Monday, September 19, 2011

Water water EVERYWHERE! And some academic stuff too.

Okay, I should start out by saying that I'm pretty obsessive about checking the weather forecast both before I go to bed and first thing after I wake up. As far as I knew last night, we were supposed to get rain today, but not early in the morning. So you can imagine my horror at 7:45 am as I lay face-down in bed blindly swatting at the snooze button and I hear it raining outside. I've mentioned before how long it takes me to get to school when it's raining. Right. Somehow, I manage to eat something, shower, and leave the house by 8:30. Traffic wasn't quite as bad as I expected and I made it to school 20 minutes early. Awesome! Had class and didn't fall asleep. Yay. This is about as good as it gets. That is, until I tried to get on the freeway to go home. Bah. Traffic was stopped up because just the middle lane wasn't under a foot of water. Only idiots in SUVs were driving in the heavily flooded left lane. Opposing traffic traveling in the left lane made wakes so big that water was splashing up at least a foot higher the concrete median - it was unreal. I'm basically sitting in the middle lane creeping along when some jackwagon in an SUV comes barreling up the left lane - through the pond of water. I've never had my car be completely doused like that before. It sucked. I don't even want to think about how bad my commute will be when it snows.

Anyway, I have a test in molecular biology on Wednesday evening. It's from 4-7 pm in one of the med student lecture halls, which is not at all where or when I normally have class. I think that's weird. In anticipation of the grade I'm likely to get on this exam, I decided to do online evaluations of the faculty that have taught so far, which will get me 10 extra points. I'm desperate. These aren't done the way EMU does it. Evaluations for molecular biology are online and apparently done at the end of each "block" of material (which I explain below). And they have to be done within a week of the end of the block. After a certain date, you get locked out of that evaluation. You get an email that tells you who you're evaluating, along with a PIN and a password. There are 24 multiple-choice type questions, along with free text fields for comments that go along with each question. All 3 faculty I had in the most recent block are evaluated at the same time. My answers are supposed to be anonymous, the only thing the course director can see is whether or not I completed the eval.

The structure of the courses here is pretty different from that at EMU also. Here, at least in the 2 classes I have now, material is broken up into "blocks". For example, Block 1 was all about the structure of biological macromolecules, Block 2 was enzymology and protein function, and it keeps going until Block 15, which is genetics. Different faculty from various departments come in and teach different portions of the block or sometimes the entire block, based on their area of expertise. The material I'm being tested on was taught by 3 different faculty members. In the case of molecular biology, a total of 15 faculty members will have taught a portion of the material over the course of the term. This can be a positive thing if you get someone who is good at teaching and if your learning style meshes with their teaching style. It can also be very very bad. And of course they're all different - some are straight lecturers, some assign problem sets, some assign journal articles, etc. The prof. who just kicked off Block 3, membrane biochemistry, does a mix of chalk-talk and PowerPoint. Amazingly, none of the faculty - 4 in molecular bio and 3 in cell bio so far - have fallen behind with any of their lectures. That's impressive. Overall though, I think having that many different people teaching is going to make the class harder no matter the level of the stuff being hurled at us.

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