- On behalf of Stu Kurtz,
the Master of the Physical
Sciences Collegiate Division,
and myself, Jocelyn Malamy,
the Master of the Biological
Sciences Collegiate Division,
it gives us great pleasure
to recognize the achievements
of two of our colleagues, Eric
Schwartz and David Archer,
who have been awarded the 2020
Llewellyn John and Harriet
Manchester Quantrell Award
for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
So congratulations to
you both and welcome.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- So, as a first question,
just to introduce our listeners
to each of these colleagues,
let me address the first
question to Eric Schwartz.
So Dr. Schwartz is a professor in the
Department of Pharmacological
and Physiological Sciences.
Eric, you've been teaching two courses
for the last number of years.
Could you take a moment and just tell us
about each of those courses
and what led you to
initiate those courses?
- Well the courses are very different,
although they do have a
common idea behind them.
One course is actually taught
at the Marine Biological Laboratory,
which is an affiliate of the university,
and I don't know, something
like seven years ago,
the university made a formal relationship
with the Marine Biological Laboratory,
and my thought at that time was
we had an invested interest,
we should use it.
And the best way we could use it
was to provide courses
there for our students.
And I thought that the having
a course which was similar to
the long tradition of summer
courses offered at the MBL
would be a tremendous
experience for our students.
And so there's a history of
people coming internationally
to spend summers at the MBL,
and do intensive courses,
and so this was modeled after that.
The course which I teach in the
fall quarter here in Chicago
is modeled as a graduate course
specifically designed for undergraduates.
By that I mean that it's a reading course
and discussion course.
We don't use a text, we
read original papers,
and the purpose is to understand
what is the cutting edge of science
and how does science evolve
by looking at what is
contemporary neuroscience.
- Hello, I'm Stuart Kurtz, I'm the
Master of the Physical
Sciences Collegiate Division,
and it's my privilege to
introduce David Archer,
Professor of Geophysical Sciences.
I have a question for David,
how did you become interested
in the computational side
of the classes you teach,
environmental science,
environmental chemistry,
and paleoclimatology,
and how did you figure out
how to include those in those classes?
- Hi Stu, I'm a computational
scientist myself,
and so the way I kind of look
at a situation scientifically
is if we can simulate it,
make a toy model of it
that does the same thing,
then I feel like we sort of understand it,
and I've sort of ramped up
and gotten more and more
into making undergraduates
do little computational projects in Python
or a spreadsheet or something like that,
because a lot of them have
never really seen that before.
You can take a excellent Python class
through CS at the university,
and you learn how to sort
numbers or something,
but applying a scripting language
or something to simulating
groundwater chemistry flow
or something like that
is something that students are,
it's good for them to see it,
'cause they haven't seen it before.
- Why don't I follow up with a question
that's very similar to what
Jocelyn was asking Eric,
and that is that your teaching style
includes having your students
read and discuss journal articles,
can you talk a little bit about that,
and how it works for
you and why you do it?
- Yeah, I came to this kind of sideways,
I was prepping to do a new class, to me,
in paleoclimatology, the
study and reconstruction
of climate changes in Earth's past,
and what can it tell us about
climate changes in the future?
And I was reading the
textbook, and then I was going
to some of the original papers,
and I got such a different impression
about the science, about just
the state of the science,
from reading a couple of opposed papers,
than I would get from
looking at a chapter,
even if it described the
opposition of the papers
perfectly accurately,
you somehow just get a
different impression.
So I sort of evolved into
a show and tell model,
where I will assign three papers,
three students to host a paper each,
and save it 'til the last 15 minutes
of the class period or something,
so my lecture kind of preps,
and then the student is supposed
to get up and show the money plot,
and pull out the essence of the paper
and describe it in a
quick sort of a thing.
I never criticize the
students or challenge them,
anything they come up with is great,
and after a few weeks of doing this,
they really start to get
enthusiastic about it,
'cause they feel empowered
to read these papers,
even if they don't understand every word.
- And this is mostly just to Eric,
but really could apply
to either one of you,
one of the things I've
noticed is that your courses
have a theme of helping
students understand
how we know what we know,
and I think I know Eric,
where I've seen students'
comments on your courses,
in both of your courses
students have commented
almost exactly on that
point, word for word,
that "These courses have
helped me understand
"how scientists know
what they claim to know."
Can you talk a little bit about how you
manage to communicate
that to your students?
- Well that's exactly sort
of the underlying theme
for both of the courses which I teach.
