BIPN 100 WI25: Course Retrospective

This was a quarter of several firsts –my first quarter as a professor, my first time teaching physiology, and my first experience as the sole instructor of record. On the whole, I’m pleased with how the quarter went, but more than anything, I’m proud just to have made it through the whole ten weeks without the train ever careening off the tracks.

A big mindset shift I had to embrace this quarter was to embrace having a passable first draft. When it comes to teaching, I tend to be a huge perfectionist – and unproductively so. Hours are wasted away trying to fine-tune a morphing PowerPoint animation as I trick myself into thinking “this will REALLY make a difference”, and it quickly becomes an unsustainable task to have 26 lectures ready in 10 weeks. Thankfully, I got a head start preparing during the fall, but nonetheless, I had to constantly remind myself that what I was doing was good enough. That wasn’t always easy; I often felt a self-imposed pressure to do all the things – lots of active learning, formative assessments, and all the other strategies I was surely hired as a teaching professor to do. But getting there takes time, and I had to be okay with that.

If I had to pinpoint what I'm proudest of (beyond simply making it through the quarter), it would definitely be creating a warm classroom space. Exam days aside (we’ll get to that…), I genuinely felt like spirits were high, and that on the whole, my students were happy in class and felt comfortable talking to me. There were some really vibrant moments during lecture (the collective gasp when an iClicker question is exactly split down the middle, the loud discussion that ensues, and the hilarity of the whole class realizing their conversations swayed everyone towards the wrong answer), and I’m grateful that my students got onboard despite our sleepy 4pm lecture slot. Meeting students during office hours was also a real highlight, and I’m really happy that so many of them came. One thing I especially enjoyed was hearing students talk about their visions for the future – it was so interesting to hear about all these paths that I had never remotely considered for myself, and to envision all these different journeys together.

Personally, I’m also proud that I’ve become much more resilient when a class doesn't go to plan. When I think back to my first TA experiences in college, I was really tough on myself. I most vividly remember one review session on chain-growth polymerization - I had planned to walk through this beautiful derivation of polymerization kinetics, and right as we were building up to the final equation-to-end-all-equations, I got completely lost and had to end the class. I was annoyed with myself for a whole week afterwards.

This quarter, I taught several lectures that will need significant edits. And each time, I found it very helpful to spend five minutes after class reflecting on what needed fixing (despite my best efforts to avoid doing this, I somehow held firm all quarter long). Besides the practical benefit of getting to see these notes next quarter, it was also rather cathartic to productively offload those negative feelings onto a piece of paper. Interestingly, there was essentially zero correlation between which lectures I was most excited to teach, and which ones landed best with the students. I was SO excited to teach my Action Potentials lecture, but that was definitely my biggest flop (though it would’ve been nice to flop on something less foundational for literally the entire course.). I skipped so many explanatory steps, and I got so carried away with my analogy of axons being like sparklers that we lost where the analogy ended and the biology began. On the other hand, some of the lectures that landed best were about topics that I’d previously known nothing about, or still find quite dry. For instance, I’m still not particularly jazzed about smooth muscle physiology, yet somehow the in-class questions I’d written that day led to the liveliest discussions all quarter.

Whereas class time generally felt pretty upbeat, the exams definitely threw a spanner in the overall mood. The first Midterm had a much lower average than I expected, and it was definitely a challenge to process my feelings about this. Having recently been a student, I remember how awful it felt when my professors would squarely place the blame on us for a low exam average. Being told we were not rising to the “MIT standard” isn’t exactly the most welcoming message a first-year graduate student wants to hear, despite whatever motivational intentions it may have had. But now that I was on the other side, I also knew that it would not be sustainable (or reasonable) to just blame myself when an exam goes poorly. After that first Midterm, I actually dreaded showing up to class, a feeling I had never experienced before – I really didn’t want the upbeat energy of the class to crumble, and I didn’t want an adversarial relationship to develop with the students.

Ultimately, I think I handled it okay. I framed it as a story of shared accountability – for me, I would survey the students and take steps to better prepare them for next time (something that I will continue doing in my future courses), and for the students, I asked them to be honest with themselves about how they’d prepared for the exam. I do think that the course ultimately continued on an upwards trajectory after that. I’m also glad I decided to let the Final replace one of the Midterms, because some students went on the most incredible redemption arcs, going from scoring 20% on the first Midterm, to ultimately getting 90+% on the Final.

All in all, I feel really proud to have made it through, and enjoyed, this quarter. After wanting to be a teacher for so long, I definitely had some nerves about how I’d feel once I was actually in the thick of the job, and although this was a LOT of work, it was all satisfying work that left me creatively and socially fulfilled. I will also hugely miss my TA/IA team - pretty much every lecture, we'd all stay behind and chat for 15 minutes afterwards; they all definitely made my quarter so much brighter. Next quarter, I'm teaching BIPN 100 again, and also adding BILD 5 on top of that. If this quarter was my first time teaching one course solo, next quarter will be my first time teaching two at the same time – so my goal will be to keep everything that made BIPN 100 good this quarter, and make the minimal set of lecture edits so that I can focus my energy on launching BILD 5. I feel very lucky to have had a marvelous group of students this quarter, and it really made my day to see that several of them are joining me again next quarter for BILD 5. Onwards to the spring!

Syllabus: Link