And it’s taken me a long time to discover what sort of teacher I actually am.... I had a colleague who said to me, ‘oh you’re a narrative teacher’. I said, ‘I’m a what’? ..... I tell stories, essentially. I tell stories. I turn everything into a story in some way... and again, analytical chemistry lends itself to that. That you can link it to stories that are in the media, personal experiences, my own personal research experience. The student’s own experience. So it’s shared. So while I thought I was a straight forward didactic teacher, you know I just stood there but I’m not, I asked students, ‘alright who’s got experience of this’, and then I use a narrative form to get that across, and it seems to work.
Expert Insights
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I find that some students pick up what the mole concept is from the idea of grouping numbers of things that are every day size. |
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It now does come down to the quality of the presentation in terms of what you put on the PowerPoint I suppose, cos we all use PowerPoint. But I try most lectures to switch that off and use the visualiser and write things down by hand, where I can see that something is missing on the PowerPoint, or if I think the students haven’t got a particular message, don’t understand a reaction, don’t know about a mechanism. I’m happy to stop, go to the visualiser and write it down at the correct sort of pace, by which they can actually write it down themselves. |
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. |
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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 you’ve got to focus on the whole class not just the people at the front - the people at the back as well. Because sometimes smart people sit at the back as well, not just the dummies who want to get out. You’ve got to make sure you know everyone in the class. And the surprising thing is that most kids sit in the same place every lecture. So you can actually recognise where they are and who they are. You don’t know their names but there’s a pattern in the way they sit. You’ve just got to be aware of that. So the trick is to embrace the whole class with your - you know physically, just with your eyes and and the way you talk. You know, when you wave your hands, wave it to the back row. Make sure they’re involved. |
Too often I think students and others think that analytical chemistry is just that measurement step. When you use the AA, when you use the ... and doesn’t take into account, well all of the other stuff, what’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve? What are you actually trying to do, sampling, measurement, validating your results? Because only then when you’ve got a result, only then does it actually become information. |
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In the lecture theatre the best strategy there, where you’re confronted by all the constraints of the lecture theatre, is to stop and do stuff with the students, walk around amongst them, see what they’re actually doing... And out of that you might go back and address some aspect of it and revisit it or something like that or you might point them to some tools to use to work out some other aspect. So in the lecture theatre it’s very much for me a case of stopping and going and seeing what they’re doing and if you don’t then clearly you don’t know. |
It always seems like we're starting from further behind than a lot of the other sciences are because they seem to know less about chemistry when they get here. If I say ‘think of a famous physicist’ you probably already have thought of three. Then you could go outside and ask someone to think of a famous physicist and they'd probably think of at least one of the same ones. You do the same thing with biologists. If I say to think of a famous chemist … that's within chemistry circles, we can't do it. We can name one but you know if you go out there and say, ‘Who is this person?’ they've got no idea. So for some reason … we've never … chemists have never been able to popularise our topic, our content. We've never been able to make it exciting enough that someone who is not studying it still wants to know about it. And so I do think we've got a bigger challenge, for whatever reason. Maybe there's something about chemistry that makes it less enjoyable, I don’t know. There's definitely been an ongoing issue for us that it's not … people just don't know anything about it... Most people know Einstein's theory of relativity. You don't see that really in everyday, go, "There's the theory of relativity at work." Newton's Law, sure, you see those and you … but, yeah, everybody knows Einstein. And a lot of … I'll call them lay people, I don't like the term, but non-science people, could probably give you a hand wave explanation of what the theory of relativity is about, which is a pretty abstract thing. I mean, if we think of the equivalent types of things in chemistry that are that abstract, nobody has a clue. We teach them in third year to the remaining hard core people that are left. |
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I think it’s a key teaching topic, also because it’s teaching students to look at data and to interpret data, to assess which part of that data is going to get them to the answer and which part is exquisite detail that they can come back to later on. |
The influence has been to stand back and let the students do the learning, rather than for the teacher to be barnstorming them with teaching. |
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