You could identify people and you use it in a constructive way. But if you could show some identity, that you’re not a remote person up the front, that the big class is not anonymous, it just helps to break down that barrier. And once they trust you and once they like coming, that solves a lot of other problems - behavioural problems, learning problems and so on.
But if you’re honest, they’ll be honest right. And I think that’s really important. If you b*gger something up and you really do make a blue or even a little blue, tell them. Say ‘oh look this was wrong, you know this is what it should be’. So that’s important - to be honest, to be upfront. Recognise that we’re dealing, in 2015 or 2014, we’re dealing with OP1 to maybe 14. Recognise the breadth of that class.
At the start of every class my standard thing was ‘can you see me, can you hear me, can you see the slide?’ I would always look up the back for someone to put their hand up and always I would never talk to the front row. I’d always talk middle and back row and if someone was talking in the back row I’d pick them up and say ‘hey you, be quiet’ and then they know that I’ve seen them.
So the strategy is to reflect, to change things, to be flexible, to talk to them but not talk down to them, and certainly I would say to any young lecturer don’t be writing the lecture the night before. Know what your course is because then you can jump back and forth as you talk about something. You can say yeah we talked about this a week ago or something like that, you know. Know what you’re going to talk about, the whole thing, because then you can put it all together as a package.
The culture in the chemistry department was always lots and lots of content. And that’s changed now because you don’t need it, because they can find it another way, but you’ve got to give them the framework to understand the content.
The big picture is that in any topic there’re key principles, and if you as a lecturer can get across the key principles, that then sets them up to solve problems and to think about the other principles and how they connect. But if they don’t, if they’re not prepared to accept the fact that there are these key principles you need to understand then it’s not going to work.
We teach way too much stuff. We teach way too much stuff that we used to teach because students didn’t have the resources available to them that they’ve got now. I mean if you look at the resources - they’ve got textbooks, they’ve got electronic media, they’ve got Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling.
They [students] reveal great misunderstandings about the molecular world. So the difficulties and limitations are as a result of not spending sufficient time on getting them to think about this world, and spending too much time on doing. You know, we’ve got to spend some time, but you can’t spend too much time, I think, on a lot of the ideas that we do teach, and doing calculations and things that, really, no one else does. It’s really something that’s done almost like it’s make-work-type stuff.
The difference between chemistry as it happens in a flask, chemistry as we show it on paper or in a textbook and helping students to understand that these are representations and they're conceptual frameworks that we use to understand our discipline and so helping them put those two pieces together.
