Blogging on the Brain

Okay. At Gardner’s suggestion, I’m going to post my teaching statement. Please please please criticize it!

Throughout my time as a graduate student, I have gained much more teaching experience than I had expected. Even more surprising, I found I enjoyed teaching as much, and sometimes even more, than research. After receiving my masters degree in December of 2007, I began teaching classes for Tarleton State University (part of the Texas A&M system). The first semester I taught Animal Behavior, a senior-level psychology course. I had never taken a formal animal behavior course before, and I was given no materials for the course other than a textbook. It was bumpy at first, as I had never designed a course or written real lectures or exams before. Surprisingly, however, about halfway through the semester, I realized that I loved teaching. It was far more stressful than working with animals in my lab, but I found it to be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.

During my time with Tarleton State I was approached by Dr. Gardner Campbell, the director of Baylor University’s Academy for Teaching and Learning (ATL), who invited me to become the first Graduate Fellow for the ATL. I jumped at the chance to work with Dr. Campbell, as it promised a unique opportunity to focus on my burgeoning love of teaching. My responsibilities at the ATL have included blogging about neuroscience, teaching, and learning (www.hillaryblakeley.net), giving Seminars for Excellence in Teaching, consulting with other departments regarding improvement of courses, and collaborating with other graduate students around the University. Largely due to these experiences, I began to refine my “teaching philosophy.”

Among my favorite aspects of teaching college classes is that I can treat my students as adults. Students seem to respond well when treated with respect, and in my experience, they tend to rise to whatever standard the instructor has established. In a discipline like neuroscience, where there is still so much to discover, it seems important to initiate undergraduate students into the field by sharing our questions with them and inviting them to think creatively about problems they may one day solve. It seems more important to engage students in the mystery of the unknown than to maintain a false semblance of omniscience.

I have become increasingly convinced that use of emerging technology has the potential to transform higher education. Students are already actively creating content online; they are active participants in a virtual community, as evidenced by the fact that some of the most visited sites on the internet, like YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, are entirely comprised of user-generated content. I believe it would be a tragic loss to overlook the possibilities inherent for deeper student involvement through use of these tools. These technologies can be used in any number of ways: I have set up a wiki page for a reading group, attended a conference in SecondLife, and I plan to start a Facebook group for students in my lab course this semester.  As I mentioned earlier, I have also been blogging for almost two years, and my blog has become an incredibly useful record of my thoughts, experiences, and activities during that time. Blogging can be a useful way for students to keep a course journal, can also encourage students to process course material outside of the classroom, and can facilitate out-of-class discussions between students.

Participation in the learning process is also important in my teaching philosophy. Cognitive neuroscience tells us that passive listening is far less effective for long-term learning than meaningful engagement with information. Whenever possible, I try to engage students in group work, class discussion, or projects. I give my Adaptive Psychology students a project early in the semester that requires them to apply the principles we are learning to everyday life. They go somewhere to observe people, like a coffee shop, bar, or playground and note behaviors applicable to principles learned in class. They always come back brimming with excitement, saying that they watched two women fighting over a man at a bar (intrasexual aggression), or simply saw jealousy induction in a sit-com. There is nothing like the feeling of transferring passion for your subject to a student.

My ultimate goal as a teacher is not only to impart information, but also to help students manipulate it in such a way that they can carry that content with them outside of the classroom. I am lucky to teach such a fascinating subject, and I want my students to be as excited about neuroscience as I am. There is still so much we have yet to learn about the brain, and I am invested in both researching it myself and also helping to bring up the next generation of scientists.

The end of a semester always brings on a lot of crazy times – students studying everywhere, faculty writing and grading finals frantically, and everything seems to reach sort of a fever pitch before dissipating for the summer. Another phenomenon we see as teachers is general student desperation on the rise. Whether in the form of round-the-clock studying, begging for extra credit opportunities, or your basic psychotic break, the students are freaking out. Unfortunately, I recently saw this take the form of cheating.

Now, I’m very, very solidly anti-cheating. I am, however, even more solidly against stupid cheating. I won’t go into details, as I don’t think I’m allowed to, but seriously, kids, give us instructors a little bit of credit – we do actually read your assignments and papers, and we absolutely will notice if you copy and paste another person’s work and hand it in as your own.

