Dr. Shellie

This semester I am teaching a graduate course, including 4 of my own PhD students. The ongoing question is the following: to derive, or not to derive? I have been playing around with the balance between emphasizing concepts (bolstered by hand-wavy arguments) and doing the rigorous derivations. 

Students tend to get lost during the rigorous derivations, due to all the algebra required to carry out the steps.

On the other hand, too many conceptual arguments leaves an unsatisfying taste in the mouth.

I am also trying to encourage student thinking and participation during class. This tends to tilt things toward the hand-wavy side, as more student participation = fewer lines of algebra on the chalkboard.

I will be playing with this all semester, I suppose. It is far more fun that last semester’s undergrad class, however — the students do actually care about the course material. 

Time spent per faculty candidate interview:

• 0.5 hour, meeting individually with candidate
• 1.5 hours, lunch or dinner
• 1.5 hours, attending talk
• 0.5 hours, discussing candidate with your colleague in the corridor 
• 0.5 hours, discussing candidate with your colleagues in the faculty meeting

10 candidates x 4.5 hours = 45 hours per hiring season

Well, here I am, 1:20am, reviewing 105 conference abstracts for a 9am deadline.

Why did I not do this earlier?

Because it would have taken more time (# of hours) than doing it now, at the last minute, when I am forced to be efficient.

So, you see, procrastination is a strategy for not devoting too much time to things that are not supervising grad students, writing papers, or generating grant proposals. 

The top priority for this semester is spending as much time possible advising my graduate students. Last semester my time got eaten up by all sorts of university-related activities. I learned a lot about the university and how things work by, for example, trading gossip at the president’s Christmas party, listening in on various faculty forums, attending undergraduate/parent orientation events, etc. However, this time comes directly out of the time I spend with my own PhD students, doing the research that results in papers and grants and will get me tenure. So this will be the semester of hibernation. Just this week, I have successfully said no to all sorts of things, some even involving high-quality food: special university reception for a MacArthur winner, president’s address about something or other, faculty forum reviewing the Dean’s job performance, etc.

Now that I think about it though, I did attend a screening committee meeting, a faculty meeting, lunch with a visiting woman professor, a student’s qualifying exam, a meeting about outreach activities, and lunch with a faculty candidate. Crazy to think that this is what happens when I am actively saying no. Maybe I need to work harder at the hibernation thing.

My teaching goal for this semester is pretty simple: provide a structure (through class lectures and problem sets) that incentivizes students to do the work of learning things. I believe that for engineering, most of this work happens outside of class through reading the book and doing problem sets. You can introduce concepts in class, but is very hard to really make complex material stick in a single lecture — students need to revisit the material on their own and apply the concepts to working out problems.

My experience last semester was that it is very hard to actually insure that anyone learns anything. I put a lot of effort and energy into trying to get students interested in the subject I was teaching (a required class) and into encouraging them to come to office hours, but they didn’t put much effort in themselves and I found it very tiring.

Related to this, I was taking a language class over the summer that was horrible. I have studied quite a few languages (to varying degrees of fluency) and I know very well how language learning works. This was awful. The teacher would spend half the class reading us words in English and saying, "So, how do you say [word] in [Language]"? This was a night class, after work. After a few weeks of this I found reasons not to drive there and not to do the homework on weekends. For two weeks, we had a sub who actually knew how to teach foreign language and spent the entire class doing helpful activities in the foreign language. Suddenly I was happy after class, eager to go home and work on my exercises. 

Thus: conservative goals; 1) try to get the students to learn and understand something during class, and 2) do not de-incentivize the students by assigning meaningless, useless work.