• I taught three courses:  General Physics II (our intro physics for non-majors course), Physics of Music, and Modern Science Skills Lab. The latter was new to me. All seemed to go pretty well, although I have a definite list of items to improve upon for the future.
• I had a few pieces of writing come out, including reviews of Why Geology Matters (here and here).
• I attended the April Meeting of the American Physical Society. One of my students, Zachary Kwong, presented a poster and did very well. You can read more about that here.
• We graduated five seniors from our department: three physics majors, one chemical physics major, and one geophysics major. They will be greatly missed, but we are proud of them and excited to see where life will take them.
• I resigned from my contributing writer position at ProfHacker. I was proud to have been associated with them for two years, but the time has come to move on and put some focus on other projects.
• My Faith and Learning paper proposal was accepted. (This is a document that all Wheaton faculty must produce as a part of tenure requirements.)

So now we’re in summer research season. I have two students working with me on projects in ultrasound and NMR. Additionally, I am trying to finish up a separate journal article. Juggling these three projects makes for a sometimes scattered brain. This summer, I’m trying two new techniques to help me stay organized:

1. I don’t meet with students before 10am each day. This gives me at least two hours of time that I can focus on my own projects before I start interfacing with theirs. Plus, it relieves them from having to be “on” as soon as they arrive each morning. They are able to settle into work, review what they did the previous day, make some progress, and get ready to discuss their status with me at 10am.

2. I started creating a table for each research week in my daybook. There are columns for each of my students, along with spaces for me to enter info about their work on each day of the week. Here I record what we talk about in each meeting, defining goals, reporting on how they went, reading assignments I’ve given, etc. It has been really helpful for keeping up with what they are doing and for making sure we are seeing good progress.

As an aside, spring in Wheaton has been a joyous experience for me the past two years. There is a beautiful sequence of flowers everywhere; a few weeks ago it was fragrant lilacs, and now we are entering peony season. (And you can bet that this Southerner pronounces them “pe-OH-ny.”)

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user F.D. Richards]

Another purpose of my attendance was to get up to date in the latest findings in physics. I won’t bore my primarily non-particle/nuclear/astro physics readers with the details of the basic research talks I found interesting (although there were some pretty interesting discussions about the mass of the top quark). But a highlight that may be of interest to most people were the plenary talks given by the 2011 Nobel Prize winners Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess. They recounted the work that led to their Nobel prizes in a manner that I found interesting, because it highlighted the personal development of the research findings. Perlmutter discussed how flexibility in research expectations (especially as regards funding) was, in his view, absolutely necessary for allowing him and his colleagues to pursue their interests. I found Riess’ review of his lab notebook and email threads particularly illuminating, especially because I teach advanced lab and am always encouraging our students to attend carefully to the process of science, not just the end result.

April APS was also a great time of connecting with others. I was glad to meet up with Mary Kidd, a postdoc on the Majorana project who has just secured a faculty position and will be starting at Tennessee Tech this fall (she and I have a number of mutual friends and grew up not too far from each other in east Tennessee); Ko Sanders, a very talented mathematical physicist; and John Burk, a high school physics teacher who is a fellow member of Global Physics Department.

I’m not sure if I’ll attend APS in the future; I need to start attending AAPM and ISMRM meetings because they are closer to my immediate research interests, which will require me to start attending Winter AAPT instead of the summer one because of the conflict between AAPM and AAPT. But it was a great opportunity to be able to attend this one.

Me loading a sample into the new NMR

The science division at Wheaton was thrilled to install a brand-new Bruker 400 MHz Avance III NMR last fall. However, because our focus during the school year is teaching, it’s been only until now that some faculty and students have had the time to get the machine really up and going according to our workflow. We’ve had a few exciting developments this week and I want to share them.

First, we are happy to report that the machine is indeed performing better than our previous NMR (which I think was around 20 years old and definitely at a lower field.) Dr. Tim Wilkinson of the chemistry department shared with me today a previous spectrum of  p-anisalacetophenone he recorded with the old machine, along with a spectrum he acquired today with the new one. We are most definitely getting better resolution on samples that are used to train organic chemistry students to identify compounds.

Here’s a link to the spectrum acquired with our new machine, and then a spectrum acquired with the old one.

Secondly, student Kelsey Boes (working with Dr. Peter Walhout of the chemistry department) successfully set up our first water suppression experiment. Kelsey has been a very intrepid student worker, very patient with what is often a very finicky piece of equipment. I was excited to read about her success in our log book (good lab practices!) and then talk with her in person later and see how happy she was about the good results.

