Why You Shouldn't Let Students Sabotage Your Lecture

I am finishing up my second semester of Anatomy & Physiology and one of the most surprising things has been the lack of student engagement. The lecture hall holds about 70 students, stadium-style seating, and students talk through entire lecture periods. It is so loud, obvious, and distracting, that I've moved around the room numerous times to try and escape the chatter. I finally found the best option in the front row, although I can still plainly hear various conversations. Not once--until yesterday--has the instructor, a 25-year veteran faculty member, called the students on this behavior. She didn't acknowledge the behavior in class, but rather sent this email rant right after class:

"I thought it was especially bad today. The GFR control mechanisms can be difficult to explain…what with afferents and efferents and glomerular pressure up and down and sideways with GFR going up and down. I know who was talking because I had time to be distracted and look…I would not be showing up on my doorstep being confused about this topic right before your lecture final exam since you gabbed all the way through lecture…much to the chagrin I am sure of your fellow students. I am beginning to feel like a stand up comic with a bunch of drunks heckling me…but I don’t get to take an exam and get a grade on my performance, do I? For you who tried to hear me above the din, thank you so much for being mature and listening…I don’t know what to do about the gabbers…it only gives them their 15 seconds in the spotlight if I yell at them in class…and they will just do it next time as well. How sad. "

I wonder if she acknowledges that she plays a role in this lack of student engagement? Don't get me wrong--students should not be talking, Facebook-ing, texting, or gaming during her lecture, all of which happens on a regular basis. But if I learned anything in my little experience teaching it's that you have to call students on their behavior, immediately when it is happening, or they will keep doing it.

Students would also leave all the time right in the middle of her lecture. She would be droning on about skeletal muscle contractions or the instrinsic conduction system of the heart, and several students would just leave, on a daily basis. One day after class she sent the following email:

"Is there some reason why people are constantly leaving the classroom suddenly this semester? In my 25 years teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology, I have never had this happen so routinely or so abruptly. Anyway, it is starting to make my mouth draw into a tight little line, so that must mean that it is irritating and distracting me. Was wondering if there was a reason for it that was known…or if not, could you please sit nearer the front of the room? It’s like people just suddenly bolt from their seats for no reason. Will try to be more tolerant, but it’s starting to strike me as being rude…which is not a good thing for my attitude while lecturing. Sorry to complain, but what in the world is going on with this? Probably some perfectly normal explanation."

I think this is really sad, that you get to a point where you are either opposed or unwilling to update your approaches in order to engage your audience. This class could be so interesting, with all the anatomy & physiology material available online that is interactive, all the ways that she could relate the topics to current health issues, and yet she lectures straight from the textbook, displays dense amounts of text under a document camera, and uses hand-drawn diagrams when she could be playing video clips or animation or any various multimedia available online. She even shows SCREEN CAPTURES of the obviously dated computer simulations that she assigns outside of class, rather than demonstrating the simulation in real-time on the computer.

Most confounding to me is her lengthy discussions of her circa 1980 published research about horses, given that this is a teaching university, not a research university, and she clearly hasn't updated her teaching practices in about 20 years. Not to mention that this is a human anatomy & physiology course.

Now, I've only had three college level science courses in the past year, but so far I have a bad impression. Science should be interactive, engaging, thought-provoking, and hands-on. So far all I know is that I will show up to a lecture and absolutely nothing will be expected of me other than to sit there passively and listen.

"It's real lullaby material," one student said to me on the way out of class one day. "Puts me right to sleep."
"It's so sad," I replied.
"I'm used to it," she said. "I'm a science major."

Finally, some justice for Rosalind Franklin?

In an earlier post, I criticized my Biochemistry textbook for its failure to mention Rosalind Franklin as a key player in the discovery of the DNA double helix. My A&P textbook is Anatomy & Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function, by Saladin, Fifth edition, Copyright 2010. Maybe it is a sign of the times. I am including their section on Franklin below, as it is the first time I’ve seen a science textbook give credit where credit is due:

Discovery of the Double Helix

Credit for determining the double-helical structure of DNA has gone mainly to James Watson and Francis Crick. The events surrounding their discovery form one of the most dramatic stories of modern science—the subject of many books and at least one movie. When Watson and Crick came to share a laboratory at Cambridge University in 1951, both had barely begun their careers. Watson, age 23, had just completed his Ph.D. in the United States, and Crick, 11 years older, was a doctoral candidate in England. Yet the two were about to become the most famous molecular biologists of the twentieth century, and the discovery that won them such acclaim came without a single laboratory experiment of their own.

Others were fervently at work on DNA, including Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London. Using a technique called X-ray diffraction, Franklin had determined that DNA had a repetitious helical structure with sugar and phosphate on the outside of the helix. Without her permission, Wilkins showed one of Franklin’s best X-ray photographs to Watson. Watson said, “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” It provided a flash of insight that allowed the Watson and Crick team to beat Franklin to the goal. They were quickly able to piece together a scale model from cardboard and sheet metal that fully accounted for the known geometry of DNA. They rushed a paper into print in 1953 describing the double helix, barely mentioning the importance of Franklin’s 2 years of painstaking X-ray diffraction work in unlocking the mystery of life’s most important molecule. Franklin published her findings in a separate paper back to back with theirs.

For this discovery, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Nobel Prizes are awarded only to the living, and in the final irony of her career, Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958, at the age of 37, of a cancer possibly induced by the X-rays that were her window on DNA architecture.

Also included are pictures of Rosalind Franklin, one of her X-ray photographs, and Watson and Crick with their model of the double helix.

A Microscopic View of Life

Here is a glimpse from my biology class. There are four main types of tissue in the body: nervous, muscular, epithelial, and connective tissues. Each tissue is specifically adapted to fill specialized roles and functions within our bodies. The following are some of the microscope slides we looked at. I find the complexity and specialization to be intriguing, beautiful, and miraculous.

