Before I met him, my boyfriend Matt spent a lot of time honing his technique at Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). Even after taking time off from practice, he still receives favorable scores while playing at expert level. More importantly, he very much enjoys playing and incorporates it into his rotation of cardiovascular exercise options (playing several songs at a challenging level really does get the heart rate going).
I'm always game to learn new things, especially games (see what I did there?), so I allowed him to drag me out to the arcade a few months back to gain some personal experience with DDR. A few songs convinced me that it might offer a way to blow off steam after sitting at my computer all day. Thankfully, Matt also possesses a home system for use with PS2, so I can play to my heart's content without waiting for other people or having to purchase tokens for an arcade machine.
The best part of playing DDR at home is having a smaller audience watching my sad, clumsy attempts to achieve passing scores on even simple songs. My coordination is suffering from such a narrow focus on mental rather than physical skills. That alone is frustrating. What's truly infuriating at times is having to switch the skill level back to beginner after watching Matt play his turn, and then still feeling like a drunken newborn giraffe as I attempt to translate arrows and music from the game to movement of my feet.
It's easy to fall into a trap of believing that, because one excels at some (or even many) things, all other activities of interest will be as easy to partake. I rely on intuition and a natural knack for understanding and interpreting broad patterns, which makes evolutionary biology a good fit for my brain. DDR, however, does not come without effort to my feet. In fact, it takes a great deal of effort.
Next time a student comes to my office hours to ask about a homework assignment, I'm going to remember my flailing attempts to play DDR. I'm going to answer that student's questions patiently, and explain concepts as many times and in as many ways necessary for them to understand. I've been studying phylogenetics for a decade now, and perhaps I take my knowledge for granted. My students need a little help, and I'm happy to be there to assist as they take their first steps toward understanding.
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
28 February 2013
Trees and characters and common ancestors, oh my!
My teaching experience has taken a big step forward this month. I gave my first of two guest lectures to a large undergrad intro bio class (they clapped when I was done; I don't know what's wrong with them!), and am piloting a new module in lab this week. Both of these teaching endeavors are focused on the same topic: phylogenetics. Given that describing evolutionary relationships is one of my specialties, I was both excited and apprehensive to put these teaching materials together.
I've done outreach activities using phylogenetics before, and I've taught classes on computational phylogenetics. I was a teaching assistant in grad school for a semester-long class on plant systematics, which heavily featured phylogenetics. Striking the right balance for a single lecture and lab for an undergrad intro bio class was tricky. I skipped most of the tedious definitions and history of cladistics, as well as in-depth discussions of the attributes of various tree reconstruction methods. I did spent time talking about the practical applications of trees, and possible implementations of these techniques they might find interesting.
Why take that approach? Well, I operated under the assumption that most students wouldn't ever really build trees again, but they might perhaps need to interpret them. I also couched my discussion in the strength of comparative biology: what if we want to breed a better crop? What if we need to know how data about a gene in mouse transfers to a gene family in humans? What can a phylogeny tell us about how traits evolve? In that context, it's way more effective to spend time talking about interpreting phylogenies and deciding how much confidence you should have in them.
At the end of the day, phylogenetics is one of those areas which some students will just understand intuitively without much extra explanation necessary. Other students will struggle, ask questions, and it will take a long time to identify and then break through their misconceptions. The former students will get bored, think my lab is dumb and conclude it to be a waste of time. The latter students will get frustrated, think the lab is dumb and conclude it to be a waste of time.
OK, maybe I hope a few students will like it...and hopefully a few of the other teaching assistants learned something, too.
I've done outreach activities using phylogenetics before, and I've taught classes on computational phylogenetics. I was a teaching assistant in grad school for a semester-long class on plant systematics, which heavily featured phylogenetics. Striking the right balance for a single lecture and lab for an undergrad intro bio class was tricky. I skipped most of the tedious definitions and history of cladistics, as well as in-depth discussions of the attributes of various tree reconstruction methods. I did spent time talking about the practical applications of trees, and possible implementations of these techniques they might find interesting.
Why take that approach? Well, I operated under the assumption that most students wouldn't ever really build trees again, but they might perhaps need to interpret them. I also couched my discussion in the strength of comparative biology: what if we want to breed a better crop? What if we need to know how data about a gene in mouse transfers to a gene family in humans? What can a phylogeny tell us about how traits evolve? In that context, it's way more effective to spend time talking about interpreting phylogenies and deciding how much confidence you should have in them.
