The Geeky Lovechild of Buddy Holly and Clark Kent

After having completed my B.S. in Biochemistry, all I can say is that most of my classes felt like B.S. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my education and I’m immensely thankful to my parents for being able to pay for as much as they did. Let me clearly state that I do not think my Bachelor’s was a waste of my time. However, I have categorized any class I took that was offered as a traditional lecture style into one single bin in my memory. I can no longer remember who said what or when because all of the information was delivered to me in a large lecture hall, in uncomfortable seats, for 50 to 65 minutes, multiple times each week, with the same droning voice, and the same terrible slide show that was already shared with me prior to class. Rinse and repeat for 16 weeks/semester and 8 semesters.

Not all of my classes were like this, but every class that I hold as a fond memory was not a traditional lecture based class.

I am not an auditory learner, so writing notes from professors while they lecture is not the best way I retain information. My junior year, I took Organic Chemistry (for the second time) with a professor who decided to “flip” the class. I took it because the other professor who was offered had already been my professor the previous spring and I couldn’t get higher than a D on any test. I didn’t know what this flipped class was going to be like, but I knew I needed new. This is where I truly got my understanding of all organic chemistry, and I became one of the top students in his class, where in a previous semester I had been in the bottom 10% of this same subject and unable to continue into my majors courses because I failed this prerequisite.

The flipped class had us watching his lecture videos before class met. I would pause and play ad nauseum as I wrote down the notes to the class and any phrases he mentioned that I didn’t understand, I could pause his lecture and instantly look up. His videos were about 20 minutes long but this way made them roughly an hour per video. We’d be given an average of 3 videos per class meeting. Now when we got to class, we had to bring this packet of problem sets. In class, we would go over the entire packet together with him and the TAs walking through the aisles of the lecture hall. I found myself much more confident in the material as we discussed in class and this had me pose more complex questions. I would ask “what-ifs” more than anything else where previously in any other lecture class my number one question was “Could you repeat that?”.  He had his class times gameified as well. Bonus points on quizzes and tests for asking novel questions, but there was a cap on the number of points he’d give you for the semester. Questions were worth two points if he had to get back to you with an answer. This course motivated me through my increased confidence and I chose to look up lecture videos from educational websites that were like his, Khan Academy is a great one that comes to mind, and I relearned everything that I hadn’t absorbed from the first semester of this course. I started to be the one in my study group that had the answers and could easily explain it. I didn’t have to struggle to make it to class on time because this was my favorite one for the semester.

Historically, my favorite courses from my undergrad were not my majors courses, but my English classes I took for my CLE degree requirements. I got my favorite professor ever by pure chance, he was a Master’s student for the English department here at Virginia Tech and I was in his section of first year English during spring. The best part of his class was that there was no syllabus. We had two assignments, some readings for class, and a large project in the place of our final exam. The theme of the course was Music. Anything we wanted to write for the course just had to fit into Music. Class times focused on readings by authors he enjoyed that wrote about music and we discussed them as a group. Our big project was an album review. The rules: it must be on the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time and you may not have already heard the album before. I decided on Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True to do the review on.

Elvis Costello: The Teenage Years circa 1972

We had this project to do over the break which was perfect because I had uninterrupted time to just listen to this album on repeat. I was at my parent’s house and I had the album saved to my phone; if I brought my earbuds anywhere, I was listening to this album. A solid week during Thanksgiving break was dedicated to this album review for music that was originally released in the 1970s. After this album review on a man who was arguably the “Father of Punk Music” I then began my second project into a history of punk music as well as the societal impacts of the genre in current events at that time. This class wasn’t gameified like my Organic Chemistry, but there were no rules, just the ability to freely express myself on a subject I enjoyed.

These two courses shaped my views of education. I decided that I wanted to educate students in upper level life sciences because its a subject I truly enjoy and it’s one I can allow a lot of freedom of expression into the lesson plans of. I agree with Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown, as we enter the 21st century, we need to look to ways to teach in the 21st century. Blackboards and overheads are a thing of the past. Technology is the future. Gameification provides the platform for changing the classrooms successfully.