In addition to the frustration/irritation of the whole ordeal, we now have to 1. decide what to do with the students (fail them from the lab? give them zeros on the assignments in question? and 2. report them. As graduate students, however, we’re apparently not allowed to report these ourselves, even though we’re the teachers of record for the lab (I have no idea how this makes any sense). So now we have to work through the instructor for the lecture course that goes with the lab course, and the whole thing is turning into a giant time-suck (which is leading me closer and closer to the psychotic break option listed above).

Sigh. At least this round’s almost over.

I am currently sitting in Baylor’s neuroanatomy lab, giving my first of two finals for the semester. My first thought was incredulity that it’s actually getting close to the end of yet another semester, although the end always seems to creep up on me.

As I’m sitting here, however, other thoughts are coming to mind, mostly about my students. Some of them I’ve had for two semesters now and most likely won’t interact with again. These are the ones I am thinking about now. Two full semesters in which I have (hopefully) taught them about MRIs, CTs, all kinds of neuroanatomy and disorders of the nervous system. My first hope is that I haven’t taught them any misinformation or made a bad impression or made them hate neuroscience because of how much work these labs are, but I feel like that should be the minimum that I hope for.

I realize that most of what these students learned this semester was pretty dry neuroanatomy, but I feel like they don’t fully realize how cool it is that right now, they’re each sitting in front of a pan with a slice or two of brain in it and they (hopefully, at least to some extent) understand what they’re looking at. Not only is that a very rare ability as far as the general public is concerned, but would have been literally impossible as of even 100 years ago.

Clearly I’m beginning to ramble at this point, but I guess I’m just feeling a little sad at losing some of the students that I’ve enjoyed having in class, of course I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the break and a new challenge next semester. I do, however, spend a lot of time around this point in the semester focusing on everything that I didn’t teach or those days when I didn’t have the energy to do my best for them. But I hope that all these students go on to do good things and that I didn’t get in the way too much, and that maybe – just maybe – they’ll remember a little neuroanatomy too.

The second day of SfN brought a couple of interesting presentations. The first was a talk by T.C. Sudhof of Stanford entitled “From Synapses to Autism: Neurexins, Neuroligins, and More.” I went to the session primarily because autism was in the title, plus the fact that I really didn’t know anything about neurexins and neuroligins, and I thought that maybe I should. As I sat through the talk and scribbled notes down, I felt like I was sort of following everything okay, but now looking back at my notes, I’m feeling a bit lost – I really should make myself do this the same day – sigh. Oh well. Here’s what I can make out from my notes:

Neurocircuitry is incredibly important to keep in mind when attempting to understand the massive processing capacity of our brains. These circuits have properties that depend on three things: 1. Intrinsic neural properties, 2. Synaptic connectivity, and 3. Synaptic properties. Neurexins and neuroligins function as synaptic cell-adhesion molecules, therefore modulating some of these circuit properties. Specifically, neuroligins increase synaptic density – sounds simple, right? Well, like most topics in neuroscience, it gets a lot more complicated really really quickly. Neuroligins do increase synaptic density, but sometimes these synapses aren’t really functional, and if they are, you may see increased excitatory post-synaptic currents (EPSCs) and no change in inhibitory post-synaptic currents (IPSCs), or you may see an increase in IPSCs and no change in EPSCs, depending, it seems, on which alternative splicing took place in the formation of the neuroligin.

So I think the moral of the story was that neuroligins may provide a common link for many of the current theories of autism (candidate genes, neuroanatomy, etc.) thus providing an underlying mechanism to explain at least a portion of the disorder. Cool stuff, but clearly I’m going to have to read up on it…

The second exciting session I went to was concerned with using neuroscience in the classroom, which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Unfortunately, it seemed to be more about how to teach neuroscience than use neuroscientific principles in the classroom. There was, however, one presentation (it was set up as a mini-symposium, which several speakers each talking for about 15 minutes) that caught my attention. The presenter, Dr. Sally Hoskins of City College in NY talked about using a curriculum called “CREATE” (see below) to use primary literature to teach science. I thought this was a very interesting idea, especially after having talked a bit with some people involved in Baylor’s Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) program, and some of the things they’ve been talking about with their “Natural World” course.

So, the first step in this curriculum is to find several papers from the same lab that the students will read in sequence of publication date. I don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to more people in the past, but what a great way to give students an idea of how science is really done! Not only will they see how long it takes to cultivate a line of research, but they’ll actually see a line of research and how the answers to one question almost always lead to more questions to answer!  So I thought that in itself was great. In addition, they outlined 6 steps (CREATE) the students use for each paper. Here they are:

1. C: Consider. Students take the paper and read the lit review section, and make a map of all the ideas and concepts in the paper. Every student’s map turns out differently, and it’s quite a bit of work for the student, as they’ll often have to spend lots of time looking up techniques or other things that they’re not familiar with.