I’m currently working on documenting basic processes, such as acquisition and data transfer to user desktops for processing. Then I’ll be working on validating some relaxometry experiments, such as those for measuring T1, T2, and magnetization transfer of samples.

The new system seems to be working very well, other than some easily-fixable, not-too-surprising hiccups along the way. We really appreciate Bruker’s great tech support and patience with us as we get up and running (and make a lot of calls to them!).

Thoughts on the role of an instructor in teaching are a dime a dozen all over the internet. You’ve got your advocates for flipped classrooms, lecture capture, scaling up – it goes on and on. In this post, I want to express some thoughts I’ve had on another angle: that instructors are transmitters of a scholarly tradition.

A few weeks ago we had Faculty Development Day here on campus. It’s a day that is set aside each semester for, well, faculty development, which can mean many things. This time around, Maryellen Weimer spoke to us about “Reinvesting: Career-long Growth in Teaching.” After some introductory remarks we polled the faculty (using clickers) to have them vote for five out of nine topics that most interested them, such as classroom management, how to keep up with pedagogy findings, and best practices for guiding discussions. We chose the five topics that had the most interest, assigned tables where faculty could gather with other faculty of the same interest, and learned from each other.

I joined a guiding discussions group and was pleased to see that a wide variety of disciplines was represented: another colleague from physics and others from mathematics, history, ancient languages, foreign languages, English, and theology. We talked about challenges we faced and shared ideas. One challenge described by a colleague from ancient languages struck me as particularly poignant: she said that once on end-of-semester evaluations a student had commented, “I didn’t pay to take this class from other students. I want to hear what you have to say about this topic.” She said the comment had made her pause and ponder.

She told our group that she had realized that, as professors, not only are we teaching knowledge and the ways of getting knowledge, but we are also the embodiment of a scholarly tradition that passes  down a line from our advisors to us, from our advisor’s advisor, and further on back, and another similar line that passes through our teachers.  And she realized that that passing on of scholarly tradition is part of what a student is signing up for in a class, whether they realize it or not. I’m a different physicist than any of my colleagues because of my background of having been trained by an engineer who became a physicist, an astronomer, a physicist-turned-all-around-imaging guru, and many others. My colleagues are different from me because of their training. Ostensibly we all took the same types of core graduate courses, but how we took in that knowledge was in some part affected by who taught it.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since my colleague brought it up. My contributions to my students are more than just the knowledge I help them learn. Whether they’re physics majors or not, they are picking up from me the ways of doing physics – really, of taking on knowledge at all – that can in some ways be greatly affected by more than just the formal coursework I took. I chose a profession that is always ensconced in learning. I (attempt to) model for them how to learn, and my ways of doing things have been developed by many threads of people, all with incredible nuances and personalities that affect their approach to physics, and science in general. It’s marvelous! I’m subconsciously (or now, more consciously) passing on those traditions to my students.  And that element of teaching can’t be replicated by textbooks or online learning modules.

[Image of Boltzmann (who is in my physics lineage) Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user martinroell. HT to my friend Jason Ingalls for the post title.]

I’m so glad to have discovered it this school year. I’ve learned a lot from the sessions I’ve been able to virtually attend. Here’s a case in point. Last semester, Andy invited participants to submit clips of teaching for feedback from members. Since a student of mine had some absences due to illness and I’d worked with my school’s media resources department to record a few classes, I had some recorded material ready to go.

I submitted the clips, which I gathered from a session from my intro course that happened to be on the ideal gas law. Fellow group members viewed them and then during one GPD meeting I received feedback from the group for about 15 minutes. I used a microphone to be able to respond to questions and comments that came either verbally from the moderator and a couple of other users, or from the users as a whole from chat within our online meeting system.

I was blown away by the feedback I got and the level of impact it’s made to my teaching. First, let’s consider what kind of usual feedback a professor like me gets. In my previous position, the only time any fellow faculty member viewed my courses was when a colleague of mine and I took the initiative to start a voluntary peer observation program. At my current institution, I had one observation my first semester and will presumably get another sometime this semester in time for me to complete a formal second-year review. But those are and will be fairly perfunctory, more of a way to check for satisfactory teaching performance rather than being geared towards real improvement. Of course, along the way I’ve gotten the standard end-of-semester formal evaluations from students and done my own informal mid-term evaluations. All of these have been somewhat helpful for avoiding terrible classroom habits but not terribly illuminating.

