Blogging on the Brain

You guys. Matlab is going to be the end of me.

As much as I enjoy working with data (mostly because it means I have data to work with), learning Matlab is rough. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it – this includes me – it’s a fairly sophisticated statistical analysis tool, which is great…except that it requires some programming experience. Oh, and it also requires that you know what your data means. I have ZERO of the first requirement, and only marginally pass the second. This is making things difficult.

Also making things difficult: I have a mac now, and the scripts and other software that are used in our lab are decidedly not compatible with macs (I know, I know, first-world-problems, right?). So I struggled for a while to get everything to work on the mac – and by “everything,” I mean just getting programs loaded and data imported – and it was not working out. So I (or, more accurately, my wonderful and IT-minded husband) partitioned the ol’ hard drive so I can run things over there. Yet STILL I can’t get things to work.

The moral of the story: I am TERRIBLE with computers. Not only am I generally useless at figuring things out, I get genuinely angry at my computer (possibly overheard in our living room one evening: “why won’t you just DO what I WANT you to DO?”).

As a person who generally likes to be able to figure things out, I get really, really frustrated when I can’t even understand the vocabulary that’s being tossed around in the “help” menus for this stuff. It makes me feel useless and stupid. Googling only takes me further down a road of “huh?” and the wikipedia links keep me spiraling in further and further (that is, until I suddenly realize I’ve ended up on the page for, like, unicorns, as one does).

So after exhausting all my other options (whining, yelling at inanimate electronics, rage blackouts, begging my husband to do it for me, pouting, angry naps, etc.), I’ve made a big step. I signed up for a seminar. That’s right. It’s called “Matlab for beginners,” (hey! that’s me!) and I guess they’re planning on doing something crazy like teaching me how to use Matlab. I figure it’ll either be great and I’ll totally be able to handle it from there, or my head will implode. Either way, at least there’ll be some resolution, right?

EDIT: There is an actual “I hate Matlab” group on facebook! 4,629 “likes!” I’m not alone!

It’s the first day of classes here at BU, and for the first time in a while, I’m sitting in a class listening to an intro lecture. The class: cognitive neuroscience. The reason: I’m helping out with the class by giving a couple of lectures throughout the semester, and I thought I might as well sit in and learn something while I’m at it (also, after doing a few guest lectures for our 101 class last semester, I think that by being around for most of this class it’ll be easier for me to jump in occasionally without overlapping with a bunch of stuff they’ve already covered).

I’ve never taken a cognitive neuro class, although I had a great cognitive psych class in graduate school, and I’m really excited about learning in this kind of format again (although I’m sure that feeling would be dampened a bit if I had to worry about exams, attendance, etc.).

I’m especially interested in seeing things from a student perspective again. It’s been three or four years since I’ve been a student in a class like this, and almost all of my teaching experience has happened since then. I think it’ll be enlightening to see things this way again – what do I enjoy as a learner as opposed to a teacher, what do I really dislike? Hopefully, if I’m careful and observant, being a student again will help inform how I teach, give me some fresh ideas, and help me keep my teaching student-focused.

Happy first day of school!

Backyard Brains Spiker Box

I just got one of these in to use for my upcoming high school class (a little different than the one-time field trip program, this will actually be the same set of students coming in once a week for a whole semester class – for which they will get high school science credit), and I am SO excited to play with it!

The best description is just the video. I really may need to buy one of these for myself, which you can totally do – the “bag of parts” is $50 and all you need to put it together is a screwdriver and a soldering iron, plus, it’s totally meant for at-home use!

Oh, and did I mention they have an iPhone app for this? That’s right. AN IPHONE APP FOR NEUROPHYSIOLOGY. We live in the future.