2. R: Read. They’ll read through the paper and draw cartoons of what actually happened in the lab. They’ll also make annotations of the figures before they come to class.

3 E: Elucidate. Students use their maps from step 1 and re-write the question that’s being answered through the research

4. A: Analyze. Students transform any data tables and reorganize the information to aid in interaction with the material and understanding of the data.

5. T: Think of the next experiment. Students are not given the next paper from the lab until they’ve finished all these steps, so each student comes up with what they think the next experiment should be (I love this step).

6. E: Experiment. Students write their proposals for ideas from the previous step, and actually form mock grant panels to eventually pick one proposal from the class that they’d fund. Different groups almost always pick different proposals, again teaching students valuable lessons about grant writing and the differences in results just depending on the people sitting on the board, not necessarily the integrity of the proposal.

These steps are then repeated with the subsequent papers from the same lab. A couple other good ideas they put forth: First, the students never receive the abstract for the article. They found that, if given the abstract, students were much less creative in their reading and interpretation of the data. Second, the class often emails the author of the papers with a short survey – and they’ve actually received many replies! So I kind of love this idea. Now I just need to find a class to try it out on!

This week I was introduced to a concept by a colleague of mine that I found quite interesting. She mentioned a student that didn’t have a “learner’s attitude.” I had never heard that phrase before, but I immediately loved it – and for anyone who has encountered one of these students, it may mean something a little different to each person, but I think it probably carries the same sort of tone.

When I consider a student without a learner’s attitude, the first thing that comes to mind is someone who assumes (regardless of how ridiculous it may seem) that they essentially already know everything. I think this gets to be a problem mostly for juniors and seniors in undergrad. They already have the basics, and are now watching younger students struggle through those first steps which, understandably, can give way to some ego issues. The funny part then as a senior graduate student is that I know they don’t know everything (or anything close to everything), but they still walk around assuming nobody (even someone more educated) could really offer them any useful information anymore.

I think I’ve always fallen toward the other end of the spectrum – mostly falling prey to the “imposter syndrome” that plagues many graduate students. There’s a great line in a Ben Folds song (I love Ben Folds, if I’ve never mentioned that on here) that says (please excuse the profanity):

You get smaller while the world gets big, the more you know you know you don’t know shit. “The Whiz-Man” will never fit you like “The Whiz-Kid” did…

That line is pretty much what I felt like for at least the first three years of my graduate career (and I still often feel that way now). While it doesn’t feel great to feel like you don’t know anything, and under-confidence generally doesn’t work so well either, feeling like that does serve to develop a couple of important characteristics that I think need to be present to have a “learner’s attitude.”

1. Humility: This one is huge – and also very rare in academia. I still often find myself wondering what would happen if the scientific community would drop its collective ego and actually cooperate and collaborate with each other. Even if we could all simply allow for the possibility that we’re wrong or that there will probably always be someone out there who understands something more thoroughly or who has a different way of thinking to offer, I think any given discipline would benefit. As far as the individual learner, this too is important. The seniors in undergrad don’t yet know that in large part, the material in their classes – yes, even the upper level ones – has been simplified for ease of learning, but if they can hold on to some humility (or perhaps rediscover it in graduate school), they’ll make much better learners than those that continue to think that they know everything already.

2. Respect: This is an interesting one for me to think about as a graduate student. I have lots of undergrads that I teach (both at Baylor and the community college). Like I mentioned above, many upper level students are starting to get a little bit of an ego going, and they can be very disrespectful toward me as their teacher – I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have my PhD yet or I’m relatively young, but I’ve often had students speak to me as if they know more than I do. Now I, for my part, try to remember that paragraph above about humility, but I also have to wonder what is going through these kids’ heads that they speak to a fifth-year graduate student as if they’re more educated than I am? In addition, I think there needs to be some respect for whatever field you’re working in/studying as well. Do these kids really think there’s nothing more to neuroscience than a few undergraduate courses? Be serious.

3. Curiosity: This is obviously necessary to be a good learner, and if you assume you already know everything there is to know about a subject, there’s nothing driving any further investigation or even interest in looking into what might be going on.

So I know I talked about most of these in the context of undergraduates, but I think it’s equally (if not more) important for graduate students, post docs, and professors to maintain this learner’s attitude – because I think most of us lose it somewhere along the way.

