Getting an email from a former student like this (former student’s name and current place of work removed):

Dr. Gilbert,

My name is Former Student. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I was a  Gen. Chem student of yours about 4 or 5 years ago at Linfield. I won’t exaggerate when I say that Gen Chem was the proudest “C” I ever earned. Your class was tough and you and Dr. Reinert both had high expectations of us. At the time, I didn’t truly understand what its application in my future would mean,  only that i needed it for the next step in my education. Well, college has been over for a few years now and looking back, Gen Chem might have been the most useful and applicable course I took at Linfield. It wasn’t just the stoichiometry and gas laws; It was the way you taught us to analyze, think, and problem solve. Also, no 8am lecture is complete without kegs of “whoop ass” (one of my favorites, by the way). So, thanks for the mind molding and development of my scientific thought processes! These days I’m working as a RN in a Transplant Intensive Care Unit at A Big University Hospital here in a large city on the east coast. We admit highly unstable liver, kidney, and small bowel transplants from the operating
room in hopes of keeping them alive and providing a better quality of life for these chronically ill people. As a nurse, my job is essentially managing and applying a variety of different pharmocological therapies and treatments based on laboratory values and patient assessments. I analyze results of arterial blood gases and a multitude of other tests to prompt the physician when acid/base disturbances and electrolyte imbalances occur. Yesterday, as an example, I administered 3, 50 meq ampules of NaHCO3 to correct a patient in a metabolic acidosis with a pH of 7.05. How cool is that?
Chemistry in action…

If you have pre-nursing students (or any students really) who are wondering why they have to take general chemistry, this guy does a great job of stating why.  It ain’t really the chemistry you’re learning – it’s the analytical and critical thinking that are important, and that’s good for whatever you want to do.  Of course it probably helps that this student has been working in the real world for a while.  That tends to put many things into perspective.  Which is why I’ve avoided it for as long as possible!  Feel free to pass this on to any students who you think might need to read it.

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.

Looking back:  In an earlier update, I mentioned how I wish I had started looking for a place to spend my sabbatical, and especially external funding, much earlier than I did.  I still feel that way.  However, I am really (still) happy with how it worked out to come here.  I’m still enjoying my work, which is progressing, and being in Tucson again after 20 years is still a blast.

One other thing I wish I had done before coming – agreed on my teaching load for next academic year.  The past couple of weeks have been taken up with load related issues that have been a distraction from sabbatical.  It wasn’t enjoyable.  A big reason I was looking forward to sabbatical was to escape from my normal academic life.  So if you’re reading this, and thinking about a sabbatical, I advise you to plan your teaching load for the year following the sabbatical before you go on sabbatical.  Unless, of course, you like being reminded of the institution you left.

Our daughter has been a real trooper, and has had to give up the most to come on this adventure.  Fortunately, her life has gotten much better since the last update.  She moved from class 7B at her middle school to 7A.  Two important changes went with that – she moved up to a higher math course (algebra rather than pre-algebra) and into a smaller class with students who care more about academics.  She’s made some friends, although none as great as the ones she has at home, who she continues to miss.

My better half (by far!) has really enjoyed renewing friendships [1].  It seems like almost every day she’s off to talk with a friend from high school, middle school or even elementary school (and sometimes all three).  It reminds me of what a sacrifice she made when she followed me to Bloomington, Waltham/Salem/Cambridge, Conway/Myrtle Beach, and finally McMinnville.  I promise that we don’t plan on moving again!

Our pup has mostly enjoyed walks and the dog park.  He’s very easy to please, which is one of the things we all love about him!

Looking ahead:  In the next nine weeks, I’m trying to figure out how to make as much progress as I can.  I’m working on aspects of the research that no one else has before, so I’m going to be doing a lot of literature searches and brain storming.  At the moment, I’m trying to incorporate Au nanoparticles into silica nanosphere arrays in any way I can.  Once I’ve done that, I need to learn about how to handle hydrofluoric acid (HF), which is particularly nasty stuff.  I’ll be using it to (hopefully) dissolve the silica spheres, leaving 3-D networks of Au nanoparticles.  We’ll see how this goes.  I’ll also get to learn how to use the Keck instrumentation center’s atomic force microscope (AFM), which should be fun.

We look forward to doing things with old friends who live in Tucson, and visits from those who don’t.  In November Dayna will fly to the bay area for her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration – hope Katie, Tahoe and I manage to find something to do.  Oh yeah, the Ducks are coming to play UA that weekend…

[1]  Actually, I have too.  I just have fewer friends than she does.  Told you she’s my much better half.

The votes are in.  Brianfredo Dalefino Gilbertega is the winner.  Frankly, I’m just glad some people actually voted.

The other night my wife told me I’d never win a chemistry Nobel prize until my name was more interesting.  If that’s all it takes, I’m willing to take the plunge!  Several folks suggested some names – here they are.  Let me know by your vote which is the best.  Or make a different suggestion.

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:

Holy Batballs Batman! Commisioner Gordon needs our help! Can I drive the batmobile?

I was shocked at what I saw!  Evidently I stumbled onto the next Batman movie – Batman in nano land.  After getting this image, I decided to zoom in for a closer look at the balls:

Nanoball array close up. I need more long range structure.

So there you are [1].  Another two hours well spent in the imaging lab.  Where image is everything.  While SEM is pretty cool, all in all I still prefer lasers.

[1]  This post is for you Ψ*Ψ.  I hope it was worth it.

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.

