Easy!

Life is easy for Ruby, my parents’ bloodhound.

Happy winter break! I’m spending mine in Wyoming and Colorado, cross-country skiing, doing crossword puzzles, eating, and hanging out with my parents’ dogs, then heading up to Seattle to blog for the AMS at the Joint Math Meetings. I am also devoting some time to reflecting (grading + fretting = reflecting?) on last semester and getting ready (syllabus + fretting = ready?) for next semester. I tried a lot of things in my work last year, with various degrees of success.  Some things were hard but worth it, others were hard and didn’t work out at all.  However, it seems like a good moment to share a few easy things that worked as intended.

• I changed classrooms.  In the fall I taught two sections of Biocalculus, with a total of about 60 students, mostly freshmen. We cover discrete dynamical systems, modeling, and most of the material from a standard Calc I course, plus more differential equations. I really like these students and the course. Many of the students are math anxious but willing to work hard. I taught the same course last year and struggled a bit—partly because it was my first semester teaching in a new setting, and some of the material was entirely new to me (Cobwebbing? Wha?). This year I came in determined to do better. Success! So many things were so much better! Obviously I had more experience teaching this particular material. However, changing classrooms made a huge difference. Last semester we met in a large lecture hall with three times as many seats as we needed. The room was built only for lecturing and nothing else worked easily in that space. This semester, we had a normal classroom with tables. Just a normal classroom, and wow, what a difference it made in allowing students to work together and speak up in class. Last semester the students were at a great distance from me and from each other. The room was intimidating and encouraged passivity. The rows of desks didn’t allow students to move around and talk to each other. I couldn’t walk through the rows and talk to individual students.The students were fighting against the room in trying to collaborate at a great distance from each other. I found myself constantly asking them to move to the front, which sometimes set up an adversarial relationship. I couldn’t figure out why everything was so hard. Until this year, when I tried the same class in different classroom. Mind blowing.

• I booked a room for Math Tea.  Physical environment in my department became an obsession for me this fall. If the design of my classroom made this much difference, what about the department as a whole? My colleagues are really cool people. But it’s taking me a long time to figure out just how cool they are, mostly because there is very little common space where I can get to know them. Not to mention the students—how can we provide a community for our students if there is no place to meet them? This isn’t easy to solve–there just doesn’t seem to be much extra space to go around. However, we can start with a tea before colloquium! This was an easy thing to create. I just booked the classroom for the talk a half hour early and sent out announcements to students and faculty. This worked pretty well! Lots of students attended the talk and chatted with faculty. The faculty members talked to each other and the speaker. Great! These two teas were the longest I had talked to several of my colleagues all semester. This was just the first step; I am still plotting to somehow get a common room or lounge. However, it was both easy and awesome to get people together for half an hour every few weeks.

Derivative art from my Biocalc class. I heart math, too!

• I had my students do public art. Basically, I gave them some colored chalk and a list of problems. Their assignment was to make one of the problems and its solution into public art and email me a picture. That’s all. It was only worth a few points but it gave the boring derivative rules part of class just a little bit of spice. I got some nice pictures, it took no extra class time, and the students had fun with it. Easy!

• I didn’t curve an exam.  Some of my students did fairly badly on their first Biocalculus exam.  I didn’t want to curve the exam, so I gave them the option of replacing the first exam score with their score on the same material on the final.  Instead of being annoyed that we were having a cumulative final, they were so happy!  Some students gained a lot on the final, but only by learning the material they had missed.  The others lost nothing. It took me no extra time, aside from adding up the score on the first part of the exam.  It was easy to incorporate this into the final grade calculation by using an IF statement in Excel (by far the least difficult part of a painful 20 hour end of semester grading jag).

After the grading was done and the last grades entered, I danced around a little bit and headed out for more easy and awesome things—eating cookies and watching hockey. Mmmm, winter break.

This is winter, skiing near Laramie, WY. (For the east coast, where winter was forgotten this year.)