I’d be interested to hear what qualities anyone else thinks would be part of this learner’s attitude too!

Every Friday my department has a “brown bag” meeting where one of the faculty or graduate students presents their work/ideas/data to the rest of us so we can keep up on what’s happening in different labs. This week Dr. Chuck Weaver (a cognitive neuroscientist) gave a great presentation entitled The Scholar in the Classroom: Rethinking & Enhancing Undergraduate Instruction. He mentioned how funny he thought it was that the people most interested in improving teaching practice, etc. are some of the least equipped to empirically test this stuff – which is where the cognitive neuroscientists come in! This is a talk he’s given to incoming faculty members and gives bits and pieces of to his classes, but it was very interesting and very informative. I’ll take you through some high points:

One of the first things he talked about was whether or not students are just “different” these days, what with access to so much information so immediately, and the ipods, texting, facebooking, and all the other technological gadgets around. For a while (and I think some of these people are still around), people said that instead of having students write papers/homework, etc., they should be assigned to make videos to post on youtube; and instead of in-depth lectures, you should just cover the basics so the students don’t have to pay attention so long. Turns out, this really isn’t helping anyone (to paraphrase Dr. Weaver – Until companies start hiring based on video-making skills instead of writing skills…)

So this led into some interesting data on the effects of multitasking on concentration/distraction. Not surprisingly, people in general lose more concentration the more distractors that are present. The sort of frightening thing, though, is that if you take “high multimedia” (HMM) users (those who often study in the presence of music/tv/texting) and “low multimedia” (LMM) users and ask them to do the same task with the same distractors, the HMM group is actually MORE impaired by the distractors than the LMM group! It’s as if the HMM group is more willing to switch tasks and so they lose the ability to suppress it – Dr. Weaver referred to this as “external ADHD,” which I kind of like.

After this, we spent some time going through what teaching &  study techniques are good or bad based on empirical data. So first, let’s look at study techniques:

-Rote Rehearsal vs. Elaborative Rehearsal: Essentially, it’s always best when trying to memorize things to try to relate the information to prior knowledge, and to organize that information to form new linkages with that old information.

-Flashcards: Depending on the situation, these may or may not be at all helpful. In a situation where you just have to memorize structures (chemistry, etc.), it’s kind of the only way to go. If you’re trying to memorize other information like vocabulary or more content-driven information, these are relatively ineffective especially if derived from “pre-studied” material like bold words in textbooks. If flashcards are going to be effective, it’s because the student needs to search through the material and determine for him/herself what information is important and generate those flashcards without the “assistance” of previous lists.

-Study Guides: Don’t give these to your students. If they ask about getting a study guide, reply “that’s an excellent idea, you should make one.” Again, like the flashcards, the generation effect of making it yourself and deciding for yourself what is important enough to remember is maybe the single most important variable in effective studying.

-Highlighting/Underlining: This isn’t studying and doesn’t confer really any benefits to the student other than perhaps some slightly increased focus during reading. It’s always much much better to outline as you read.

-Study Groups: As Dr. Weaver put it, “this is a great way to meet girls, not a great way to study.” Generally study groups aren’t terribly productive (especially if it’s a situation where several people each take a chapter, then exchange notes). If you want to be in a study group, always study with people smarter than you.

Now let’s look at some information on teaching:

-Testing: The more tests/quizzes you have the better. This essentially forces the students to study more often, get more feedback about how they’re doing, and avoid cramming for larger exams.

-Feedback: On exams, feedback should be slightly delayed (like the next class period, not the end of the semester). When reviewing exams, it’s very important to review the correct answers with the class, or chances are, the students will just remember the incorrect answers that they chose in the first place.

-Cumulative Finals: According to Dr. Weaver, this is non-negotiable. A non-optional cumulative final should be in every class that you teach. There is clear evidence that this is going to increase the long-term retention of the course  material.

There was a lot more information in the presentation, mostly in reference to practice/mastery and good vs. poor students, but I think I’ll save some of that for another time. Hope this was maybe helpful or at least interesting!

I just met my new Adaptive Psychology class this morning, and while I can’t believe we’re already in the first week of the term, I think it’s going to be a fun semester. No matter how resistant I feel as the beginning of the semester approaches (especially the fall semester), I always still get a little excited when I get to talk with my students for the first time – especially for this class, which is a lot of fun to teach.

