The First Day!

It's very good to be back to school.

I love the excitement of the first day - the campus flooded with students, including my wonderful brother. It will be great to study with him again. The new students are eager and early to lecture. The returning students are chatting with their friends about the good ol' days when they were in first year. My brother was hobbling on crutches as he broke his ankle on Friday, but he was cheerfully eating his lunch on the bench of the phyics building's sign none the less.

I had the privilege of meeting the first year students I'll be working with in their first lecture today, and I can't wait to get to know them better. They have that hesitant but hopeful look about them - like they aren't quite sure what to make of this yet, but they're going to give themselves an honest chance to learn. A few of them are con-ed students, a few upper year students, a few people just giving physics a try, and lots of people hoping to study physics in the future. I can't wait to get to know them better and learn each of their stories - right now, I'm just doing my best to work on nailing down names and programs of study!

It was nice to sit in on the first lecture - the professor does a great job of getting the students to feel as ease and comfortable to laugh. It may take a bit of work/time to get them truly building community with each other. He started with a good exercise of putting them in groups according to which residence they live in, so that they have someone they know in rez who is also in physics. However, when they came into lab later that afternoon, they were dead silent with each other. We'll see what happens, but I hope that by continually putting them in learning communities in class, in the lab, and in tutorial, they will eventually build that community themselves. I love talking to people (I strike up conversation to random people for the minute that I'm waiting in the line at Timmies), so I sometimes have trouble understanding why two classmates would sit beside each other and not talk, but I know we all have different levels of comfort with that sort of thing (and perhaps we've been told 4000 times in school not to talk to our desk-neighbour...)

Another part of the first lecture that I particularly enjoyed - the professor was providing his reasoning for why he will be using interactive "peer instruction" teaching methods instead of traditional lecture. He did a brief activity in which he had the students write down something they are very good at (many students wrote "playing guitar", etc). Then he had the students write down how they learned that. Then he asked them how many people learned what they are good at by lecture? Did they watch their music teacher play the instrument? Clearly, they learned to be experts in that field by doing not just by passive listening. It was a quick activity, but I think it made the point clearly and effectively.

One thing that is of significant concern to me in the class is the fear factor. Today reminded me of just how terrified I was in first year physics. One of my high school teachers had told me that physics, and specifically physics at Queen's, was very very hard - I'll never know if he was subtly suggesting that I wasn't very bright or if this was a generalization for all students. But either way, it really made me scared. And that was exactly the look I saw on so many of my students' faces today. I want to sit down with each of them and tell them that physics does not deserve the bad reputation it so often gets. I want to tell them that it's okay if you don't understand everything right away - you aren't expected to! It's like learning an instrument - you don't play Beethoven after studying piano for a day. But they are used to courses like Biology where they can just sit down before the exam, memorize everything they need to know, and do fine. Physics isn't like that - it's a skill which you need to work on a little bit every day - and it's okay if you're not super pro at it the first time. I want to sit down with each of them, hear their fears, and help them work through those fears. If I had a genie, I would wish for 63 hours of extra time to spend an hour with each of them.

In my "research time", I did a few more modules of the online ethics course for researching students, and ran around campus on the ever on-going search for a test of student's self-efficacy. This is a much harder task than you might expect! Such tests seem to be either very expensive, unavailable or unknown to the many librarians I've spoken with, but I'm not giving up hope yet! The plan for tomorrow is to try the psychology building - I expect they'll have more insights there.


The evening of my first day, I had an encouraging audition! I'm very much hoping to sing with the choral ensemble this year, but priority goes to undergraduate music students. Encouragingly, however, the conductor seemed very pleased with my audition - here's hoping that not too many other alto II's in the music program tried out! I would absolutely love to sing again if I can. I'm on pins and needles until the list is posted in the music building tomorrow!