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I have been observing a troubling number of mental lapses I've been making this spring - the salinity miscalculation being just one such example. On another occasion, I made a mistake on the order of events during the heart cycle (atrial filling before atrial systole!). And then there was the muddling of the definitions for endothermy and homeothermy, and a recent lecture where I started out talking about caribou but then couldn't remember the extent to which "caribou" is synonymous with "reindeer." (Finally looking it up just now, that was fine. Whew. Still, troubling!!)
I have to hold myself to high standards on these matters because I'm holding my students to high standards. I expect them to be very sensitive to discrepancies between how material is presented and taught to them and the meticulousness expected of them on assessments. That would be true for you, too, right? Stupid teachers asking demanding and meticulous questions tend to come across as malicious.
I think the origin of these issues has to do with demand hardening. (I'm still so grateful to the book A Great Aridness (DeBuys) for introducing me to the concept.) The problem is that I am still too good at filling my schedule too full, leaving me with an inadequate amount of flexibility to rest and attend to the niggling details that are easy to put off. But the world NEEDS things like the bicycling class and rowing program. So.
A lot of the lecture slip-ups are also because I'm not immersed in the lecture material in the same way this year as last year or the year prior. I'll get better at those parts over time, but I'm not there yet. And in certain ways, recording the material as lecture videos last year messed things up, too: the delivery of course content through lecture videos is very different from the delivery via live lectures, so I'm reverting back to materials from 2019 as much as from 2020.
I haven't tried to go back and provide students with the lecture videos this semester. My sense is that they wouldn't help, because my general sense is that students aren't learning a ton from lecture videos (though they might think that they do in many cases). When I have more breathing room I'm hoping to learn more about whether I'm right in thinking that it can work for a student to have maybe 1 or 2 classes taught in a "flipped" format at most. This thinking is tied to what I've observed for the rise and fall of the MOOCs.
It is going to be really interesting to see whether this group of students winds up giving me the same longer-term feedback as the students from the first year of teaching. One of the 2019 students in particular has commented on just how much they remembered from my course, which must therefore stand in contrast to how much they feel they remembered from their other coursework. This probably isn't just a product of my teaching approaches, although it's nice to think they might contribute. I do think that it has to do with the quiz/exam course structure and format forcing them to study every week.
But they might not give me that feedback for other reasons. We are all still coping with extra mental overhead due to the pandemic, and that really showed clearly in student performance on the first midterm exam. They just aren't all fully able to drill in and be as meticulous and precise as I'd like, and in informal conversation it's clear they are really struggling to remember what they're learning. I think this is also a direct consequence of trying to function at a heightened level of stress. Stress impairs memory formation. For acute stress, this is protective, but for chronic stress it's a problem.
I have to hold myself to high standards on these matters because I'm holding my students to high standards. I expect them to be very sensitive to discrepancies between how material is presented and taught to them and the meticulousness expected of them on assessments. That would be true for you, too, right? Stupid teachers asking demanding and meticulous questions tend to come across as malicious.
I think the origin of these issues has to do with demand hardening. (I'm still so grateful to the book A Great Aridness (DeBuys) for introducing me to the concept.) The problem is that I am still too good at filling my schedule too full, leaving me with an inadequate amount of flexibility to rest and attend to the niggling details that are easy to put off. But the world NEEDS things like the bicycling class and rowing program. So.
A lot of the lecture slip-ups are also because I'm not immersed in the lecture material in the same way this year as last year or the year prior. I'll get better at those parts over time, but I'm not there yet. And in certain ways, recording the material as lecture videos last year messed things up, too: the delivery of course content through lecture videos is very different from the delivery via live lectures, so I'm reverting back to materials from 2019 as much as from 2020.
I haven't tried to go back and provide students with the lecture videos this semester. My sense is that they wouldn't help, because my general sense is that students aren't learning a ton from lecture videos (though they might think that they do in many cases). When I have more breathing room I'm hoping to learn more about whether I'm right in thinking that it can work for a student to have maybe 1 or 2 classes taught in a "flipped" format at most. This thinking is tied to what I've observed for the rise and fall of the MOOCs.
It is going to be really interesting to see whether this group of students winds up giving me the same longer-term feedback as the students from the first year of teaching. One of the 2019 students in particular has commented on just how much they remembered from my course, which must therefore stand in contrast to how much they feel they remembered from their other coursework. This probably isn't just a product of my teaching approaches, although it's nice to think they might contribute. I do think that it has to do with the quiz/exam course structure and format forcing them to study every week.
But they might not give me that feedback for other reasons. We are all still coping with extra mental overhead due to the pandemic, and that really showed clearly in student performance on the first midterm exam. They just aren't all fully able to drill in and be as meticulous and precise as I'd like, and in informal conversation it's clear they are really struggling to remember what they're learning. I think this is also a direct consequence of trying to function at a heightened level of stress. Stress impairs memory formation. For acute stress, this is protective, but for chronic stress it's a problem.
