Muzyka’s Musings

We’ve made it through a week of classes so far.  I’m very excited about this new approach I’ve adopted for my organic chemistry classes.  In the past I never made reading assignments and sort of assumed that most students hadn’t read the book before we talked about things in class.  I made these assumptions because I remember how I was as a student and because I have been informed by previous students about their textbook reading habits.  I’m aware, however, that my students will need to be better readers in order to be successful as scientists, attorneys, physicians, or other professionals.

My new approach involves assigning reading before class and having students answer questions about the reading before we discuss the issues in class.  Actually, I only give them until midnight the night before class so that I have time to review their answers in preparation for class.  It’s kept me on my toes generating the questions and then reading all the answers before class meets.  The students have responded well, even though Moodle (the learning management system) hasn’t been very responsive.

This weekend we’re changing servers in order to improve Moodle’s performance.  So, I decided not to assign any reading questions for my students to answer.  One of the students actually requested questions to answer.  I’m surprised and delighted to know that he recognizes how much the reading has helped him even after only a couple of classes.

Today we were talking about Diels-Alder reactions.  The level of student understanding was so high that we actually spent a fair amount of time discussing frontier molecular orbital theory, something I’ve never had the opportunity to do in teaching second semester organic in my previous 19 years as a faculty member!  I am happy that I decided to implement this new teaching strategy.