(As I said in the intro to
my first semester summary, I want to keep some notes here on the successes and failures from my teaching exploits. It's mainly for my reference, but there's no reason not to share my successes and failures with everyone else.) Here's a wrap-up of...
Semester #3 - Spring 2013 - 3 classes
* Lower division intro to weather & climate, 100 students
* Lower division earth system science, 50 students
* Upper division synoptic meteorology, 15 students
I learned a lot about myself this semester. The weather and climate course began to click, with the just-in-time methods and classroom activities and other assessments. Now I just need to make some changes to the lab manual, which I inherited from a previous instructor and which doesn't match my style (or content) as well as it should. Since I didn't draw this course again in the fall, I didn't work on it over the summer. Maybe I should have.
Our weather analysis-synoptic sequence is taught without the prerequisites of physics and calculus, and it's incredibly difficult--more than I thought--to teach synoptic concepts without it. How many of you have ever tried to teach QG theory in words? :-) It can be done, but it's a slow process. I really like the Lackmann book, but it's not the best fit for a conceptual synoptic course in my opinion. I resorted to a lot of Vasquez's material, as well as Chaston's old book. He has probably the best descriptive QG section out there, that I've seen.
My first foray into my new departmental home was ESS, with a few majors but mostly as a service course as are many 100-level courses. I struggled with what kind of theme I wanted the course to take--again, given that I inherited a lab manual that in no way reflected my pedagogy--and eventually decided on a tour of the earth system: a few weeks of each of the four (five?) spheres. And my goodness, if you want to know where your knowledge of a topic is weak, don't do your homework and then go to class in an activity-based course design! I did learn that students are okay with you saying "I don't know," to a point. It shows that we're human, that we don't have all the answers either. I think many of them resonate with that.
Semester #4 - Fall 2013 - 3 classes
* Lower division intro to atmospheric science, 10 students
* Upper division climatology, 25 students
* Upper division mesoscale meteorology, 20 student
I moved the "weather and climate" course across campus to a new department and gave it a new name, with lab exercises of my own, and it felt really nice. One problem: just as small-classroom exercises definitely do not scale up to lecture halls, large-classroom activities don't scale down to a room of 10 students, either. More than once, an activity that would take 2-3 minutes in a room of 100+ students would be over in 30 seconds. "Well, that usually takes a little longer." It didn't hurt that I had an incredibly bright group. So we improvised with more data, or went to the web for more photos, etc.
This may disappoint a few folks but I'm not going to say much about the mesoscale course, because most of the previous struggles (mixed grad/undergrad, no math and physics prerequisites, etc.) and successes (use of case studies and real events, individual vs. group presentations, etc.) came up again. It was fun to take the course as I'd taken it--all lecture by powerpoint--and tweak the topics and change the presentation. Much fun.
Climatology was a new prep for me but also a fun one; I'd taken a couple of graduate courses in it and it's a hot topic in mainstream science, so I felt ready. Key takeaways:
* Flexibility in the entire course plan. I hadn't wanted to talk about the Milankovitch cycles until we introduced past climates & Earth's climate history, but students wanted it during the radiation physics section. So I had to shift everything.
* Don't hesitate to abandon ship. On "what causes the jet stream" day, I tried to leap too far too quickly (it's temperature gradients ultimately, btw). The handouts I distributed weren't matched up with what I wanted to say, the way I said it didn't match up with what they had read, and about 30 minutes into the (75-minute) period I realized this boat was a goner. "Okay, class is over. That's it. Come back Thursday." We did, I revised and resubmitted, and it went much better the second time.
* Students love real life. As we got to a section on ice ages and glacier formation, a winter precipitation event presented itself. So we spent a day on precipitation types and vertical temperature profiles, looking at observations and making forecasts, and so on. They seemed to really enjoy that.
What will Spring 2014 hold? Enrollments of 100 and 30, I know that much.......
