the quiet hum of busy-ness

Two reasons for the title.

First, that's me this week - it is a busy week. One of our grad students (I am on her committee) is defending on Thursday. And there's a bunch of other work-stuff to be done. (This morning, campus is closed because of bad weather - so I am at home, trying to finish one of the books a student chose for Directed Readings).

But the real reason for the title is that is the sound you hear in a good lab. A lab that works, that the students find challenging but not frustrating.

I enjoy teaching labs. The situation is more relaxed than a lecture class (and yes, I am one of those evil-according-to-the-educrats profs who still lectures. What can I say? I teach the sciences. By and large it is the most efficient way to convey information. Believe me, I have tried the "read the chapter and we'll discuss" thing - test scores were a lot lower and the students did not seem to grasp the material as well).

In lab, you can talk more-or-less "privately" to individual people - in class, if someone has a question or of a discussion gets going, anything you say is for the class at large, for public consumption. In lab, you can talk quietly to one person, you can deal with their particular confusion or problem, and you don't have to worry about phrasing it in a way that will make sense for anyone else.

The other thing is you get to see more of the personalities of individual students. Some are quiet and workmanlike - after the introduction, they get their supplies, sit down, and you don't hear from them again until they're done. Some people are kind of slapdash, trying to finish as fast as possible so they can leave. (Generally the labs I do are self-paced for individuals or small groups; if I do a debriefing I wait until the next lecture section. It doesn't work well to have one group finish in 45 minutes and then sit around rolling their eyes and making comments about the super-diligent people who want to take the full time to do everything just so). Some people have a lot of questions, others you maybe have to press a bit to be sure they DON'T have questions. Some people want to talk about something from lecture or clear up some kind of logistics point.

So I tend to circulate around the class helping people, seeing how things are going, asking questions, discussion. This semester I have a TA who has HAD the classes (and mirabile dictu, I have a TA for both my labs who has HAD the labs - so he can answer a lot of the questions, which frees me up for more leisurely discussion with other groups).

There's a point I've noticed, about midway during a "good" lab, where there's relatively little talking going on - everyone's settled down to the task at hand, people are working, things are making sense, data are being generated and interpreted. It's a good feeling. It's about the "rightest" feeling of teaching there is - knowing the students are understanding, knowing that (at least some of) the students are happy at their task. You don't have to do much but be on hand to answer questions or to be a sounding board for potential interpretations of results. It's sort of a peaceful feeling - sort of a surrendering-of-control that is kind of nice. It's now the students' responsibility to figure stuff out, to do the work. If someone complains that the lab failed, or that they didn't get it, it's not that I taught it badly - because here are six other groups clicking away and doing what needs to be done.

There are also nice little "eureka" moments - one lab we do is a very simple natural selection simulation, and one guy doing it remarked, "Oh, so there can be random stuff too - like a predator with a really high score doesn't get near any prey, he may be the "best possible" genetically at getting prey but he will still die out" - things that are maybe hard to convey in lecture, but in practice the students get them.

I think some of the labs are enjoyable, too because they are practical. My soils TA remarked the other day that "Soils lab is a fun lab." He went on to explain: "You're doing stuff that matters. Stuff that you might need to know how to do in your job." Yes, I have them do all of the simple basic testing that you can do on a soil. (Another thing I do, which I think helps the lab a lot - the first lab is taking the students out to a local natural area, having them find locations on a soils map, and then collect the soil they and their lab partner will be analyzing. So they're always working on the same soil - they get to build up a picture of the details of it - and it's something they kind of have "ownership" of because they chose the site. It's little things like that which help a lab along, I think.)

Labs are one of the best parts of teaching.