In the intense course at
MBL, the notion there is that
what we know depends upon
the instruments we use.
And we have to understand
what the instruments
are actually measuring
in order to really assess
what is being recorded.
Furthermore, it gives us the opportunity
to create new instruments
and to modify existing instruments.
Likewise in a reading
course here in Chicago,
the methods which are actually used,
and how those methods have evolved,
with time, is an important
part of understanding
what the result is.
And I think that knowing the
method by which we acquire data
is just as important as what
the data or the results are.
- I think that really applies
to what you were describing
in your course, David,
because papers themselves
and close analysis of
papers really fits under
that exact same theme, I think.
- Yes, especially if you come up against
the ragged edge of our knowledge
and we actually don't know
why it was so much hotter in the Pliocene
when the CO2 levels were the same as today
and sea level was 20 meters higher.
We don't know and it's kinda freaky
that that was the case
but we don't know why.
- And how do your students handle that,
that coming up against that
ragged edge of the unknown?
- How do any of us, I guess.
- I think that I would say
that it's often the case
that students feel a little
bit out of their depth,
challenged, when they start a course.
But with time and just
a few weeks of practice,
they get into it, and they
feel much more comfortable
once they realize that they
really can come to grips
and understand these things.
I imagine it's just the
same for your course, David.
- Yeah, yeah, and then
toward the end of the quarter
they actually are feeling good enough
that they can be kinda nasty, actually,
to the authors of these papers.
They can see that they're just
humans like the rest of us.
- Right.
- In a good-natured way, of course.
- I think that's one of the transitions
which I hope to create during the course,
is that the students
actually make that shift.
- Yeah, I find this in my classes,
I teach the lower-level
students that they come in
with the impression that
almost everything has been solved already.
And then I imagine your
courses are a rude awakening
for those students.
- They're intended to be.
- Well, for the paleoclimate,
it's especially interesting
if the uncertainties about the past
then reflect onto
uncertainties of the future.
- So I have a question for David,
you have an unusual approach
to student assessment,
giving students assignments
without deadlines
and the opportunity to redo
them for a better grade.
Can you tell us more about this?
What your theory is behind it,
and how well it's worked in practice.
- There's not really a theory behind this,
I just kind of didn't wanna deduct points
for when the thing is handed in,
and I kinda felt like
if you set a deadline,
and you're harsh about it,
you're kind of letting
the student off the hook,
"Well, time's up, I gotta hand it in
"even though it's half-done," or whatever.
Whereas, if they don't have that threat,
then they have to deal
with it sooner or later.
My hope was that they would
develop the initiative
to do things on time because
it stays in synchrony
with the lecture material,
but in practice that has been I would say
an absolute failure. Nobody does that,
but maybe people grow
from this experience.
I sort of wanna treat
them like colleagues,
I don't wanna treat them like children.
And they don't go all the way
to professional, on-the-ball
colleagues in a quarter,
but maybe it helps some
of them get started.
I don't know.
- They certainly think so.
- Eric, you also have
sort of a gentle approach
to assessments that you told us about.
- Well, I start with the fact
that I never liked taking exams,
and I assume that my
students are the same.
And so I usually begin
the class by offering,
or having a discussion and offering
that we can develop any grading system
they're comfortable with,
and we put out several.
And usually what they decide
is that they would prefer
to emphasize classroom
discussion and forgo all exams,
so that's what we do.
And once everybody has
agreed, everybody's on board,
then coming to class
and actually participating
in the discussion
is the most important thing.
And that's really what I most enjoy.
- Very good.
- Eric, I received a couple of questions
forwarded from some of your students,
and one of them was how did you become
particularly interested in
the instrumentation of optics?
I imagine this is one of your MBL students
asking this question.
- Specifically optics.
Well, by training I'm actually
graduated from medical school.
And when I finished medical
school, I did a short residency
in pathology, which I
had to use a microscope.
And I always enjoyed looking at images.
Later on, when I started doing science,
I still maintained that,
and I dabbled a little bit
because I had a good friend
in the anatomy department,
and I would go over and visit
him and see what he was doing.
And he was an electromicroscopist,
where he did freeze fracture replicas,
and I liked looking at them.
Now for probably at least
20 years in my career,
I really did electrophysiology,
but at one point I decided that I wanted
to shift what I was doing and I'd become
more interested in
objects now, and imaging,
and that's what I do in the laboratory,
but I also I'm aware that
there's been a tremendous change
in the technical ability to
look through a microscope,
we now have so-called super resolution.
