Engineering and Science majors). My class will have 100 students and the parallel one, taught by a colleague following the same syllabus, will be of similar size. So decisions about homework, grading policies, midterm dates, and so forth all need to be finalized by tomorrow morning before the syllabus is sent off for printing, this is around the time when I find myself wondering again why we are making the students spend $200 or so on a textbook when all they really need is a few equations, attendance at good lectures, and a lot of practice. Then I remember, and the words pop into my head. Security blanket. And I don’t just mean the students. The main winner here is what I have called in the past “Big Textbook”. It is a battle I am not going to engage in just yet. I will not win. Yet.

Then there is the issue of in-class technology and how useful it really is. I tend to think it is mostly a red herring. Those who are already good at teaching use it to amplify what they already do well, mostly (or get distracted form it), and those who are bad or don’t care amplify that aspect, but get points for showing they can bring “modern teaching methods” to the classroom. Looks good on tenure dossiers and so forth. On the other hand, I’m not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I do know some colleagues here and there who put it all to good use. There are some aspects that can be enhancing and genuinely useful, but only if you already know what works well from the basics of good teaching. Of course, I am no expert and there is always room for improvement, but let’s just say that a packed slideshow on the computer in a darkened room where all the students are playing on Facebook in a course where hands-on problem solving technique is what you’re supposed to be teaching is not what I have in mind. And there’ll be no clicker-response units for me this year. I think it can work well, if trying to implement the peer-instruction ideas pushed by Eric Mazur, but there’s too much material to get through to use them well, they take away too much problem-solving practice time, add additional costs for the students, and I really don’t need it in order to get the students engaged. I think.

But I will be experimenting with a new tool which is both new-school and old-school. More on that later.

Now, having lunched and drained my beer glass (hey! I’m from Europe!) it is back to the Project for a few hours.

-cvj