When my teaching session was observed via GPD by my peers at other institutions, a major piece of feedback came out: the need for me to emphasize physical meaning behind proportional thinking in equations. That statement doesn’t seem to really explain it very well. Here’s some context: in the teaching clip that was viewed, we looked at the ideal gas law equation and did some clicker questions that asked students to determine by what factor the temperature would increase if the pressure increased. The students did well, most of them getting the answer “right” – but I put “right” in quotation marks because there are different levels of right. GPD members suggested that maybe the students were primarily thinking through the math and not through the physics that causes the change in temperature.

This had a remarkable effect on how I think about teaching physics now. I shudder to think how often I have rewarded students for being able to do math (important in and of itself, of course) but not really tested if they were doing the physics – thinking through how the gas particles were changing with the increase in pressure, in this case.

Very soon I saw benefits from this feedback, which came at the end of last semester. The first week of classes this semester, I gave students this clicker question regarding some topics we had been covering on light:

Almost all the students got the answer right (it’s #4, by the way). In the past I would have told myself, “okay, they’re getting it, let’s move on.” But this time I pulled out one of my new favorite classroom tools, mini whiteboards, and asked them, “now, draw a figure of what’s going on and prove that that’s the right answer. Can you show via a drawing the real physics of the scenario?” And it was clear that the students had relied on the math to get the right clicker answer.

We ran out of time for that class period, but that was really a good thing because it left the students wondering about how to really get the right answer through physics. I got a lot of emails about light in general after class, which lead to some great discussions at the beginning of the next class period. This isn’t the only example from the first few weeks of classes this semester that has proven the benefit of participating in GPD. I’m looking forward to having class session from my physics of music class critiqued in the next few weeks.

GPD isn’t a replacement for institutional feedback or even conferencing, but it’s providing me with a way to improve my teaching that doesn’t come from the more formal professional development avenues. I’m excited to be a part of this community.

Have you benefited from GPD? Would such a system maybe be helpful in your own discipline? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

But until 2011, the reality of what people who need medical physics for treatment and their caretakers go through had been at arms’ length. Sure, I knew that people get very ill (med physics grad literature is filled with images of some of the most frightening brain tumors you can imagine, for example). And I’ve had a lot of friends and friends of friends who have undergone diagnostic studies and various treatments. My family has not been immune to medical concerns, but up until 2011 it had mostly been grandparents dealing with some fairly usual end-of-life troubles. Cancer was always distant to me.

That all changed this past year. In the first few days of 2011 a close family member was diagnosed with cancer. And not one of those that we have a good reign on. On the bright side, it seems like it was caught earlier than usual due to the sensibilities of a very astute histologist. But it was tough to see my family member go through it all – to hear their fears about the procedures, to struggle with where to draw the line between my professional knowledge of and my personal attachment to the issue, to know how to offer advice on how to handle the side effects and what to expect, to know what information to seek out and what to leave to the physicians to tell us. To have my knowledge of physics gripped by a real fear of what its limitations are, at least at this point in time.

I am very passionate about the marvels of physics and communicating that to my students. I want them to have wonder and amazement for the universe and a strong desire to be a good physicist and play a role in advancing knowledge in the field, whatever subset of physics they go into. Providentially, I taught for the first time an introductory course in medical physics in the fall semester. I like to think that my students soaked up a very personal side to physics and what it is capable of and how it relates to people. We talked at length about many topics: what are the personal responsibilities of a medical physicist? How do you balance pursuing technical excellence and knowing that on the other side of that treatment plan is a person with concerns, fears, and maybe a very pessimistic prognosis?

So perhaps the end result of this past year was that I got a shot in the arm for my passion for medical physics. Maybe (hopefully!) that came through to my students and they came away from my classes with a more personal insight into how physics can affect lives. But definitely, I ended 2011 grateful for the tremendous amount of good that has come from medical physics. May it continue on and benefit many  more people.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user ToniFish]

• I’ve been working with the editor of Books and Culture to launch a web-exclusive series entitled Science in Focus. Each week of a given month, a scientist or mathematician will give their insight into a given book (or article or film, even!) The series launched today and I hope you’ll check it out. Be on the lookout for posts each Wednesday. Coming soon, you’ll see reviews from Robert Talbert, Vanessa Fitsanakis, Andy Rundquist, Elise Crull, Jim Kakalios, Tim Slater, and several other fascinating folks. Each one has a different point of view on the book they’re reviewing. Together they illustrate the wonderful multi-faceted nature of science and math.
• Global Physics Department starts back up tonight after a brief break for the holidays. (What is GPD? It’s a weekly online meeting of physics education folks, secondary and higher ed, who get together to talk about matters relating to our work. Personally, I’ve found it to be the best professional development series ever.) This evening, I’ll be talking about using Mendeley, particularly in why and I how I start talking to my students very early on about reference management. Andy Rundquist will also talk about using BiBTeX, which I’m excited to learn more about. GPD starts up at 9:30 Eastern, 8:30 Central most Wednesday nights.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user mt 23]

Still, one problem remained: pulling together bibliographic information. Every teacher had a different desired format. It was easy to lose periods, commas, and other punctuation in the transfer of information. To my delight, I discovered bibliographic software early in grad school and have never looked back.