And to understand how that works,
you have to know a
little bit about optics.
So it was a natural thing for me to do.
- And David, I'd love to
hear a little bit more
about your background as well.
- Well, my experience with
teaching has been similar to
what I heard Eric say in that,
it pulls me into things
that I would not have,
it broadens me I find. I
did a global warming class
for a long time and I knew
all about carbon chemistry
in the oceans, but I
didn't really understand
the greenhouse effect, and my
environmental chemistry class
was a big stretch to start,
and my paleoclimate class.
I wasn't really a deep
time person by training,
so some of the most broadening
aspects of my career
have been the classes that I've,
it's a privilege to be able
to teach classes you're
not qualified to teach,
speaking for myself, no
reflection on Eric here.
- No, David, I agree completely,
I often say I teach what I don't know,
or more aptly I teach
what I would like to know.
And sometimes I structure
the course where it begins
with something I'm very familiar with,
but then diverges into areas
I would like to explore.
And so I tell the students
that this is a joint venture.
I am just a little bit ahead of them,
I have a lot of years of experience,
but I'm reading some of these papers
for the first time as well.
It's an opportunity for
me to go into a different
sub-area every year, and so
the course changes every year
as my interests change.
So unfortunately, my students
have to persevere with my interests.
- Even things that one
feels one knows really well,
at least I have found that
to break them back down
all the way to the basics
to be able to explain them
to a new student coming in,
reveals one's own knowledge gap.
- There's nothing like
teaching to learn a material.
- And to realize you don't
know what you thought you knew
quite so clearly.
- So I have a question
maybe for the both of you,
as long as we're in this space,
can you think about a time
where an interaction in your class
has maybe changed the
way that you've thought
about some aspect of your discipline?
- Well I was doing my
global warming class,
and reviewing carbon footprint,
where our carbon footprint comes from,
which prompted me to
stop going on airplanes,
so that has had a big
impact on my personal life.
If that counts.
- It's easy for me to think of an example,
it just happened this past quarter.
A student came to me and asked me
if I would write a
reference for an internship
they wanted to take at
the College de France,
and I spoke to them a little bit about
with whom they were going to work,
and I had to admit I didn't know much
about that person's work.
So when the course was
over, I picked up a book
which this investigator had
written, and read through it.
And then corresponded
with the student and said
"Gee, thank you, that was
very good, I enjoyed it,
"and it opened me up to an
area I wasn't aware of."
And that happens with some frequency.
- I bet our students would
be very interested to know
if you have any new ideas,
do you plan to continue teaching
the courses you're teaching,
or do you have any ideas for courses
that you would like to
develop in the future?
- I do have an idea for a
course I would like to develop,
which is...
We often read in the press
about the impact of
artificial intelligence,
and how artificial intelligence
is modeled on neural behavior.
But I think it would be rather interesting
to teach a course with
perhaps two colleagues,
in which the biology,
the computer science,
and the legal and social implications
or consequences of artificial
intelligence are explored.
And so if I can find two colleagues
willing to co-teach that with me,
I think it would be an interesting course.
- My environmental chemistry
class is kind of required
for the major, so I have
to keep manning that,
and my PhySci class was another obligation
which I have been relieved of
by a cherished colleague of mine
who's taken over, so that's enabled me
to do the paleoclimate class,
which I've only done twice now,
so I'm gonna stick with
that for a little while.
I don't have any super duper ideas
for something else I'd like to do,
but if somebody in my
department wanted to do
one of the ones I'm
doing, I'd be delighted
to try to come up with something new,
it's always a rush to do a new class.
A rare privilege.
- Think there are some big gaps
or things that we should be teaching
that we're not teaching right now?
- Well, there'd be a lot
of room for some sort
of big ideas class about
climate, I would think.
That hasn't really gelled in a way
that I have been involved in, but,
a lot of scope for that.
- I don't know that
there's a particular area,
but there is a sort of
philosophy or thread
that I think we should probably
stress a little bit more.
It goes back to what David
said a few minutes ago,
that students read a
textbook and they think
that it's all solved, and
the facts are very clear,
and I think that we need
to stress that science
and the way we look at the world,
is only the way we look at it today.
It's evolving, and it
depends upon our history,
and it depends upon
the instruments we use,
and to see science as
a more dynamic process,
a process of ever-changing worldview,
I think could be emphasized more.
- So between the two of you, you see a lot
of University of Chicago students
at a number of different levels.
