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Hemmick: Because even though what you're putting up, let's say you're using a projected
screen,
and your projected screen can have some motion. Just adding the motion of a
person across the stage
adds visual interest ands
adds to the tenor and the change of pace and
you can walk to the edge
as you're trying to catch people's attention and
just look down at them,
in some cases it's down, some cases it's up,
it allows you to come
ever more personal
as you move around and
simply adds to the ability of the person to be interesting to watch.
Glynn: Do you ever actually go into the audience?
Hemmick: Infrequently.
I do occasionally, but pretty much infrequently.
Most recently i've been teaching in Javits one hundred
and it would require a few stairs to go down. I suppose that's not much of an
impediment. I should consider it
because that would make a very nice contact
Glynn: And with the technology today, with
the microphone, with remote drawing tools,
you actually don't have to be on the stage any more to do your
presentation.
Hemmick: Good suggestion.
That could be interesting because yeah, having the prof in your face
You're not going to sleep in that case. Glynn: Especially in the back row where you
tend to get the students who tend to
be reading the newspaper,
or today
using their PDAs.
Hemmick: Good suggestion. I haven't used the remote drawing tools yet
but yeah, that's a neat idea.
Glynn: Now does the old adage about lecturing, about lectures where
content goes from the faculty member's mind into the student's mind with
neither one thinking in between
because essentially it's a delivery mechanism.
It's a way of getting information from
you to the students that they then need to digest and work on and learn. Do you agree with that?
Hemmick: Not really.
Lecture can devolve to that,
but it shouldn't be that.
If you ask yourself.
what do you remember in lecture
you probably remember
when the prof was wrong.
Glynn: Or when he told a story.
Hemmick: Or when he told a story, or when he slipped up
or when a
question was asked
that
people weren't sure of and so they thought about it for a while.
I was once lecturing
on heat transfer
and so
in that case, as it turns out ,
air has a much higher,
er,
lower thermal conductivity Glynn: Make sure you get it right.
Hemmick: Oh! Making a mistake is great! Making a mistake is an opportunity to stop and repeat
and every time you repeat, it allows somebody to anticipate.
From the student's standpoint,
whenever you can anticipate what the professor is about to say,
there's something magical about that moment,
and the professor can provide you with that opportunity subtly
by repeating themselves
or by correcting themselves
because in this case
the student's mind is faster than your mouth
and they'll be ahead of you
and that's a tremendous feeling. Glynn: So do you deliberately make mistakes?
Hemmick: No, I make enough by accident that it that it serves me quite fine.
Anyway back to the thermal conductivity.
Air has a low thermal conductivity, why don't we make the walls out of air?
Oh, the reason is that the air just blows in and out
and that's convection.
So, then the explanation is
that even though I grew up in a house with storm windows,
with two panes of glass that were far apart,
about this far,
all that needed to be done to make good thermal windows
was to bring them this close together
so that wouldn't be convection.
A student raised his hand.
He said, " I worked in construction for years and these windows are filled with argon. Why?"
I don't know.
Let's think about it.
So we started talking about what are the properties of argon.
It's a monotonic gas and we got half
the story,
but then afterwards
I spoke with student.
"It's not everything"
So we did a web search and we found the rest of the story.
The two halves of the story are that as a monatomic gas
its
specific heat at constant volume
is smaller than other gases, which means that it will accept a
different amount of heat per temperature change
in the right direction,
and then the other thing is because argon is heavy
and so in bouncing back and forth between the two panes
it moves a little more slowly.
So those two things put together
make it an insulator, and I didn't know
and
the student knew something that I didn't
and everybody remembers a lecture like that.
So,
you can't be afraid of being derailed.
Actually, being derailed is the best possible thing
because in the train wreck
that's when everybody's paying attention, everybody's learning, and it's an
interesting memorable event.
Glynn: The other
positive side effect of that is
it makes you more human,
which makes you more approachable
by the students. They feel more comfortable talking to you after class,
coming to your office hours,
all those sorts of things. Hemmick: I agree.
One of the things and actually, I teach this to grad students most often,
is that there is a fantastic answer to a question:
"I don't know"
Because it's true
and it's much better than another answer that goes by an acronym, M.S.U.
that in the nice one is "make stuff up"
Often, you know, people think
"I should supply an answer," so they just
say something
Glynn: I thought you were gonna say something about Michigan State University.
Hemmick: No, I wasn't, but you can imagine what the 'S' would be in another context.
But make stuff up
is
not what you want to do as a faculty member. Showing
even a level of vulnerability to the student that
"Gee, I don't know that.
So what are we going to do?"
How would we find out? Where would we go?
What location would have the answer?"
You can throw in why this is interesting, because
probably there is something interesting about it. When I learned about the argon
I also found out that the most expensive wetsuits
instead of having air bubbles in the foam of the wet suit
they have bubbles of argon
for the same reason.
Glynn: Now, storytelling is not,
again, a natural
skill everybody has.
And also, it's very hard sometimes to come across stories that would be appropriate.
Do you have any hints on how to develop stories or where to find them?
Hemmick: That's good question.
For me, I tend to go around
looking at things and putting them into the context I'm familiar with
which is a physical explanation.
I was taught
"Look at those metal garbage cans over there.
What do you notice about them?"
I had a physics professor ask, just walking across campus.
I don't know, what do I notice about them. They're metal, they're shiny. I hadn't even noticed
this pattern that looks like scale on a fish
that was the crystal of the zinc that was used to protect the steel.
Wow, you learn something and so
I guess I was taught
to observe and
classify
and then that leads to stories. Glynn: So, maybe tell a story about when you had your own insights
into how things work?
Hemmick: Yeah, because somehow you came to this
realization
and there's a way in which you understand it
and if there's
a context that
when you think of a particular topic
you say
"Of course! I remember professor John Brown Newman when he
poured that liquid nitrogen on that unexpecting student!"
Which happened.
Then suddenly, that's a story and you say "why do I understand? Why do I remember that
so clearly?"
Well the reason you remember something so clearly
as the association of
something that you're about to teach
is because it had an impact on you and it was somehow interesting
and so it doesn't necessarily have to be a story about people or anything like
that, but
if you take a
concept
and you personally have inside
not just an intellectual "I remember which page of so and so book this was on,"
but you have some reflection of that
on how it impacted you,
that's also a story,
even if it if it doesn't involve a circumstance and some people and
funny things happening.
Glynn: So we've talked about enunciation, we've talked about
getting some coaching on performance on the stage,
use of humor, storytelling in particular.
Any other strategies?
Hemmick: Well, you have to work very carefully,
once you've got the students' attention,
to
discern whether they're understanding it.
That's the most important thing. Obviously, if you don't have their
attention
it doesn't matter what you say. You won't have
communicated any understanding.
But even once you have the attention
it's important to use the same eye contact to try to discern whether you're
communicating effectively.
You can't do that with three hundred students in a room.
Glynn: But they're all head down taking notes, how are you getting this eye contact?
Hemmick: They're not all head down taking notes. They'll look up now and again.
Also,
just as in poker, there are tells.
Certain people are not good poker players because you know by their
mannerisms
there's a tell,
they have a good hand or a bad hand and then you can bet against it.
There will be
in a large class
some students
whose facial expression, posture,
mannerisms,
expression, or something