At the end of the day, phylogenetics is one of those areas which some students will just understand intuitively without much extra explanation necessary. Other students will struggle, ask questions, and it will take a long time to identify and then break through their misconceptions. The former students will get bored, think my lab is dumb and conclude it to be a waste of time. The latter students will get frustrated, think the lab is dumb and conclude it to be a waste of time.
OK, maybe I hope a few students will like it...and hopefully a few of the other teaching assistants learned something, too.
12 November 2012
Learning about learning: Part 1
A friend talked me into taking an introductory philosophy class with her our second semester of college. I don't know why I thought this would be a good idea, as I was already taking 18 hours and it was a section which met at 8 am. I was a precocious little academic hellion, though, so I persevered despite my friend dropping the class a few weeks later.
I remember taking copious notes during class, studying diligently, and very much enjoying the subject matter. I was a little disappointed when my grade on the first exam was a B. Dissatisfied with my ability to improve my grade based on the comments written in the blue book I'd filled with essays, I met with the professor to chat.
As you might expect of an academic in his field, Prof Philosophy was ferocious in his arguments and maintained high standards of cerebral function. I began by asking him about the few comments he made on my exam, trying to sort out why those minor points warranted what I saw as a dissatisfying grade. He answered the first few questions but then became impatient.
"Look," he said. "There are some exams that are obviously A papers. Yours was not one of them."
I was a little surprised, and I'm sure I felt the sting of tears behind my eyelashes. I blinked them away, processed that thought for a moment, thanked him for his time and then left. I thought about his assertion frequently throughout the course of the semester, improved the depth of my thinking while listening to his lectures, and ended up with an A in the class. I thought about his comments even more often during graduate school.
A student from the lab section I'm instructing approached me awhile back to ask about a question from the exam. It was a multiple choice question that required inference of a phenomenon based on information provided. I explained to her the reasoning behind the correct answer, and she honed in on one minor bit of information that seemed ambiguously worded in the question. "You mean I would've gotten the question right if I had made that assumption?" she asked.
I explained to her that it was not that simple. If you are answering higher level questions and only have a cursory understanding of each concept included, you are compounding uncertainty by the time you reach an answer. Getting "close enough" to an answer doesn't mean much when you are trying to combine and synthesize information, because each little bit of inaccuracy takes you farther from the correct answer.
This is the challenge of learning and teaching in science, particularly biological systems. It is a balance of accuracy and precision of content recall bolstered by reasoning and critical thinking. Students' bean counting points to get a better grade in the class reinforces that parameterization of a problem down to individual units will yield better results. In fact, understanding how all parts-- of a semester, or of a biological process-- fit together leads to improved learning.
I remember taking copious notes during class, studying diligently, and very much enjoying the subject matter. I was a little disappointed when my grade on the first exam was a B. Dissatisfied with my ability to improve my grade based on the comments written in the blue book I'd filled with essays, I met with the professor to chat.
As you might expect of an academic in his field, Prof Philosophy was ferocious in his arguments and maintained high standards of cerebral function. I began by asking him about the few comments he made on my exam, trying to sort out why those minor points warranted what I saw as a dissatisfying grade. He answered the first few questions but then became impatient.
"Look," he said. "There are some exams that are obviously A papers. Yours was not one of them."
I was a little surprised, and I'm sure I felt the sting of tears behind my eyelashes. I blinked them away, processed that thought for a moment, thanked him for his time and then left. I thought about his assertion frequently throughout the course of the semester, improved the depth of my thinking while listening to his lectures, and ended up with an A in the class. I thought about his comments even more often during graduate school.
A student from the lab section I'm instructing approached me awhile back to ask about a question from the exam. It was a multiple choice question that required inference of a phenomenon based on information provided. I explained to her the reasoning behind the correct answer, and she honed in on one minor bit of information that seemed ambiguously worded in the question. "You mean I would've gotten the question right if I had made that assumption?" she asked.
I explained to her that it was not that simple. If you are answering higher level questions and only have a cursory understanding of each concept included, you are compounding uncertainty by the time you reach an answer. Getting "close enough" to an answer doesn't mean much when you are trying to combine and synthesize information, because each little bit of inaccuracy takes you farther from the correct answer.
This is the challenge of learning and teaching in science, particularly biological systems. It is a balance of accuracy and precision of content recall bolstered by reasoning and critical thinking. Students' bean counting points to get a better grade in the class reinforces that parameterization of a problem down to individual units will yield better results. In fact, understanding how all parts-- of a semester, or of a biological process-- fit together leads to improved learning.
