Reminiscing

Don't get me wrong - I do love this year - I have amazing students and teachers on practicum, wonderful classmates and teachers at McArthur, and some really great classes about interesting things that I care about.

But the thing is, it's January. The sky is grey. My Christmas tree is frozen into the snowbank where we incorrectly assumed trees were picked up with compost. And in true uncoordinated anneke-fashion, I just stubbed my toe on the blade of my skates, and it's sore. It is time for a grey January blog post - a look to the past.

I miss undergrad.

I miss the craziness of labs - spilling liquid nitrogen all over myself in my usual uncoordinated style, fearfully believing we had just exploded the only filament of its kind outside of Russia and then realizing that we had just accidentally unplugged it, playing with superconductors (as pictured below), experimenting using my fingers to make a microwave diffraction pattern for several minutes before realizing that I was microwaving my hand, and the list goes on...

I miss those amazing moments when we'd spent all day on a Saturday - my fabulous lab partner and I - organizing our data and doing all the necessary analysis. Then finally, we were ready to plot the data points of some crazy microwave diffraction pattern.... drum roll.... and it actually worked! Everything I learned in my Lasers class about light was really true - it actually happened! And we made it happen with little more than a sheet of metal with a hole in it, a microwave emitter and a receiver! Better yet - we had completed this gigantic lab, and we were still alive!

I miss sitting on the couches in Stirling with wonderful friends, puzzling for hours over Quantum assignment problems that seemed impossible until... suddenly, the solution would jump out of those pages of math upon math! I'd do a little dance, the first year students would look at me like I was insane, and I'd give them that knowing look that (in my head) says, "Just wait 'till you've been here for a few more years..." There's nothing like solving a really ridiculous Physics problem with great friends.

I miss those moments when I would be carefully trying to teach a friend what I thought I knew, and in the midst of my explanation suddenly realize that there was a huge gap in my understanding. Someone else would walk by, and they'd stop at our couch and share another brilliant insight, and then the friend who was originally playing the role of student would pull it all together, make the missing connections, and teach everyone what they'd just figured out. Everyone saw things in a different way, and we needed everyone to make it through those assignments alive.

I know it sounds silly, but I also miss being a pseudo-minority. In Stirling Hall, we were the tiny group of surviving females in a building of males with crazy beards. Baking cupcakes and cookies was a rare and extraordinarily skill, as pictured below:

We were also learned in the art of cheese-arrangements (the piece pictured below was briefly titled "Blackbody Cheese" before it was eaten):

But alas, now I am female teacher number 673. There's nothing special and exciting about being able to make cupcakes or arrange cheese in what must be the most estrogen filled building in all of Kingston. We're supposed to write resumes that "stand out", but there's hundreds of us writing the same stand-out-ish resume, and everyone can make cupcakes here.

I even miss sitting in Mathematical Methods for Physics, desperately trying to understand contour integrals, coming to class despite the worst flu so that I wouldn't fall behind, and pouring over my notes after class in desperate hope for some light bulb of understanding and connection. I remember how stretched my brain felt - like every concept was on different corners of the universe, and my brain was stretched out like silly putty trying to connect these ideas together. I'm pretty sure my brain would ache, just like legs do after a really good work-out.

I miss sticky-noting my binder for all the things that I didn't yet understand, looking at the sea of yellow sticky notes, and telling myself, "This looks impossible, but my Uncle Howard learned this stuff before me, and I have his genes - there's no reason in the world why I can't understand this stuff." I felt like David standing in front of the Goliath of Special Relativity, and I had to keep checking my pulse to make sure I was still alive. And then there was that wonderful feeling of watching the sticky notes be taken out of my binder - being replaced with giant highlighted pictures and equations scribbled everywhere my notes had space for them. I miss that amazing feeling of getting it.

Now I sit in the McArthur lecture theatre and hear that "Students get to choose different formats of assessment in projects. That's what's really complex about this." Complex? I agree the idea of giving choice and autonomy to student's learning is a great one, but is it really complex? It's difficult to juggle, challenging to assess fairly, and time consuming to prepare, but it's not the mind-blowing complexity that I miss so much.

Practicum was great for sure - guiding my students through those incredible ideas like inertia and potential difference (which will likely never cease to blow me away) is definitely brain stretching. It's a whole new level of complex brain stretching to not only strive to make the connections in my own mind, but also to help my students stretch their own brains out to the corners of their own universes, which may have very different gps coordinated than the corners where I found the concepts and concept connections. There is certainly still lots to learn in teachers college. It is challenging and exciting in it's own way.

Yet undergrad was special. And I can't help but miss it on this January day.