This will be my second time teaching the course for Tarleton, and I find myself caught between really wanting to improve the class from what I did last time, and wanting to conserve my time and energy and just use all my lectures/methods/etc. from last year. It just took I so much work the first time through the course – reading the textbook and writing lectures and coming up with exams and quizzes – that not only do I often not feel like using that much time again, I also feel like it would be a waste of the previous time spent if I didn’t use that work again.

I’m sure I’ll end up using quite a bit of my preparation from last year, but I really need to make time to sit down and figure out how I can make things work better and how I can get the students to engage more. Last year it was pretty much a lot of lecture, then projects/presentations from the students. Anyone have any thoughts on how to (generally) make a course more engaging? Are there things out there that you veteran teachers do to stay more interesting while lecturing? To pull more students in? To get them to participate? As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated!

The end of another semester. Students are scattering, grades have been turned in, and I actually have some time to breathe (and write). I think overall it was a good semester, or at least that the good outweighed the bad. The bad is mostly that I let my other responsibilities take over time that I really needed to devote to lab work. The good, however, is a slightly longer list.

First, I completed my first semester as the graduate fellow with the ATL, which was a total blast! I got to give my seminar on neuroscience and learning (something I never would have dedicated as much time to had I not had a good excuse to), meet some great people at Baylor, and learn a WHOLE lot about using technology (like this blog) to open up conversations and get advice from all of you out there that know a whole lot more about, well, most things than I do. And to top it off, I’m being sent to San Diego in a few weeks to be a representative for the ATL and the NCORE conference! It’s a tough job

Second, I completed my third semester teaching at the community college. It was an interesting process this time through because it was the first time I wasn’t scrambling to write lectures and structure the class as I went (I taught the same class last spring). While it was really nice to have my lectures ready to go, I could feel myself getting a little lazy about teaching rather than using the extra time to continue to improve the class or add new material/activities. For those of you who have taught the same courses for long periods of time – how do you keep yourselves motivated to keep making the class better? I don’t want to be one of those teachers who you can tell is bored with the material or isn’t totally invested in making the class the best it can be. I’ll have to try harder next semester when I’m back to teaching Adaptive Psychology. On a good note, though, that class is already full and was the second one (behind stats, which is required) to reach capacity during registration!

Third, I got to teach a new lab at Baylor: Behavioral Neuroscience. It was pretty great getting to actually teach something I’m interested in rather than just supervising students or teaching stats (no offense to anyone out there who likes stats – it’s just not my thing). Next semester I’ll be teaching the lab for Clinical Neuroscience, which is mostly a neuroanatomy lab using sheep brains. Not only should it be fun to teach (if you’ve never been in a room with 20 undergrads and as many sheep brains, you should try it), it should also be a good review for me as it’s been a couple of years now since I’ve taken neuroanatomy. Also, a big thanks to Becky Helfand for walking me through all of this stuff, I’d be lost without her!

So it was a busy semester, and I’m a little worn out, but in that nice kind of way when you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. This summer I’ll be taking my LAST CLASS EVER – molecular genetics – for the last few credits of my biology minor, then I’ll be back to the usual grind…which I think I kind of like.

This week I graded the first exam in my Animal Behavior class (the one I teach at the community college). This is always an interesting experience for me and my students, as the course material and test format tend to be a bit more challenging than they’re used to. As it turns out, the exam average this semester is quite a bit better than last time I taught the class – 66%. I don’t generally curve exams if there are students that still manage to do well on them, and on this exam I had three students make As, so I left the exam scores as they were. Let me tell you, there were some unpleased expressions as I mentioned this to the class after handing their exams back. This process always starts me thinking about several different topics that I seem to wrestle with pretty much every semester:

Should I make the class easier?

My initial reaction: of course not. I teach this class at community college, but the program I teach for is an offshoot of Texas A&M University and these students are working toward bachelor’s degrees in psychology. Animal Behavior happens to be a senior level course, and having been a psychology major myself, I don’t think that the material or the tests are inappropriately difficult. I have, at different times, both been praised by students for offering a challenging course, and been a little bit chewed out for making the course too difficult. (One time I actually made a very nice pregnant lady cry because of a low exam grade – not my finest moment). So I generally end up sticking to my “of course not” answer to the question of making the class easier, but every semester I ask myself the same thing as I’m rattled by the poor scores on my first exams.

Should I curve exams?