As we’re all gearing up for the new semester here (six days and counting…), our little team has been talking a bit about integrating clickers into some of our courses. I’ve never used them before, and had never given much thought to how to implement them in a classroom beyond the obvious attendance/pop quiz application. So my boss directed me to a talk given by Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard, who uses clickers as sort of the basis of all of his classes. I can’t emphasize how much I LOVED this talk. When I first saw how long the talk was (about 80 minutes) I sighed and settled in for what I thought was going to be a pretty long haul. It was not. In an effort to not write out a transcript of the whole talk (because you should really, really watch it), here are the highlights:

Dr. Eric Mazur

The basic idea behind this is that Mazur realized his intro physics students did well on “conventional” physics questions (plug-and-chug, basically), but when asked fairly simple conceptual questions, they bombed (keep in mind, these are Harvard students). So Mazur changed the whole way he teaches. He says we need to “shift the focus from teaching to helping students learn.” Amen. So how does one do that?

Well, first of all, he has his students read the material for the day before they get to class (I know, I know, we all tell our students to do this, but without something like a reading quiz, why would they? All traditional lecture does is outline the chapter for them). Mazur uses this example: if you were teaching an English course and the reading for the day was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would you (the teacher) go to class and start reading it to them? Or even waste your time with a point-by-point plot summary? Additionally, the students would know that if they hadn’t read it, they shouldn’t bother coming to class as they wouldn’t be able to participate in discussion.

So when students come to class, they have already read the material (Mazur has a reading quiz on blackboard the night before each class, which always includes a question about what they found most challenging/confusing). This allows him to spend much less time “covering information” and much more time going in-depth with important concepts, applications, etc. From here, he basically uses clickers to assist him in the process of peer instruction, using the following steps:

1. Mazur puts a multiple-choice question on the screen. These are generally more conceptual and are often based on the responses he gets from the reading quiz.

2. Students spend a couple of minutes thinking individually about the question.

3. Each student answers the question with a clicker.

4. This is the important part – now Mazur has the students turn to a neighbor and explain to the other student why he or she picked his or her answer. The students discuss, and basically try to convince each other of why they think their answer was correct.

5. After peer discussion, the students all answer the question again. Hopefully (and usually, according to Mazur) the proportion of students answering the question correctly will have increased.

6. Finally, Mazur leads a large class discussion on the question to make sure to clear up any remaining confusion.

So simple, so easy, and SO effective.

One of the things I appreciated most about Mazur is that, like any good scientist, he collected actual data on the efficacy of this technique. He noted that even among scientists, once the conversation veers into teaching, most of us stop using data and start telling anecdotes. He then quoted someone (I missed who it was) as saying “the plural of anecdote is not data.” Which is maybe the best thing I’ve heard this year.

So he’s taken meticulous notes on variations he’s tried, as well as pre-test/post-test measures for his class and others (as well as his classes with traditional lecture and others’ classes with peer instruction), and to make a not-very-short story at least not-super-long, he basically found that peer instruction doubles the gains you see in traditional lecture. Not. Too. Shabby.

Other benefits:

1. Classes are easier for the teacher to prepare (often an argument of those teachers who are resistant to changing their lecturing ways)

2. This scales up really easily (often an argument of those teachers who are resistant to changing their lecturing ways)

3. As an instructor, you can constantly assess where your students are at, especially what they’re struggling with, which I assume we can all agree is better than being in the dark until they all fail their midterm.

4. Focusing on conceptual lessons seems to also increase students’ ability to deal with conventional “plug-and-chug” questions. Students that performed well on conceptual questions on Mazur’s exams also did very well on conventional. There was no correlation in the other direction.

5. This would work in basically ANY discipline, and most certainly in the hard sciences.

So basically, you should watch this talk. I know it changed the way I want to teach, and I can’t imagine it won’t at least change the way you think about teaching.

Aaaand it’s December. Once again, the semester accelerated and totally ran away with (from?) me. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll catch up with some of the many things that have been going on this semester, but I’m too excited about this to make the story wait its turn in the queue of upcoming posts. Today I got to be a judge for a high school science fair, held at Boston’s Museum of Science!

