Through semester’s course and duration,
Acknowledge the check of narration:
The concepts we’ve pitched here
Are always abridged—
Nearer essence of lecture: curation.
This is a non-Twitter/Bluesky poem that I wrote a few years ago. I think of its themes increasingly often in the courses I teach, given that many of them are introductory. It seems worth taking some time this week to expand/explore these lines, as the end of the semester emerges in view (ever so slightly), on the horizon.
“Through semester’s course and duration, /
Acknowledge the check of narration…”
The constraints of an introductory textbook mean that a textbook entitled Chemistry at best covers a significant portion of what chemists would agree on as the fundamental concepts, at the time of its writing, for an introduction to beginning students.
The constraints of a 55-minute class period mean that a small percentage of THOSE concepts are communicated synchronously there, once a professor has chosen a textbook to use for their course.
Given infinite time and undivided attention, I suspect that anyone would teach their subject in a different way; as that’s far from the case, we each have “check[s] on narration,” in preparing our courses.
“The concepts we’ve pitched here /
Are always abridged…”
I emphasize to my students that the coverage of a chemistry curriculum is iterative. The concepts in an introductory course are significantly abridged compared to the substance of the discipline itself; it is expected for the material to seem overwhelming on a first pass.
“Nearer essence of lecture: curation.”
I remember a workshop early in my teaching career where a senior colleague from a different department, in an illuminating side comment, described their approach as “curation.” They noted that, with the ubiquity of the internet, their teaching had fundamentally changed: they saw one of their main class-time roles now as highlighting the most illustrative online resources via which a student could further explore a discipline on their own.
While the disciplinary content of chemistry is significantly different, I do think the ability of a class session to “curate” the most crucial concepts and techniques to understand, from an otherwise-immense amount of textbook material, is analogous.
Chemphasis 