Myth 1 – practice makes perfect

This is one that is interesting to see.  It seems logical that the more time you put into solving problems of a similar type, the better you’ll get at it.  Not so.  Cooper’s research shows that students quickly “plateau” at a certain achievement level (after about 3 problems in her study).  So, telling your students to go and “do as many problems as possible, and then do some more” isn’t a good strategy, at least based on the data Cooper has gathered.

Myth 2 – Group work doesn’t improve individuals.

Cooper’s data shows that it does!  In fact, use of informal (no roles) collaborative group work appears to get individual students past the plateau described above.  She observed immediate improvement on problem solving abilities in groups, which carried over to individuals.

Myth 3 – Good students carry others in group work.

Cooper formed groups according to student abilities measured by the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT):  formal (capable of proportional reasoning, able to infer from data, control variables, understand conservation of matter), pre-formal (sometimes capable of formal thought) and concrete (can’t reason from data, unable to undertake problem solving in general chemistry).  Her work shows that problem solving improves in all groupings of students, except for the most concrete (Piagetian) thinkers, and that the improvements carry over to individual work.  So although a less capable student may (in fact will) benefit from working with a more capable peer, the peer isn’t just shouldering the load.  Interestingly, the students who gained the most were in pairs of pre-formal with concrete thinkers.

Myth 4 – Explicit teaching of algorithms and heuristics helps.

The last two myths weren’t covered in the JCE article, so instead Cooper gave evidence from the general chemistry laboratories she runs at Clemson.  Basically, Polya’s “How to Solve It” (develop a plan) is good.  The detailed solutions to example problems in general chemistry texts are not.  The only thing these accomplish is producing students who can mimic the algorithms they’ve been exposed to, which results in the request of many to “show us more”.  Cooper argues that having students explain their plans to one another in groups is better, however I don’t think she has any data to back this one up.

Myth 5 – Instructors must give clear, explicit and unambiguous instructions.

It would seem that this would produce students who expect the world to be clear, explicit, and unambiguous.  I would argue that is not a reasonable expectation in daily life, much less scientific research.  Cooper used this review at Amazon of her Cooperative Chemistry Lab manual to drive the point home.

So I have a couple of take home messages from her talk and the JCE paper:

1. Collaborative groups lead to better problem solving strategies and abilities in individuals.
2. Be careful about how you form collaborative groups.  Don’t form groups of just concrete thinkers.

Interestingly, her research showed that male/female group balance wasn’t important, and it also showed that pre-formal female students gained the most in problem solving abilities when grouped with concrete students.

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.

So, the research project I’m working on is not what I thought it would be when I wrote my sabbatical application (shhh, don’t tell the Dean!). I think I said I was going to use vibrational spectroscopy to study liquid-solid interfaces, which would’ve been fun, but was simply something I wrote about so I could get a sabbatical. Kinda like how you write a conference abstract, or a grant proposal about one thing and then turn it into another.

What I’m working on is even more interesting that solid-liquid interfaces. Amazing, I know. When I got here, Jeanne and I talked about a project she had in mind – making nanoparticle based collectors for solar cells (to possibly replace ITO windows). I told her I thought it would be a great project – it is applied, related to renewable energy, involves nanoparticles, and gives me the opportunity to learn a lot of new stuff – dynamic light scattering (DLS), nanoparticle synthesis, electron microscopy…

So, I’m currently working on making silica nanospheres. They’re made via something called the Stöber process – an ammonia catalyzed formation of silica nanoparticles (from tetraethyl orthosilicate, or TEOS) in methanol (or ethanol or a mixture) with water [1].  I may write a post about the chemistry at some point, but for now, the important idea is that mixing all these up and reacting them at 40 – 50 °C leads to spherical nanoballs of silica.  Changing the ratios of the reactants and catalyst lets you control size (which is important).  I’m trying to make spherical 100 nm silica nanoparticles with a narrow (<20 % relative standard deviation) size distribution.  This is what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks.

The reaction takes about three hours.  When it is done, I characterize the size of the nanoparticles with DLS [1] to get a first estimate of their size.  Then I centrifuge and wash the little balls with ethanol, sonicate to redisperse, repeat (and repeat).  After that, I use scanning electron microscopy to check size and shape [2].  One question that I’ll need to answer while I’m here is how the size distribution measured by DLS compares with that by SEM.  DLS is nice – it determines size distribution through an autocorrelation function (all behind the scenes computer stuff).  SEM doesn’t determine size distribution.  People do [3].

Once I’ve figured out how to consistently make 100 nm balls, I’ll need to learn how to form them into two and three-dimensional arrays on some other substrate.  After that, I’ll start adding Au nanoballs (something I know how to make already) to the arrays.  When the Au is incorporated, we’ll strip out the silica (HF or something nice like that?) and hopefully be left with 3-D Au nanoball arrays, which would be a first step in the process of replacing ITO type collectors.

So, there you go.  Not a lot of detail.  If you want detail, send a comment to let me know what you’d like more detail about, and I’ll try to give it to you.

[1]  Which is sweet.  We need to get one of these for Linfield!

[2]  The SEM is one floor down – it’s from FEI (a company that came from the Linfield Research Institute), and is one of the smallest SEMs I’ve ever seen.  Long story short – UA got a Keck grant and had to (wah wah) buy a lot of surface analysis instrumentation.  The SEM was part of that.

[3]  I’ve offered my daughter $0.01 for each particle she measures.  She didn’t go for it.  I may have to up the offer to $0.02/particle so she can earn $2/sample…

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.