The seniors were all from Fenway High School, an pilot school in downtown Boston that’s been working really hard to get/keep their students engaged in the sciences (I have a group of them coming in for my Neuro Day in the spring!). Let me tell you – it shows that they’re being well trained. All of them had a better understanding of experimental design, independent and dependent variables, control groups, and hypotheses than many of the students I interact with at BU, and certainly better than I had when I was their age (a DECADE ago!). Anyhow, I was very impressed. Many of the students were dressed in suits and had clearly prepared/practiced talking through their projects. I was greeted with firm handshakes, tons of eye contact, and really thoughtful considerations of what did/didn’t work in their projects and what they’d do differently if they repeated the experiment. Among my favorites:

One student tested the effects of different brands of toothpaste on bacterial growth. He hypothesized that toothpastes with the most fluoride would cause the most inhibition of bacterial growth. So he made up some agar, populated it with bacteria, added toothpaste, and then measured the extent of inhibition! Turns out, the toothpaste he used with the most fluoride (Sensodyne) actually inhibited bacteria the least, but he had some ideas of what he wanted to try next, and seemed really excited about it.

Another student read up on the effects of listening to music while taking tests. She made up a basic multiplication test and had several classes take it while listening to baroque classical music (which she had found in her research – yes, research! – is supposed to increase critical thinking), hip hop/rap, or no music (YAY for whoever is teaching them about control groups!). She found that the hip-hop/rap groups did the worst, and baroque did the best – even better than no music at all! Awesome.

There were 71 participants in all, and even the not great ones (and there were some of those) still showed that they clearly understood the basic principles of the experimental method. This should give them a HUGE advantage if they go on to study the sciences in college, and I was just so happy to see young students so excited about what they were doing, and so engaged in a process that they’ve now participated in, and not just read about. Yes.

Also, I have to admit, the museum was super fun. I definitely took advantage of getting in for free, and once the fair was over, I wandered around among all the field trips and totally played with all the interactive exhibits (sometimes only stopping when I realized there was a line of second graders waiting behind me). It reminded me what fun it can be to explore that stuff for the first time. There were some funny moments too, including when I walked by the “where you come from” exhibit and heard a LOT of yelling. I peeked around the corner, and caught a glimpse of a bunch of high school boys watching what looked to be a fairly graphic birthing video. Oh, high school. How I do NOT miss you.

So that was today. There have been some ups and downs since starting this job (and I’m sure there will be more of both), but it’s hard to be anything but buoyant after a day like this.

EDIT: Just spent some time looking around Fenway HS’s website, and it’s AWESOME! There’s a link at the top right to all the teachers’ blogs…yes, TEACHERS’ BLOGS! Also, I love their motto: Work Hard. Be Yourself. Do the Right Thing.

Words to live by.

Tuesday was my very first lecture here at BU. It was for our neuroscience 101 course (NE101), and I was extremely nervous about it. There were some obvious factors playing into my nerves, not the least of which was that my boss and one of my co-postdocs came to watch it, which to me feels kind of like babysitting when the kids’ parents are still in the house (it’s not like you’d be beating the kids if the parents weren’t there, it just changes the dynamic a little). Additionally, it’s been a long time since I’ve given a proper lecture. Really, the last time I gave a real talk was at my dissertation defense back in March…so it’s been a while. One thing that surprised me when I was preparing wasn’t that I felt super uncomfortable with the material or anything, but I had seemed to totally lose the ability to estimate how long it would take me to get through the slides I had. As it turns out, I got through all but one slide, so I was pretty close after all!

