O’er course of career here-amassing, /
From teaching and testing and “class-ing,” /
Note margins’ connections /
In varied directions: /
The value of comments in passing.
The first of these more random summer essays discusses a point I’ve found intriguing throughout my career: often, the most directly insightful comments, in terms of actually doing day-to-day work, are not presented in the most typical educational arenas.
(I expect that many of these summer essays will run long, compared to my typical 280-word limit, and I’ll just provide that overall acknowledgement here.)
“O’er course of career here-amassing, /
From teaching and testing and ‘class-ing’…”
The traditional path toward a faculty career in STEM (graduate school and postdoctoral work) is primarily focused on depth, in terms of developing specific research expertise, rather than in the breadth that will be useful in teaching courses. As I examined last summer, that tension is a fascinating one that many more established authors have explored, in much more detail than a brief blog post would allow.
Thinking of my own experience, it can be interesting to reflect on where the most pertinent on-the-job training has come from, for preparing and teaching classes. I’ve certainly had formal instruction in my own career (campus centers for teaching and learning; the Preparing Future Faculty program; excellent books). However, much useful advice also has arisen in side comments from my own professors, in settings like office hours, grading sessions, and conference travel: e.g., what can be specifically challenging about writing an exam, or why scientific curricula have the overall structures that they do.
“Note margins’ connections /
In varied directions…”
When I was expanding this poem this week, I thought of two science essays I had encountered in the past.
In “The Proof of Lavoisier’s Plates” (from the excellent compilation The Lying Stones of Marrakech), paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould begins by discussing the usefulness of notes in the margin, for “two most contradictory forms of intellectual activity.” For one, he acknowledges that the term “marginalia” is often used as a catch-all designation for seemingly minor points and tangents; for the other, he points out that a reader’s own notes in a book’s margin often mark the genesis of their own independent insights or thought processes related to that book. A quick annotation can ultimately have a massive domino effect.
In botanist Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl, she movingly discusses an encounter that, again, defies obvious classification. Here, a past mentor retires and donates his lab equipment to her: “[W]e two scientists conducted a homely ceremony that transferred the tools of his life– his career– to mine.” She invokes an image that has stayed with me for a near-decade at this point: “It was kind of tragic, I reflected, that we all spent our lives working but never really got good at our work, or even finished it. The purpose instead was for me to stand on the rock that he had thrown into the rushing river, bend and claw another rock from the bottom, and then cast it down a bit further and hope it would be a useful next step for some person with whom Providence might allow me to cross paths.”
Both Gould and Jahren’s essays highlight additional opportunities for these informal moments of insight and support that arise throughout a more formal career. Moreover, they remind me of a perpetual favorite image, of the poetic form of the rubaiyat: casting the poem’s rhyme scheme forward into its next stanza, projecting how the next likely steps will take shape. Here, the marginal note and the equipment transfer could potentially provide a scientist with both a new question and the means with which to explore it.
“The value of comments in passing.”
Academia certainly has occasion for many formal settings and events: classes, seminars, exams, defenses, and graduations, just to name a few. However, the metaphorical margins and “comments in passing” likewise abound, in the course of a scientific career.
Chemphasis 