An absence...

I don't know if anyone has noticed an absence of something on this blog the past few weeks. But I realized it today:

I'm not bitching about my students this semester.

Part of it is, the "terrible" class I teach (the non-majors class), I'm in a different section, no longer right before lunch. (I'm coming to conclude that the 11 to noon hour is basically a wasted hour for all but the really dedicated souls). It's also a smaller class and some days, we've just kind of hung out, playing with demonstration materials, doing dry labs, and talking. Which is kind of fun and feels a lot more "human" in scale. They're not necessarily getting MUCH higher grades but I'm not hitting that wall of "I don't want to be here" with this group.

And my other classes are also good. My one lab-intensive class, I don't even have to remind the folks to wash their glassware at the end of lab. Now, that may sound sad to some of you, but I will tell you, sometimes it's really hard to get the 18-20 year old set to remember that it's not their mom at the front of the class, and that there aren't Magick Laboratory Elves who clean everything up. (Well, maybe on some campuses there ARE, but we don't have them.)

So when students "forget" to clean their glassware, either I have to do it, or the TA does (on the rare occasions when I have a TA). And usually it's me. And I don't like washing glassware when it's not glassware I've dirtied.

But this semester, they're really good about it.

They also ask a lot of interesting questions and actually seem interested. I have a couple of them who ask some really detailed questions and a couple times I've had to say, "I don't know the answer but I will try and find out."

(Note to students: Any professor or other teacher worth his or her salt eats it up when you ask those kind of questions. It shows that what they're trying to teach is making an impression on you. And most of us - well, me, at least - LIVE for the knowledge that our students are learning and that they care about what they're learning).

The other thing is: It pushes me to hunt down more material. I've been looking online for videos - and I've found a few, from USGS and other places - that touch on topics we're discussing. And it's a lot easier (and more fun, and I think ultimately it makes a bigger impression) to show a video of how a sandboil forms than it is to try and describe it or draw it on the board.

My other majors class is fun, too. They're, most of them, very personable and FUNNY. Like, on an essay on the last exam, when there was a question about niches, one of the students titled his essay, "Cribs: the Ant Edition." (Okay, so WHERE a species lives is not strictly its niche, but he covered that in his essay.) Someone else wrote as an example of a neutral mutation that cattle could develop a mutation that would make their pelts like shag carpet: "It wouldn't hurt them or help them, it would just be ugly."

I love little things like that; they make me laugh while I'm grading. I like that little spark of personality coming out. I wish more of the students felt free to do that.

I find that my spring semester classes are more interesting and fun than my fall semester classes. I do not know why that is, but that's usually how it comes out.