22 February 2010
Compete or be nice?
I'm participating in a program this year sponsored by the MU Graduate School called Graduate Colleague Circles. I'm serving as a mentor/facilitator of monthly meetings with three other senior grad student mentors and 15 first year graduate students from science departments on campus. The goal of the program is to give new students a little extra help to facilitate retention after the first year of a doctoral program in particular departments.
I really like the idea of the program. I really like to talk about science, life, teaching, learning, etc with other peers, particularly those from other departments. I'm not going to discuss the relative success or implementation of this particular program right now, but it is the premise of the set-up and a meeting we had earlier tonight that sparked my interest in the issue of competition among scientists.
First, I must admit to personal interest in this issue, as I've recently had some eye-opening experiences with a few of my peers regarding their interpretation of my behavior and comments in class and the lab. Suffice it to say that I have a strong personality that I apparently do not sufficiently temper enough to put some of my colleagues at ease while working with them in a professional setting. However, I'm starting to think about getting a job after I graduate (May 2011? So soon?!?), and that means dispassionately evaluating where I am in my education and career development, where I would like to end up, and who I am as a scientist. Inevitably, that means comparing myself to my peers to see how I will stand out in a stack of applications.
How do I compare? Well, that's for me and my insecurities to battle out later. What I can say, though, is that my exposure to the mean side of competitiveness and criticism has been miniscule compared to what other students may experience. Case in point: a senior grad student from a biomedical-type department detailed his recent experience giving a seminar to his department. He said he was grilled fairly hard-core for 10-15 minutes afterwards in the question-and-answer session by a half dozen professors, all of whom expressed seeming displeasure or intense criticism of his research. Afterwards, though, they all came up to him, smiled, and said he did a good job.
Yes, I used italics, because this observation is so important to me. As scientists we are taught to be critical, and sometimes that criticism is not happily accepted. That does not mean, however, that the criticism is provided with malice, and sometimes we need a critical view. Another student revealed tonight a philosophy that I had not encountered: if labmates are too nice to each other, they must not be in a competitive or successful lab, because there is not enough criticism. This was revolutionary to me, that there were people who thought like this! While I believe one should be nice while providing their viewpoint, I sort of believe that constructive criticism should always hurt a little bit.
Here's what I really think. I can be pretty durn snarky at times, and while I don't intend to be rude to other folks, I think sometimes my head gets pretty far up science's ass and it's difficult to moderate the more harsh aspects of my personality. In other words, if I'm really thinking about a scientific question, enough of my brain power is committed to the problem at hand to make playing nice even more difficult. To me, that's good. I like that I'm committing that much brain power to an issue. It's efficient, and it doesn't mean I'm trying to sound smarter than you. I promise.
But it's only efficient if the receiver of said criticism can handle it, and can separate emotion from science. Easier said than done, and I speak from experience: that one's taken me years, and I still fall off the bandwagon sometimes.
Science, learning, and playing
I've got a pretty big crush on a blog new to my reading list, ProfHacker. I read other blogs about methods and programs to help with teaching, learning, academia, and science, but I like ProfHacker because it is written by folks from humanities and other areas not engrained in science learning. What is the difference? These academics are interested primarily in teaching students to read, interpret, and analyze literature and other texts, rather than attempting to instill large amounts of "important" scientific content into young minds.
One of the most intriguing (to me) items mentioned on ProfHacker lately include the value of multiple choice, website-administered quizzes required for each lesson's reading. The rationale? Students feel the push to read and think about material prior to discussing it in class, and the linked article also mentions framing appropriate directions for student inquiry with properly worded questions.
Even more interesting to me, and the impetus behind this entry, is the idea of incorporating games into academic lessons. To me, the idea of getting students to play is a great way of parameterizing an informal learning environment. Especially when teaching undergraduates grooming themselves for professional/medical programs after graduation, students are often afraid to take intellectual risks and instead prefer to have content handed to them to be memorized. Games provide a low-risk (i.e., no grading involved?) environment in which to explore the content at hand. That's not to say games can't be graded, but just the idea of calling it a game seems to make it more appealing to students.
These issues are especially interesting to me, as the class I'm TAing this semester (plant systematics lab) is traditionally heavy on memorization and light on creative thinking. There are some great ideas previously developed by other TAs of the course, but I'm really hoping to re-evaluate the format as the semester progresses so we can implement other approaches next year.
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