I gave two extra credit questions on my 15 point quiz yesterday:

1. (2 pts) Who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine this year?
   
2. (2 pts) Why did they win?
   

I got only two responses. Neither were correct.

It never turns out well.

I went in to SLU yesterday to check on my students plates, and, if everything looked as well as I expected, to take the first timepoint.

Stop right there and review that last sentence. Do you see what my mistake was? You might say it was "going in to SLU yesterday". You might say "doing the timepoints for the students". I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But the real mistake was that I expected everything to look good.

Things did not look good. They looked quite bad. One after the other I found contamination, plates that weren't labeled, plates that didn't appear to have anything in them… so after I ended up throwing out ¾ of the plates, I began to wonder: are they all really not getting it? Or… is it me? I mean, I knew some of them were having difficulty, but I though some were OK.  But the evidence was to the contrary. As I see it, there are three possibilities:

1. I am a bad teacher.
2. My students are not coming to class prepared.
3. The experiment is flawed.

Let's work through each possibility:

1. I am a bad teacher. According to my TA I'm going over and above what has been done in previous semesters. I give my students detailed protocols; I describe visually the protocol; and I demonstrate for them how to do it. I am covering all different learning styles. Plus, I've gotten positive reviews from other classes I've taught and student I've mentored. That still doesn't necessarily rule out this possibility, but it does seem to indicate that the shortages aren't on my end.

2. My students are not coming to class prepared. Well, that is true. I am racking my brain to come up with a way to combat this particular problem, and would welcome any suggestions. However, even so, once they get to class they have everything they need to complete the experiment, so while this fact is annoying it shouldn't necessarily result in such a catastrophe of having to discard 75% of the work.

3. The experiment is flawed. I know it isn't inherently flawed because it has been done before, successfully. However, I haven't done it recently, and I haven't done it at SLU, so perhaps this possibility should be explored further. I decided to take some cells from my TA and set up the experiment myself- just to make sure that it could be done. My TA kept protesting that she would do it, but you know the saying… if you want it done right, do it yourself.

I would have preferred to start from scratch, but I didn't have time to make media. So I took her media and filtered it, and went to get all the dishes and supplies I needed. It was actually a useful learning experience for me, since I had never personally used the TC facilities at SLU, having imported all my cells from MRU where I do my research, and handing them directly to the TA who has been maintaining them since. So I'm gathering all the supplies, and that is when I noticed that the 12 well plates that the class had used for the growth curves were collagen coated. F*** f*** f*** f*** f***. I don't know for sure, having never actually directly compared, but I have a feeling that this is perhaps some of the reason the cells are not growing well and do not look right. I am extremely angry about this for several reasons.

>It will, no matter what, screw up the results. Hopefully not badly enough that my class won't still learn something.
>My TA didn't notice, when I asked her to find 12 well TC plates, that the box was labeled, in big letters, "COLLAGEN". Or, perhaps, she didn't realize it was important.
>I didn't notice it during class, when everyone was plating their cells.
>I'm not sure if I should be mad at myself- for not specifically checking to make sure these were the correct plates. But really, who would think that there would be collagen coated plates, and not plain old TC plates, in the supply closet? SLU has not much money, and I would never expect them to have the more expensive plates just laying around up for grabs.

At the end of the day, it is nobody's fault but my own. I have relied too heavily on my TA, and on protocols supplied to me by past-professors of the course. It is good that I am in there, getting my hands dirty, so to speak. I am turning over a new leaf. It took a Sunday visit to the lab for me to realize just how bad things were, but the semester is still young.

One of the classes I am teaching is a master's level lecture/lab class all rolled into one five hour session per week. It is quite a challenge to fit the lab into that time frame, not because 5 hours isn't enough time, but because the class only meets once per week. When planning the syllabus, I thought five hours would be plenty of time, and I arranged it so that the class would be finished in time for me to get my daughter off the school bus. Well, I was being naïve. The first class went over by half an hour; the second class went over by an hour, and the third class went over by 3 hours. Three hours! Not because I took too long; in fact, on week 3 I only gave a very brief lecture in which I went into extreme detail about the day's exercises. I wrote out a summary, explained it verbally, and demonstrated what was to be done. And yet it still took 8 hours. For some perspective, if I had to do that particular technique, it would have taken me 20 minutes.

At 2:30- which is when the class is supposed to end- one of the student came up to me to clarify the details of the protocol. This was five hours into the class, when I expected everyone to be done. He hadn't even started. I have no idea what he was doing for that whole five hours; he looked busy; but busy doing what?

As frustrating and tiring as that was, the real worry for me is that this week 3 exercise was just setting up our cell cultures for week 4. Just plating the cells. Nothing else. My students will have to plate their cells every week, and do the experiment as well. How am I possibly going to get it done? I am more than a little bit concerned.

The other problem I have is with the laboratory notebook. They are using lab notebooks that have duplicate pages, and hand in the pages from that day at the end of lab each day. My problem is that the pages are too neat. I know, as I am working with them, that they don't always get the calculations right the first time. Yet I don't see this in their notebook. Often I see them taking notes on scraps of paper, and then copying into their lab notebooks at the end of the day (which kept me 20 minutes late, week 2). I have told them that under no circumstance are they to do this; that I want them to write everything directly into the lab notebook, that it has to be legible but not pretty. They will each hand in formal reports as they finish each experiment; the lab notebook, as we all know, is a record of their progress, but not a formal presentation of the data. And yet they are fixated on the neatness factor. They protest "But I don't have the results yet!" Last week I crumpled up and threw away one girls' notes. This week I fear that I am going to have to be even more dramatic; I am going to forbid any other notebooks or papers in class, and I am going to have to tell them I will deduct points each time I see them writing on scrap papers. They are always asking "How many points is this worth?" of "Is this on the quiz" (Which is an irritating question because as I have told them over and over… there are no quizzes. To me it is more important they get the technique and understand how to interpret the data.), so this tactic should make an impression.

Sigh.