Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.I am in Pittsburgh at the American Physical Society (APS) March meeting until Tuesday. Today was a series of workshops and talks on Physics Education Research (PER) as part of the pre-APS meeting for the Physics Teachers Education Coalition (PTEC).
First, I arrived last night (Saturday) and spent the evening the same way I always spend the evening in a new city: I find a bar, grab a beer, and start talking to the locals. Why? First, beer is a necessity after a 6.5 hour drive through north-western Virginia. Second, every major city I have ever been to has extremely nice bar crowds. Bar locals are easily the nicest people to talk to, and more importantly, they tell you all the really good stuff to do while in town that the brochures don’t. I discovered Primanti Bros., which, according to one of my new friends, has the best sandwich ever. I went there today. It was pretty good, but not quite the best. It wasn’t Nick Tahou Hots in Rochester good.
Today, it was a workshop run by Ed Prather bright and early in the morning. Ed covered think-pair-share, lecture tutorials, and ranking tasks. I’ve mentioned Prather before, and I saw the same basic stuff at the AAPT New Faculty Workshop last summer. However, I still picked up a few nuggets of useful advice. I wrote down these useful nuggets, and then I forgot to take my notes with me! What I remember where specific points about implementation of think-pair-share and a few references that I wanted to remember. Ed told me that he would send me the PowerPoint, though, so I should be ok.
After that, the smell of free luch was to irresistable (especially when you are also receiving a per diem), so I went by the AAPT New Faculty Workshop reunion. Two talks: (1) a discussion of Univ. of Colorado’s work with Learning Assistants and how they have dramatically increased the number of students leaving certified to teach high-school physics, and (2) a talk about changing the teaching paradigm in your department.
We’ve started using Learning Assistants (LAs) in our courses at Longwood. LAs are just undergraduate students that act similar to Teaching Assistants. We don’t have a grad program, so we’ve had to use undergrads. I think it is a successful model, and we intend to start doing more with our LAs next year.
The “changing paradigms” talk was more … interesting. The point the speaker was trying to make was that the students “know” a lot less than we think they do/should know when they walk into an upper-level course. A very simple example involving electric potential was presented. This led to loud dissent by a couple of audience members, who could not believe that the students would not have such a simple concept mastered after the intro sequence. Afterall, it was “trivial”!
The speaker challenged these members of the audience to go back to their schools and ask a few simple questions at the begining of the semester. I know from experience that the speaker is exactly right.
The main point was not that these so called trivial examples are not being covered well in the intro sequence (although they probably aren’t), but that they are hard. Damn hard. They seem trivial to us as physicists, but we are weird. Not only did we go to college, but we finished with a degree in physics. Then we went back for more and finished again. We have to keep reminding ourselves that this stuff ain’t easy for the uninitiated and non-weird. Sometimes, I’m thankful that I am not very smart. I had to struggle to understand this stuff, and in some cases I’m still struggling to understand this stuff. I think this makes me a better teacher.
Anyway, that is all for today. Tomorrow is all about science, and I have to present my work on charge trapping on semiconductor surfaces. A few things I plan to hit:
- Expo in the morning to see if I can meet up with some friends that work in industry,
- undergrad research poster session to scope out what my students will be doing next year,
- my talk,
- Puru Jena (VCU) will be giving a talk shortly after,
- who knows!
Apparently there is a good sci-fi independent film playing right down the road that I may go see in the evening. I am now off to the Executive Suite at the hotel, which I have access to since my wife is a Hilton Honors Diamond VIP. It’s fancy and has free food.