Nervous tissue: The cell body of a neuron and its cell processes (axons, dendrites), responsible for transmitting electrical impulses throughout our bodies.

Muscular tissue, specifically skeletal muscle: Highly striated (striped) cells called muscle fibers (lower half of the slide), which are responsible for our voluntary movements. These cells are specialized to contract in response to various types of stimuli.

Muscular tissue, specifically cardiac muscle: This slide is specially stained to see the tiny vertical lines called intercalated discs, which are responsible for cell-to-cell communication in the heart. Note the faint striations in cardiocytes (cardiac cells) as compared to the skeletal muscle slide.

Epithelial tissue, specifically stratified squamous epithelium: Many layers of flat cells comprise the inner lining of the esophagus. Why? The food swallowed is quite abrasive and wears away at the epithelium. By having many layers of cells, there are always new cells developing in the deeper layers to replace the cells being worn away at the surface next to the food. In general, epithelial tissue covers body surfaces, lines body cavities, covers surfaces of organs and glands, and more.

Epithelial tissue, specifically pseudostratified columnar epithelium with cilia: The cilia move mucus up out of the trachea. The mucus captures inhaled particles. In this way, particles from the air don’t travel to the deeper areas of the respiratory tract.

My Problem with Science Education

And here is my fundamental problem with science education. As I’m reading my Biochemistry textbook (published in 2007) I notice that scientists who made (apparently) important discoveries are highlighted in the sidebar of the textbook, complete with their picture and a profile of their scientific accomplishments. It’s not long before I start to realize they’re all male, and this starts to bother me. So one afternoon I sit down and go through the entire book, scouring the sidebars for examples of female scientists. There are 14 scientists featured and only one female scientist, Marie Curie, who is labeled as a “pioneer in radioactivity.” This is the kind of thing that urks me. And it gets worse.

Let me reiterate that this textbook was published in 2007.

Chapter 22, on ribonucleotides, in its discussion of DNA and RNA, features Watson and Crick as the discoverers of DNA, for which they later shared a Nobel prize. There is, of course, no mention of chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was the basis for Watson and Crick’s discovery, which they never got her permission to use, nor did they ever give her any credit. Although this is a highly disputed and controversial topic (there are numerous books written about it, such as The Double Helix, by Watson and Crick), there is no mention of this in the textbook. Black and white. Definitively. Watson and Crick discovered DNA. Whatever.

And it’s not like there aren’t opportunities to feature female scientists. For example, there is an extended discussion of the polyamide Kevlar, used in place of steel in bulletproof vests, and how the uniform system of hydrogen bonds that holds the polymer chains together account for the “amazing” strength of Kevlar. There is a picture of the hydrogen bonding pattern, but no mention of the female chemist Stephanie Kwolek, who synthesized Kevlar while working as a chemist for DuPont.

Why does this matter? Because I’ve done research on the lack of women in science and engineering fields, and the research says that women need to see examples of positive, successful women in science and engineering. Textbooks like this inadvertently send the message that science is a male domain.

Avoiding Science & Other Thoughts

My decision to avoid science was pretty much solidified the first semester of my freshman year in college, during Chemistry 101. The professor was a callous, stern older woman who gave long lectures without betraying a trace of emotion, multiple choice tests that required rote memorization, and long, boring labs with titrations that I found tedious and uninspiring. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I’d known how titrations could be used to develop a medication for a sick child, or to find the cure for a disease. Although I got As and Bs in Chemistry, Precalculus, and several Computer Science courses, I assumed I wasn’t good at science. I’d always been an A student in high school, and when that didn’t come as easily in college, I took no more science courses than the minimum requirements for my B.A. It wasn’t until twelve years later, after my mother had a stroke that I began to rethink my decision to avoid science. Research on the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields includes many strategies for creating gender-inclusive STEM classrooms: smaller classes, increased percentage of female faculty, outreach programs as a bridge between high school and college, cooperative learning vs. competition, recognition of different communication styles, hands-on projects, group work, and content that is relevant to society. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I’d experienced a different type of science classroom.

There have been two times in my life when it seemed that the universe grabbed me and shook me out of my complacency. The first, when I was evacuated from the corporate headquarters of the company where I worked, from the Sears Tower, on September 11th, 2001 and was subsequently stranded in Chicago. After four years of feeling ambivalent about my place in the corporate world of software development, I quit my well paying job, sold my house, and went to graduate school.

The second time was in November of 2005, when my 60-year-old mother had a stroke that deprived the left side of her brain of oxygen, and left her with permanent left-side weakness. Ironically, this experience, the biggest test of strength and courage my family has ever known, has also been a blessing. I would never want my mom to suffer again, but she has led me to value every moment, to believe that I have the ability to change my direction if I’m not happy. And it is seeing my parents, happier together than they’ve ever been, which is my foundation.

My plan with the Master’s degree was to pursue teaching at the college level. That was before I learned that teaching English at the college level with only a Master’s degree essentially pays minimum wage, and offers no promise of any (let alone permanent) employment. And isn’t this surprising, given that our English dept. relies on almost as many instructional academic staff working in these tenuous circumstances, as they do tenure-track PhDs. This is just as bad, if not worse, as the abuse of limited term employees in higher education (but this is all another story).

Alas, I just met with my manager, and he made no mention of the agenda-less meeting drama! I am so surprised I expected that he would have a diagram about it, which he would narrate. He had another diagram, which he did narrate, but at least for now it sounds like I’m free to make my own decisions about meeting agendas.

I’m writing this all just as I found out about yet another tragedy with a friend’s struggle to have another child. My heart breaks for her, and yet I am without words. It makes all my complaints this week seem so trivial.