A Teacher's Nightmare

SO: the other night I had the weirdest dream. Yes, boring, but still, it reflects the situations teachers encounter and the often humorous situations that result.

At any rate, I dreamed that my class in Physical Anthro was supposed to learn about population genetics. In the dream, I turned the page in the book, even though I don't lecture from the book, and saw that the topic was population genetics. I said 'just a minute' and began scanning the section. I became engrossed (entranced!) by Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and as I was looking through the material, I realized that the class had gone eerily silent. I looked up to find that the classroom was empty! During my reading, the students had quietly packed up their things and left. I looked at the clock, and realized I had spent 15-20 minutes standing at the front of the room, thinking and reading about Hardy-Weinberg.

The fact that this nearly happened to me in lab (minus the students exiting the classroom) is the probable impetus for the dream, but it also speaks to the larger issues I think about: the complexity of material covered in two or three paragraphs of an introductory textbook; the need for students to understand basic mathematic and statistical principles in order to understand a complex world; and, how teachers can most effectively present material that is complex and mathematically based. I'm still working on the last one.

I intend to dramatically revamp the physical course, giving much more weight to homework assignments, making the tests easier, and perhaps developing small, problem-based group exercises for each unit. I tried the last, a bit, when I assigned articles to discuss in that class, but I found that too many students were unprepared to understand half of the articles.

Two related articles that illustrate my point:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627603.600-neanderthals-not-the-only-apes-humans-bred-with.html

and

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/13/seth-roberts-on-orwe.html