The lecture was on sensation and perception – which is generally the subject of an entire semester-long course. I had 80 minutes. This struck me as challenging. On the other hand, I really like S&P, and it’s pretty easy to engage students through little demos and questions. Luckily, the students were delightful and seemed to really get into the material. So I basically tried to give them a framework for sensory systems (they all have to transduce an external stimulus, then the information is relayed to a primary brain area, and the primary brain areas generally show very organized topographical regions), then I talked about perception for the last third or so of the time. Some of the demos/activities I used:

-After talking about the auditory system I played a 2 minute clip of one of my favorite Dvořák pieces (serenade for strings in E, Op 22). I told them to close their eyes and think about the complexity of what was happening – that their cochlea (which are less than an inch long if unrolled) are allowing them to experience this incredibly rich phenomenon. So often with learning about sensory systems we spend all our time talking about how a single, pure tone is carried through the air, then the ossicles in the ear transfer it into a liquid wave, and the wave activates the appropriate part of the cochlea, then we hear that tone – and we forget to marvel a little bit at the breathtaking complexity of the system. I asked the students what they noticed after listening, and they thought of all kinds of things: tone/timbre, experiencing multiple notes at the same time, direction of the music (pitches traveling “up” or “down”), volume, sound localization, and hearing all the stringed instruments as separate. Basically, I think they got it, which was awesome, as I was a little nervous about how they’d react to being forced to listen to classical music.

-I did a couple of demos to illustrate how our sensory systems work in tandem, and really aren’t very effective when isolated. The first thing I had them do was to stand up (which, incidentally, I think helped wake them up a little too) and stand on one leg. Then I told them to continue standing on one leg but close their eyes. The result was actually really funny to watch. They all (about 120 of them) started wobbling around and kind of bumping into each other. I then asked them what that little demo tells us about proprioception (your sense of where/how your body is positioned) and vision, and they – of course – got it: our proprioception is informed by visual cues.

-The other sensory integration demo I had them do involved all of my leftover Halloween candy (apparently kids in our neighborhood don’t trick-or-treat). I passed bags of candy around and then had them hold their noses closed and eat half of it. It was really fun to hear some of their mumbled “whoa”s as they realized you experience the right texture, but really not much of the flavor at all (it really is surprising how little you can taste without your sense of smell – you should try it!). Then they ate the other half normally, which reinforced how differently it tasted. Again, the message was that you need both taste and smell to experience flavor fully.

Chuck Close - Self Portrait

The only other thing I did was to show quite a few videos. With the candy demo, I talked about anosmia – the inability to smell. Instead of talking a bunch about it, I showed them a video of a guy with anosmia. When we talked at the end of the day about the difference of sensation and perception, I wanted to talk about visual agnosias, where people have no trouble seeing objects, but they can’t identify them. Again, instead of trying to describe it ad nauseum, I showed them a clip from the Colbert Report (which they loved) of an interview with an amazing artist named Chuck Close, who does amazing portraits even though he has prosopagnosia (the inability to recognizefaces). I have to assume that they’ll remember more about prosopagnosia after listening to Close talking about his strategy of “flattening out” faces than they would if I tried to describe it. You should seriously watch that video.

So anyway, I think it went well. I’m hoping they won’t be expecting so many bells and whistles for the rest of my lectures, S&P is just really easy to insert those types of things into. But I hope to keep things exciting and keep the students engaged as much as I can! Next up: a week from today I get to teach intelligence and cognitive function – should be fun!

So. It’s almost November and, as usual, I am shocked at the speed at which the semester is going by! I’ve been sort of paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things I’ve wanted to write about here, which has obviously led to absolutely no writing at all. So in an effort to get back in the proverbial saddle, I give you: my semester thus far via bullet points!

-Starting at a new school is hard. I don’t know how things run, and I still don’t know a whole lot of people here. The good news is that the people I work with directly are very patient and supportive (both of the other postdocs in my position did their doctoral work here at BU, so they obviously know a lot more about how things work), but sometimes it’s still hard to be the New Girl.

