When Chemists Attack

The usual Friday features are on hold again this week, since I’m off to the Teaching Professor Conference in Atlanta.

The first day here was a bit rushed – since our college’s group left South Carolina and left for Atlanta at 6:30 in the morning and had some pre-conference sessions to attend at 9 AM. It’s a good thing that traffic wasn’t that bad coming out of the airport!

Today’s big session was the pre-conference session given by Chris Anson from NC State. It was about a topic that nearly all of us would agree deserves more time in the classroom, but that a lot of us struggle to find time to add: writing.

Anson made the point that we should often treat writing assignments not as a tool to teach writing, but as a tool to get students to think about class topics and organize their thoughts. I agree with that point, but I find myself unable to implement many writing assignments in some of my classes due to a few factors:

• Time. Instructors who teach labs usually have more hours actually in the classroom than other instructors. This leaves less time for reading student work and grading outside of class.
• I spend a lot of time in my lower level course teaching basic math skills like unit conversions, and there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to write about converting centimeters to meters.

That said, I do intend to add more of a writing aspect to my courses. I’ve set up a blog for my courses, and students will be required – as part of their grade – to leave a few sentences worth of commentary after each class on whatever class topic I’ve posted about. They’ll also be able to ask questions of me and each other via the blog comments. (I admit that getting students to answer each other’s questions in a public forum might be an uphill battle!)

The class blog can also serve as a way for the students to interact with each other outside of class. Our college consists entirely of commuters – many from rural areas who drive half an hour or more to get to class. These students find it very difficult to get together outside of class, with the result that students don’t have much opportunity to help out other students. Perhaps this will improve student-student communication.

The best way to assess these online writing assignments will also be something I’ll have to think about for a few days. Since the purpose of these assignments won’t be to teach writing itself, I shouldn’t have to worry about grading grammar and spelling. I should only be looking at the ideas.

On an almost completely unrelated note, here are some views of Atlanta from the hotel window:

Day

Night

(Click to enlarge)

By now, you’ve probably seen this example of student “reasoning” on the internet somewhere.

I don’t believe that one was actual student work. Clever and amusing, but not real.

Real examples of bizarre student work look more like what you’re about to see. This is one student’s “scratch work” – for which he presumably intends to obtain some sort of partial credit. This is all of his scratch work from the entire test.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of grading. How many points do you think this student’s effort is worth? (You can probably guess how good this student’s actual answers were.)

Just so you know, I didn’t mistakenly give a chemistry lab exam to a second grader. I do teach only adults in my classes.

And no, there were no questions that related to butterflies, dogs, or pigs.