Wow, it’s hard to believe, but I’ve reached the half-way point of this sabbatical. What does that mean? Well, for this post, it means a little looking back, and a little looking forward.
The votes are in. Brianfredo Dalefino Gilbertega is the winner. Frankly, I’m just glad some people actually voted.
Surprisingly, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) isn’t as exciting as it might sound. I know, I was shocked too. A lot goes into SEM. First, you have to coat your samples. I’ve been coating mine with gold and palladium (not enough to get rich on though). Then, you have to sit around while the vacuum chamber that your samples will be placed in vents (generally three whole minutes!), put the samples in, and pump it back down (another three minutes!). After that you have to turn on the electron gun (cool) and align everything. Just getting ready takes about twenty frickin minutes!
After all of that, you take pictures of your samples. Here’s one I got yesterday of a silica nanosphere (ok, nanoball) array: Read the rest of this entry »
Life, especially Katie’s, has gotten much better since the last update. Katie was having a real hard time for a while – new town, new school, new friends. The folks at her school wanted to move her into a new class, which she didn’t want to do, even though the kids in the class were really rowdy and disrespectful, because she had made several friends. Dayna and I spent the better part of a day at her school talking with the counselor and then observing the new class. Many things about it were better: smaller (13 students instead of > 20), quieter, and more advanced math. By the end of the day, Katie wanted us to leave and was fine. Since then, she’s gotten to know the kids in that class better, and has joined a Girl Scout troop that includes some of the girls in her class. She’s even told us that she actually likes Tucson!
My research is moving along. I’ve gotten to be pretty decent at making silica nanoballs. Now I’m trying to make 3 dimensional arrays of them with some gold nanoparticles included. This takes time – 2-3 days for array formation, so I have a lot of time on my hands to work on other things. A couple of weeks ago, I spent most of my time preparing for group meeting (my first since I was a postdoc about 14 years ago!). The group meeting went well. I talked about research at Linfied (DMAC for those of you who’ve been following this blog), and what teaching/researching at a school like Linfield. It was well-received, with some good discussion – both about my research (Jeanne had some excellent suggestions of things to look for at some point) and questions from students about teaching positions.
Dayna’s enjoying catching up with friends. It’s amazing how many of her’s still live in the area. Today she got to have brunch at La Paloma with a Tucson friend from grade school. Katie and I weren’t invited, but we had fun anyway. Let’s see, what else? We’ve been going to UA volleyball games – this will be a big week since both of the Oregon schools are coming. It’s definitely fall weather here (sunny, mid 80’s), and Tahoe still loves going to the dog park (although he tears his paws up chasing balls).
“I miss the cold and the rain. I love McMinnville. I love Oregon. I want to go home,” cried Katie tonight….oh, how it pulls on my heartstrings.
My wife’s Facebook status this morning. One of the most difficult aspects of this sabbatical has been the emotional part. Yeah, hard to believe it, but I actually am a sensitive guy. On one hand, I really am enjoying the work I’m doing in the Pemberton lab, rediscovering U of A, and reconnecting with old friends. On the other hand, this trip has been and is really difficult for our daughter.
Our daughter is in middle school. So, right there, you know immediately that she is in one of the more interesting portions of her life. To come on this sabbatical, we, ok I dragged her away from the really great friends and school she has back in McMinnville, transplanted her in the middle of an unfamiliar city, with a strange climate, and forced her to go to a school at which she knew no one. So, if you were her, how would you feel?
She has made some friends here. Of course, she’s only known these girls for a few weeks, which can’t replace friendships she’s made over years back in Mac. There have been tough times too – the first group of girls she made friends with dumped her rather unceremoniously. Middle school drama. Gotta hate it. She made new friends who seem to be nicer so far, but part of the difficulty is getting them together outside of school. The school is on the Davis-Monthan Air Force base, and nearly all of the kids live on base, which is difficult to get onto.
The latest problem has been misbehavior in the classroom. One of the teachers was out for a week after an emergency appendectomy, and the sub apparently had no clue about how to manage the classroom. The school has strict discipline – talking in class can result in Saturday detentions – but the sub didn’t follow through, and instead had large numbers of kids in the class yelling obscenities when she was out of the room. The school’s solution seems to be to try and move our daughter into a different class – thus removing her from the only friends she’s made here. Yeah, she’s not thrilled with that. We’re meeting with the assistant principal tomorrow morning to talk about it.