-We’re about halfway through our first trial of a new class: NE203. This involves one of the most intensive labs that I have been a part of – and I got to help design it! However, we are now at the point in the semester when our planning is being put to the test. This week all the students will be performing stereotaxic lesion surgeries on rats. We have 75 students, working in groups of 3-4, so in the next 4 days they’ll be performing surgeries on about 25 animals. This is daunting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is our responsibility to assure various parties that these surgeries are being carried out according to protocol (and there are LOTS of requirements for that). Additionally, we are going to be doing some behavioral tests with these animals after surgery, so it’s important that they, you know, live. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

-For the first time ever, I’ve started student advising! It’s not as fun as it sounds! It’s not that bad, really. It took some work to understand all the University graduation requirements, AP credit, what courses transfer, etc., but I’ve been given mostly freshmen to meet with and they’re all pretty much on the same track, which makes it easier. The rough part is when you get anyone who isn’t a freshmen – so many course requirements have changed between last year and this year that it makes for a huge mess of confusion as to who needs to take what, who was “grandfathered in” under previous requirements, etc. Anyway, it’s certainly been an enlightening experience, and it’s at least nice to get to meet some of the students one-on-one!

-A week from today will be my second iteration of the High School Neuro Program. I’m excited to give it another shot, and I have a lot of ideas that I think will improve the progression of the day.

-A week from tomorrow I do my first lecture in our NE 101 class! It’s team taught, and it’s finally my turn for a few lectures. My first is on sensation and perception. All of it. In 90 minutes. Still not super sure how I’m going to manage that. But I’m really looking forward to being back in the classroom. Although now that it’s been a while, I’m feeling a lot more nervous than usual about being up there in front of all those students. MUST try to choke down the imposter syndrome.

-Our website is finally up! You can visit it and see what we’re up to!

-Another website you should visit: The Beginnings of an Education. Written by none other than my wonderful husband who just started a graduate program in History at Boston College! You know you want to stop by and say hello…

Today was my first go at our High School Outreach program, which consists of a class of high school students coming in for a day of intro to neuro, sheep brain dissections, and exposure to a college campus. So, all in all, I think it went pretty well! I had a group of 8 students, which was great, but they were all home-schoolers – which is also great, except that it meant none of them really knew each other, and they were really, really shy. There were also some really young kids – even a couple of 8th graders! Do you remember how to talk to 14-year-olds? I sure didn’t. But even with those…unexpected…issues, I had a lot of fun! The students responded fairly well to questions (I tried to keep things pretty conversational, especially because it was such a small group), and said they really enjoyed their visit!

Other unexpected issues (and what I plan to do about them):

-A couple of the students had a problem with the smell from the brains – not sure what to do about that one

-Keeping a conversation going with 14-17-year-olds during lunch – probably going to find some undergrads to have lunch with us next time, as I’m sure the high schoolers would have lots of questions for them

-Elucidating and reaching goals – it’s weird to be teaching without the eventual goal of having the students memorize and (hopefully) retain the information past the end of the class. In this situation, I have to re-assess what the goal is; it’s not to have students memorize neuroanatomy, it’s to get them excited about neuroscience. To this end, I tried to keep the neuroanatomy relevant by showing video clips of different disorders and then show them the corresponding structures in the brain (video of Clive Wearing/the hippocampus, video of cerebellar ataxia/cerebellum, etc.) This seemed to work okay and I think it helped the students keep from getting totally overwhelmed. I think next time, though, I’ll structure this even more. I found myself still rattling off structures nearby other areas we were talking about. Old habits die hard?

Anyway, it was a good first run, and I’m excited to revamp and try it again next month!

So I’m flying today.  I’m generally not a super nervous flyer, but today has me thinking. It’s the 10^th anniversary of September 11^th today. I’m flying out of Logan Airport in Boston – where one of the planes that day originated, although I don’t even remember which one. I just stopped at the Starbucks near my gate, where they had a sign up that said “This is a day to come together – free coffee and conversation, 8-11 Sunday morning.” The TSA guy in line shook his head and said “I can’t believe so many people are flying today.”

