Thanks for sharing!

It remind me a very proud moment for me as a father. My mom, comes from Venezuela, and she has been in her own bubble for most of her life. So sometimes you need to have serious conversations with her about what’s appropriate and so on. Last time we visited we were taking her back to the airport in DC, we took the morning to go around and see some monuments. My son (7 years old second-grader) had the role of explaining to us (the non-U.S. educated) who the people in the monuments were, and what they did. When walking around Martin Luther King, he said “this is my favorite, because he was fighting so everybody could have the same rights,” I asked what do you mean? he said well dad, back in the days, people of color were not able to do things as white people, for example voting. Then he said hey dad, if we were living back in those years we couldn’t vote right? because we are brown. At that moment my Mom jumped in and said “don’t say that, we are not brown, we are not anything, we are just people, stop saying things like that, we are like everybody else, we don’t need to pay attention to color of the skin”

His wonderful answer: “Wait grandma. We do are brown, and I’m proud of being brown, it’s part of my family, it’s part of my culture, it’s what I am. I love my white and black friends, and I care about them, but I’m brown and there is nothing to be ashamed because of it.”

In my mind he just dropped a huge mic.

I think my field–wildlife science–is especially easy to get students engaged and moving around doing things. Half of the courses are either field courses or have a field component. Students are out flipping over rocks and playing in streams. It’s almost like we have an unfair pedagogical advantage! However, I focus on wildlife statistics, so I don’t get to capitalize on the field work advantage. But I do think having students solve coding problems in groups is an efficient and engaging way to teach programming and statistical modelling.

P.S. Your post elicited several humorous pictures in my head of people teaching a class in the stereotypical, animated preacher voice.

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In response to your question, I completely missed out on macroeconomics my freshman year of college. However, unlike your thermodynamics class, it was the lack of assignments that hindered my learning experience. I feel that macroeconomics is a subject in which everyone should have a baseline understanding. However, few people are motivated enough to go above and beyond what is required in this class (it’s not the most exciting subject, at least for me). Thus, requiring students to do homework assignments would have encouraged me to actually learn the concepts, rather than just memorizing them for the test. In addition, when the test questions are word-for-word from the notes, very little critical thinking is required. The class was essentially “too easy” too get the “A” for me to retain the information.

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In our “Preparing the Future Professoriate” class, I actually wrote my term paper on teaching tactics for large lecture-style courses (like your chemistry class). Many of the articles suggested student-centered teaching techniques that involve active learning. The problem is that these courses to which you are referring cover sooo much information in such a short amount of time that there is “just no time” for discussion and other engaging activities. The solution is to reduce the amount of material covered. If we only retain 10% of the course material, why do we spend so much time on the other 90%? Check out http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed076p1136 for more info.

You might not need to worry about learning styles because there isn’t any good empirical evidence for them. Although, what you describe–student preferences–surely exist.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-teaching-to-a-students-learning-style-a-bogus-idea/