I started out using EndNote but quickly became frustrated at the cost of updates. I was especially concerned at the cost for the sake of my undergraduate students, for whom shelling out anything over $25 can sometimes be a concern. So when I started my work at Wheaton, I switched to Mendeley and have never looked back.

Now, I’m teaching courses in which excellent communication of information and thoughts is an important part of our department’s assessment plan. Aside from official assessment, I’m passionate about building our physics majors’ abilities in managing information for both ease and quality of communication. So early on, in our sophomore computer modeling class, I start talking to them about using bibliographic management software. They’re getting this talk as well in my junior/senior mechanics class, and they’ll be getting it this spring as well when I start teaching our advanced lab course. And Mendeley is now a part of my research program; my research students are expected to set up an account and we use a group to share journal articles. I’ve been recommending Mendeley because it has no cost to start using, a feature which is important to me in considering what my students can and can’t pay for. I want them to start building their own library of references that they can carry on to whatever they go on to do. And I want them to start getting used to a social side of academic communication as well. Mendeley fits all these.

What can Mendeley not do? As of right now, it doesn’t have all the bibliographic forms I need for the journals I target, but they’re adding new journals all the time. Syncing between computers isn’t perfect either, but it’s getting better and better. I’m glad to be part of the development of a tool that works well with the way research is done – not the other way around, having to work your research around a tool.

And so this fall I signed up to be a Mendeley advisor, willing and able to spread the word about the program. You can check out my advisor page here. Any questions about using Mendeley (or reference management in general? Is anyone else talking to their physics majors about information management?) Let’s start a discussion in the comments!

If you’re reading this post, you’ve found my new blog location! The days between Christmas and the spring semester starting up again tend to be a time that I fiddle with web stuff. I decided to create a special place for my blog, which you’ll now find at http://convergediverge.com (which will redirect automatically to where you are now.) Update your feed readers!

Heathermwhitney.com will remain in place, but is now more of a launch page with mostly static items.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user KDavidClark]

Today in non-major, algebra-based physics we went over the fairly classic problem of determining which will win a race down a hill, a sliding block or a hoop, cylinder, or solid sphere? I like working through this problem because it’s a great way to show students the value of not plugging in numbers too early, but rather let the equations play out so that you whittle the problem down into what really affects the difference in answers between all the options. It’s also a nice example of thinking about a distribution of initial energy; in this case, the object will go slower when some of its potential energy gets converted into rotational kinetic energy. The object that has the least amount of energy going into rotation (or none, in the case of the sliding block) will have the most available to go into its translational kinetic energy. And that will be determined by the objects’ moments of inertia.

Everything was proceeding like it has in years past when I’ve taught this section, but then a question came up: should we account for friction? One student in particular noted that he thought that there had to be friction present in the rolling objects’ case, even if you said the sliding part was frictionless. And for the conservation of energy equation to play out, you really did need to include it.

I’ve got some ideas, but I want to ask  you all – what do you think? Part of me feels that this is connected to an oddity I see in a lot of my non-majors, in that they are always wanting to think about friction, air resistance, etc. (Compare that to my physics majors, who in today’s Matlab class were very pleased to not account for air resistance in a model we coded for hitting a baseball a certain distance.) I’ve been thinking a lot about why my non-major students are so attached to the ideas of friction and drag. In class we talk a lot about setting up models, adding in additional factors as we get more and more specific with the model. But this year’s class especially isn’t happy with the discussion. They ask, “if we live in a world with friction, why would we even bother to ignore it?” I was talking with a colleague in the health sciences, and he said that the students (many of them the same ones I have in my class) ask essentially the same thing for some models he talks about. So at the very least, their questions like this aren’t limited to physics.

But to get back to the original question, do we need to include rolling friction in the analysis of which rotating object will go down the ramp the fastest?

*”hup” is how my college physics professor pronounced “hoop” when we covered this. He said, memorably, “what is that, a hup?” and I almost always dissolve into giggles thinking about it even now. I guess you had to be there.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user phonogalerie.com]