So, as parents who love our daughter, what are we doing to try and keep her spirits up? As much as we can. We’re trying (as many of our friends have suggested) to find fun things to do here that we can only do in Tucson. We’re going to fun things like the Grease sing along at The Loft, and Spamalot next weekend. We’ve broken down and let her have a cell phone with a texting plan (amazingly she’s not glued to the thing) so she can keep in touch with her friends back in Mac. We Skype whenever schedules work out. And we try to remind her that she only has X # of weeks left. Of course, to her, 13 weeks may as well be forever.
Melanie Cooper from Clemson University was yesterday’s speaker at the chemistry department colloquium. Her talk was about research in chemical education about what increases problem solving abilities in general chemistry students, most of which she has published in the J. Chem. Ed. vol. 85, pg 866 (2008) (sorry, not a free article). I’ll highlight what she and her co-workers found, but for the full story you really should just read the article.
One of the first issues she dealt with was exactly what she meant by problem solving, which she quotes from Anderson as “What you do when you don’t know what to do.” Her talk, and the JCE paper referenced above, both center on students solving open ended, ill-defined problems (so, not something like, how many Ne atoms are there in 1 g of Ne?). Students in her study were applying previously acquired knowledge to case-based problems. The results of the study debunk five common myths about learning and problem solving.
I’ve decided that I really like being back in a research group. Especially as a visiting professor – no classes to teach, no committee work, no advising. Just regular lab work. In other words, fun! So what, exactly am I doing here, and what is the group like? I’m sure that’s exactly what you’re all wondering. If you aren’t, too bad, because that’s what this sabbatical post will be about. If you want to know about something else, leave it in the comments and I’ll write about that sometime.
A post by Joshua Kim at the Technology and Learning blog from Inside Higher Education caught my attention this morning. The title, “Demand and Supply” is a reference to what Joshua sees as a problem – lack of demand by students for active learning classrooms. He asks, “Why do students seem content with a lecture based class system?”. I won’t spoil his post – you should go read it.
My own opinion is that most students adapt to whatever mode of instruction is used in a classroom. They are busy, and no matter how much we’d like to think they concentrate on our classes (you know, the full 2-3 hours outside of class for every hour spent in class), I don’t think it is likely they do. In class, they may be distracted, sleepy, hungover… In other words, they aren’t really thinking about how they’d prefer to be instructed. Of course, some students do. For example, I had a student tell me last fall that, “I do much better in courses that the teacher just tells me what I need to know and I don’t have to think.” Really, a student said that to me.
I’ve found that most students adapt well to an active classroom. I feel it is important to spend some time at the outset helping them discover why active participation in their learning is valuable. I don’t collect data about how they perform compared to traditional instruction, but there are many studies that show active learning is especially helpful for D & C students, and that A students retain more information than in traditional (lecture only) classrooms.
Ultimately, instruction should be up to the instructor. The instructor should teach using a style they are comfortable with – but should be aware of what educational research says. To me, that would be like trying to do research without reading the literature. Just plain crazy.
So I’ve been here for about 1.5 weeks with most of that time taken up with moving into our sabbatical house, getting our daughter into her school, and starting paperwork on campus so that I can have an ID, buy stuff in the stockroom, etc. Finally, in the last couple of days, I’ve been able to get into lab, which, of course, was the whole purpose for my coming here in the first place. Well, that, and to get away from teaching, committees and normal life for a while.
As I’ve mentioned before, working at the University of Arizona is a bit of a homecoming for my wife and I; we both recieved our bachelor’s degrees here about 20 years ago. I’m working with Jeanne Pemberton, who was one of my professors almost 21 years ago! The goal of the project I’m working on is ultimately to make novel nanoparticle based “hole acceptors” for solar cells, which would replace the ubiquitous indium tin oxide (ITO) based interfaces.
We are trying to make the collectors (this may be the wrong terminology – I’ve still got jargon to learn) by first forming 3-dimensional arrays of monodisperse silica nanospheres (SNS). When these are made, I’ll try to add 10 nm or so sized gold nanoparticles (Au-NP). After that, the SNS will be removed chemically, and we’ll be left with a 3-D array of Au-NP.
I’m starting out by trying to make the SNS, using recipes that one of Jeanne’s recent Ph.D. students had in his dissertation. I need to make sub 100 nm spheres, with a small relative standard deviation (< 13%), which I’ll measure by dynamic light scattering. I’ve started making some particles already – here’s a picture. Later today, I’m going to learn how to use the department’s new scanning electron microscope (SEM), and still later, the transmission electron microscope (TEM). So, lots of surface science!
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