Gave midterms today

[anonemouse 1]

I hope this doesn't make too many enemies, but sometimes people are so smart/intelligent and maybe even disciplined that they do not realize how hard some things are for others who don't have their gifts.

I definitely understand that. I have absolutely no aptitude for math. I have never made a grade higher than a B in any math or math-related class, no matter how much studying I do. Getting a B in a math class is a cause for celebration for me. The last math class I took was experimental design last semester. It was basically an intensive statistics class, using completely different techniques than any of the other stats classes I've taken. The only reason I did as well as I did in that class (I got a was because I had taken a SAS (statistical computer software) programming class the semester before. At the end of the experimental design class, I could literally do only about 10% of the material by hand. I couldn't tell you what a lot of the symbols used in the equation meant and I couldn't go to the professor for help because I couldn't use the proper terminology. But what I could do was figure out how to input the problem into the SAS software with the proper programming and interpret the results. If I hadn't had that SAS programming class, I probably wouldn't have passed the experimental design class.

The thing with the labs I teach is that there is very little that the students actually have to know how to do. The majority is basic memorization. I think a lot of them get really stressed out by the idea that they will have to know all of this stuff that they have never learned before and will never have to know again, and they make it a lot more complicated than it actually is. I could understand if it was like a math class and they were learning complex equations and having to remember them, but the most complicated thing they had to do on the midterm is use a microscope to figure out which thread was in the middle of a pile. The rest was straight memorization. Heck, they didn't have to do that much, actually. They just have to be able to recognize the correct answer out of three or four choices, most of which are not at all similar. I also tried to teach them little tricks for memorizing the correct answers. For example, algae in the phylum Pyrrophyta cause red tides. "Pyro" is a word that many know is associated with fire. Fire is red. Therefore, they can associate Pyrrophyta with red tides. We try to use associations like that to make the memorization a little easier on them, instead of having them look at the organism through a microscope and recognize it soley by its appearance.