The answer to this question is a little less clear to me. Generally my exams have a multiple choice section and a short answer/essay section where I give five prompts and let students choose four of the five to answer. When I run the scantrons, I do the standard item analysis and check any questions that half or more of the class missed. If I find any of those questions confusing/unfair (I don’t use a test bank, and I still sometimes make mistakes writing m.c. items) I throw them out; the rest I leave in. The essay prompts all cover material that I have stressed in lectures. The point is, I try to be fair and clear about the questions I ask. I don’t attempt to write “tricky” questions or to pick obsolete points out of the material to trip the students up. Yet scores on this exam ranged from 96% to 27%…which leads to my next question.

Should everyone be able to get a college degree?

This is the most challenging of the questions I ask myself. Before I became a teacher, I would have said that absolutely, with enough dedication and work, everyone should be able to acheive a college-level education. Now that I’m on this side, however, I’ve definitely started to wonder. I have had students in my classes (once again – senior level college classes) who don’t write complete sentences on exams or in papers, can’t seem to grasp simple concepts, and don’t seem to have the ability or motivation to study or even read assigned chapters from their textbooks. I currently have several students who have failed this class with me once before and are doing no better this time around than last. Certainly some of this can be attributed to poor study skills, poor public school systems, etc., but still – should someone who can’t write a complete sentence be allowed to graduate from college with a degree in any subject?

This brings up a topic that was discussed at length in one of my graduate courses at Baylor – the idea of being average. Nobody wants to feel average or mediocre, and no parent would admit that their child is merely average, but the fact of the matter is that, well, sort of by definition, half of the population is either at or below average. Certainly dedication and hard work can make up for quite a bit of intellectual mediocrity, but are there some people that just won’t make it? Are there some people that have but only because teachers didn’t want to have them as students again the next year? I’m afraid I’m coming off as terribly elitist, but I promise that’s not my intent (most of the time I think I’m probably one of those mediocre students who happens to work hard enough to pull it off). It just seems that especially with the decreasing value of a bachelor’s degree we should ask what’s going on - decreased standards of admission? graduation? teaching? testing? I don’t know.

So that brings me to the end of my tirade for the day. I would very much appreciate any feedback that other teachers or students out there might have regarding any of this. Clearly I’m still mulling over a lot of this myself, which I am sure to do at the grading of the first exams for many semesters to come.

So this feels weird. Kind of like writing an email to nobody in particular. Clearly I’m very new at the blogging thing, and I’m hoping I’ll start to feel a little more comfortable as I acclimate to the process. I guess I’ll start with a little about me.

As far as my professional life, I consider myself first and foremost to be a scientist. I’ve always been a scientist, really – from my early days of reading about Jacques Cousteau and learning what “SCUBA” stands for (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), to examining the physiology and proportions of animals through my (very limited) artistic endeavors. At some point, my curiosity found direction in the mystery of the brain. I got my MA in neuroscience in December of 2007, and I’m now working on my PhD. Let me just say that if you ever encounter an awkward silence in conversation with me, it’s a safe bet that you can break it by bringing up anything remotely related to the brain. I am utterly fascinated and in awe of the complexity, elegance, and power of our least understood organ.

In addition to being a scientist, I am also a teacher, and a fairly new one at that. Just over a year ago, I started teaching at a community college in the area after essentially no other teaching experience (just some very minimal TA responsibilities for labs at Baylor). I took the job because I thought it would be good experience, look good on my CV, and, let’s face it, anyone who’s ever lived on a grad student stipend knows that it never hurts to earn a little bit extra on the side. So I jumped in the deep end.

The class was animal behavior. They handed me a textbook and about two rules and told me to go for it. A class of 30 for an hour and a half twice a week.  I started off the semester frankly terrified – that I would say something stupid, say something wrong and have a student correct me, or, worse, say something wrong and have the students believe me. I mostly lived in fear that first semester. Despite what I felt was a shaky start, I accepted the offer to teach a different course the next semester. This one was adaptive psychology. I started off the semester with about the same anxiety as the first, but then about halfway through, I realized something that came as quite a surprise: I was enjoying myself. The course content was interesting, sure, but more than that, my students were responsive and excited about the material; they were asking questions – questions that I knew the answers to! I found myself looking forward to the mornings I got to teach, not dreading them. I am now teaching the animal behavior course again, and I have to admit, there’s nothing like that feeling you get when leaving a classroom after a great class. I think I might be hooked.

So that brings me to the impetus for this blog. I was fortunate enough to be offered a position as the graduate fellow with the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor, a position which gives me the opportunity to investigate the intersection of two things that I’m very excited about: neuroscience and education. That’s what this blog will be about (more or less). So stay tuned if you’re interested. More coming soon…