I feel like I’m noticing all the changes again: the plastic baggie of small bottles of liquids. Taking my shoes off.  My husband not being able to walk me to my gate to say goodbye. It’s amazing to me how fast these things started to feel normal, how quickly they were absorbed into our “post-9/11” consciousness. There were bigger changes too, but harder to identify.

I don’t think about this day very often – I didn’t lose anyone in New York, and my closest connection to anyone was that I was at Wheaton College, where Todd Beamer (one of the heroes of the plane that went down in PA) graduated a decade or so earlier. We now have a Todd Beamer Student Center at Wheaton; his wife spoke at homecoming the next year.

I was on a field trip for my first year biology class. We had gotten out of the school vans and were taking observations on some grassland areas. We all climbed back in, where one of our teachers had been listening to the radio. She said “we’re under attack.” We all thought she was joking about the mosquitos.

I feel like this was the first real “historical” event I’ve experienced. The kind of thing college freshmen today may not remember very clearly. They were 8 years old.

Ten years. I had turned 18 the day before it happened. Yesterday I turned 28.  I feel like soon I’ll be telling my grandkids about where I was that day, what it was like, what changed.

It’s the first day of classes here at Boston University. It is also my first day of school ever as a non-student. While part of me is very excited about the semester getting underway (we’ve put a LOT of work into the courses that are starting up), I’m finding myself feeling more reflective than anything else. It started a couple of weeks ago – you know that new feature on facebook that tells you what your status was a year ago? The other day mine was:

Just applied for my first postdoc! And to celebrate, I’ll be on a cruise for the next 5 days!

It feels like about a decade ago that I wrote that. I had just applied for the job I now have, and we were about to go on vacation with a couple of our best friends. I was still living in Texas, still a graduate student. It’s not that I’m unhappy about the changes that have taken place over the last year (I’d be crazy to not be happy to have my Ph.D. and be living in Boston instead of Waco), it just seems I’m not very good with change. And after six years of starting every fall at Baylor, I find myself missing my department, my routine, and my cohort.

So with the new semester starting, I’m trying to figure out how to settle in to my position here. The position, as I’ve mentioned before, is split between teaching and research, and assumes I’ll spend most of my time during the semesters working on teaching-related stuff, then spend the summers doing research. This is a great idea in theory, but this summer went really slow on the research end. I’m learning a whole lot of new stuff, and there’s just a really steep learning curve – plus I got Lyme Disease in July (seriously.), which took me out for a couple of weeks – which all resulted in quite a bit less work getting done than I’d hoped. SO, now I’m going to be trying to make up some time on that end while also working on the teaching stuff.

As far as teaching goes, I have a few primary responsibilities:

1. Managing the new sophomore lab we’re just starting up with one of the other PFFs (this is the lab that we spent most of the spring and summer piloting experiments/writing the lab manual for). There are 6 sections being taught by 3 grad student Teaching Fellows. Pretty sure this’ll keep me busy.

2. Running a high school outreach program this fall. This will consist of a one-time visit by science classes from schools in the area. They’ll spend the day learning a little basic neuro, meeting current undergrads, and doing a sheep brain dissection with me! (which I am thankfully very familiar with from teaching it at Baylor). I’m really excited for this. It’s some of the only hands-on teaching I’ll get this semester (other than a few lectures for the team-taught neuro 101 class).

3. Getting our new courses for the spring up and running.

What I’m kind of surprised about is that I’m legitimately bummed to not have my own class to teach this semester. This, of course, gets me all nostalgic about how much fun I had teaching my labs at Baylor (a neuroanatomy course in the fall, behavioral in the spring) and even teaching at MCC in Waco. I kind of miss the autonomy, I guess. And the teaching itself, of course. Although I have to remember that feeling a little uncomfortable (in lab, in teaching, etc.) is probably a good indication that I’m learning and growing. Right?

Well, happy beginning-of-the-semester anyway. More to come on the success/failure of our new lab as we get underway!

« Older Entries