Death

A new book:

No other period of life has such a feared and mysterious ending. Childhood ends with the budding of puberty and the new challenges of adolescence. Adolescence passes away in the excitement of pulsating hormones, shedding its awkward, uncertain skin in the journey into young adulthood. The subsequent stages of adulthood bring undiscovered treasures of love, children, work, and spirit. Even in the face of failure or lost opportunities, there is always hope for something new. But aging seems to bring this process to a halt. The horizon is unknown except for the single fact that a true ending will come ...   Excerpted from How We Age: A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Growing Old, by Marc E. Agronin, M.D. Available from Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.                              

 From Salon.com[http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/02/05/how_we_age_excerpt/index.html]

When a student in my class died from an alcohol overdose one semester,  I spent some time looking for an appropriate passage to read to the class.  I couldn't just let him disappear from the class with no acknowledgment, especially since it had been obvious to me that he was in trouble.  I chose to read the following:

50.  Death
Men flow into life, and ebb into death.
Some are filled with life;
Some are empty with death;
Some hold fast to life, and thereby perish,
For life is an abstraction.
Those who are filled with life
Need not fear tigers and rhinos in the wilds,
Nor wear armour and shields in battle;
The rhinoceros finds no place in them for its horn,
The tiger no place for its claw,
The soldier no place for a weapon,
For death finds no place in them.
Tao Te Ching, excerpts
http://www.alamo.edu/nvc/programs/humanities/huma/pages/divine_taoTeChing.htm#50Death

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

NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative

NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative

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Fun with Students

One quick story and a short email exchange:

It's been fun this past week, the end of the first two weeks of classes. Closed classes, serious students, 20,000 waitlisted seats in one district, etc. So, on Wed., about 15 minutes after class got out (during my 'office' hours) and after I had just finished adding 2 students and going over the syllabus, 3 guys wander into my classroom. here's the conversation:

    "hi. can we add this class?"

I'm very suspicious as to their motives, so I ask: "What class do you think this is?"

    "uh, psychology?"

    "no"

he (looking around and noticing the map on the wall), said somewhat triumphantly: "geography!"

    "no"

a note of desperation creeps into his voice "uh, English??!?"

    "no"

At that point I broke down laughing and said: "well, we could be here all day while you guess. It's anthropology."

    "oh. can we add the class? we need it to keep our insurance."

I said they could, and they went outside to confer. One came back in and said he wanted to add, and then after we went over the syllabus and he went out to talk with his friends, the other two came back in and they wanted to add. I told them I was exhausted and I was hoarse, so if they emailed me I would send them an add code.

One did email me, but I decided to make him come to class Monday where I'd give him the add code in person. He actually did show up, and is in the class.

Yesterday I got an email from a kid who wanted to add one of my other classes. I replied, by email: which class?
He or she answered: either astronomy or anthropology. I replied: I'm teaching THREE anthro. classes at this college. which one do you want? They never did email me back; perhaps their astronomy teacher was less demanding.
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So, the moral is, for those of you who have 18-22 yr. old children, or will have: they're ok. The kids are all right. Their life is stressful and they don't have the skills yet to manage it, but they try. And half of their teachers love them.