Chem class is going well so far, if rather fast and furious. Just to recap:
– One year of college Chem
– Compressed into a two-month span
– Weekends only; all day, Saturday and Sundays.
Two weekends have passed. One quarter of the entire “school year” of chem. In that time we’ve “only” burned through two chapters of the text book, had two labs and had our first test. The next test (two weeks away) will cover four chapters. So, the pace is beginning to pick up. I just finished the homework for Chapter 3, and it ended up being 7 fairly dense pages of balancing chemical equations and calculating the limiting reactant and the percentage yield in equations. Although I’ve never had a lick of Chem before (not even high school), I’m finding that there’s enough math involved that I seem to have an advantage over most of the rest of the class. Most of them seem bewildered by basic Algebra, which is a bit of a handicap in this class.
The prof is proving to be really good, and rather fun. He’s a tall, trim, graying man, I’d guess in his late 50s or early 60s. He’s a former MD who gave up medicine and now teaches at a number of schools in the area. He teaches some grad classes in theoretical physics at Berkeley, as well as this Chem class at New College. He seems really well rounded, even outside of the obvious breadth of his science knowledge. Each lecture ends up including several casual mentions of things like where the word acid come from in the original Latin, the relation between Eastern medicine involving Qigong and how that elates to the medical philosophy of the ancient Greeks and their model of the body’s “humours”, and how the initial results of scientific studies make their way into the popular press, to the detriment of “real” science. I really appreciate that he is not dry or one-dimensional, but is instead a really talented and engaging lecturer.
In fact, this got me to thinking about my experiences with teachers back when I was in college, and more recently at community colleges, the massage school and now this class at New College. When I was at university, I had very few truly good teachers. Frankly, only three or four come to mind. And I have a few theories about why this was true. For the most part, I don’t think the majority of instructors at a university are there to teach. Some of them are grad students with their own studies to worry about. Some of them are newer professors more concerned with getting tenure than anything else. And a bunch of the more senior profs are more interested in their own research and getting published than they are a bunch of undergrad students and lectures they have given for the past ten years.
But I think it’s more than that. If I can engage in some gross generalizations, the majority of students I knew at university were straight out of high school, going to school on mom and dad’s dime. To put it gently, their priorities might have had a wee bit less to do with education, and a bit more to do with drinking and getting laid. Not that I’m harshing on those worthy endeavors. But, it does put the instructor in the position of working with an audience that is… less than fully engaged. It seems like that puts some instructors in the position of trying to force the students to take the subject at hand more seriously. Which can result in teachers who seem to fall into the pattern of making a subject more challenging than necessary, or using the class as an opportunity to demonstrate how much more they know than the students. It seems to create an environment where the teacher is more concerned with erecting challenges, rather than genuinely trying to teach.
By contrast, I’ve had much more positive experiences with teachers outside of major universities, in classes where they are dealing with a class of mostly adults. The seem to be much more collaborative with the students, more of a facilitator, genuinely interested in how they can help a student master the necessary material. There is no tenure, or “publish or perish” competing with the instructor’s attention. And the largely adult students are mostly paying for the class themselves, so they are deeply engaged in succeeding, and they have little tolerance for instructors who aren’t eager to help. In fact, a teacher who is less successful at making the material accessible will soon find diminishing class sizes and may find the course canceled out from under them. Which hits them in the paycheck.
Whew, I got off on a bit of a tangent there. Anyway, class is going well, and I’m enjoying it. Although I’m “drinking from the firehose” somewhat successfully so far, I wouldn’t mind if the homework pace slacked just a bit. Or maybe I’ll just get better at drinking faster. 🙂