Do you feel that they are being,
when they come to you,
have they been prepared
to accept the kind of education
that you're providing,
do you feel that their high school,
or whatever they have had
before they get to us,
is preparing them in the right ways?
- Yeah, sure, I always
start from the beginning,
so even in my environmental
chemistry class,
which has chemistry as a prerequisite,
I don't assume that everybody's up,
they've got thermodynamics
right front and center
in their minds. I kind of start from zero,
but yeah, the students, I
love teaching undergrads here,
you know, you give them
every rung of the ladder
and they just scamper right up.
- I quite agree, I think our
students are very very able.
I do not have requirements, prerequisites,
for the courses I teach,
I refuse to do that.
I believe that if anybody is interested,
then I can break down the
subject and present it,
and that special
knowledge is not required.
Anything that is required for the courses
can be done within the course.
Consequently, we've had, for example,
at the MBL courses, I
can think of a student
who was an English major,
another who was in economics.
True, the majority of the students
are in neuroscience, computer science,
physics, or chemistry.
Or sometimes even math.
But anybody who has an interest,
I'm happy to have in class.
- Yeah, I've had some
great philosophy majors.
- Exactly, I remember one student
who was interested in art conservation,
and wanted to come and take the course
'cause he thought that
spectroscopy and imaging
would be an important part,
something he wanted to learn.
So, it's been, we shouldn't be too narrow
in defining people into
subjects or majors.
- And how did you find those
students did in the course,
were they able to keep up?
- Perfect, I think they
enjoyed the course.
- As long as we're on
the topic of broadening
the scope of our classes,
David, you're known for
recommending books and movies
to students to augment
what's going on in class.
Can you give us any recommendations?
- There was somebody
from the press office,
was writing a thing and she
asked for book recommendations
as part of this, and what I came up with,
not wanting to ever waste
a good teaching moment,
was Jared Diamond's "Collapse"
for a non-fiction book,
and a book by somebody,
St. Marie, somebody,
called "Station Eleven", a fiction book
about a much worse
pandemic than we have had,
but a kind of meditation
on the fragility of the human enterprise.
I kind of, this whole
sort of looming pandemic
coming over us like a tidal
wave in the winter quarter
resonated alarmingly
with my mass extinctions
I was doing in my paleoclimate class.
- So it's interesting
that you mentioned Jared Diamond, David,
because when I was at UCLA as a postdoc,
Jared Diamond was in the
department of physiology,
and we'd occasionally have lunch together.
But his career has now diverged remarkably
from that initial start in academics.
- From birds?
- Birds or language or cultural history,
a number of topics which he's gone into.
- Yeah, I love his books.
- He's an example of an individual
who can easily migrate between fields
and doesn't have to be constrained
by any particular field.
And I think it's what we
should encourage our students
to do in general.
- So Eric, are you gonna recommend a book?
- I'm always hesitant to recommend a book,
because what I read is my personal taste,
and I don't expect other
people to share that.
I usually tell students if
they wanna read something,
read outside your field.
Get new ideas, and then bring them back.
- So we're in a very strange
educational world of course right now,
and not looking to be back
to normal anytime soon.
Do you have any thoughts as educators,
of how students or how other faculty
should be thinking about the challenges
that are coming with remote learning?
- Well as somebody who
objects to gratuitous travel
for climate reasons, I
was kind of hoping for
a flowering of new technology
and that we would learn
how to solve the etiquette,
and the technological problems,
and the security and everything,
and make some lemonade
out of these lemons, but,
the departmental seminars
in my department,
nobody wanted to do them over Zoom.
I've given seminars over Zoom before,
before this pandemic
happened, and it's clumsy.
So I was sort of hoping for more.
t seems like this isolation is really
kind of killing the social,
it's killing something
in our interactions.
- Yeah, I'm part of a national,
international I suppose,
seminar series in my own field,
and within an hour, 900
people signed up for it.
- I'm wondering if maybe you guys
could reflect a little bit on the way
teaching at the university
has changed over the years,
and where you think we might be headed.
Maybe I'll put David
in the hot seat first.
- Well, so Dorian Abbot is
evolving my global warming class,
you should ask him about
the future, I'm the past.
He's flipping the
classroom and experimenting
with all these new technologies.
I didn't figure out how to,
with a big 300 person class like that,
I didn't come up with the creative ideas
of how to flip it, he's doing that, so,
he's the person to talk to.
- So as sort of the students' choice,
because this is very much reminding people
that we're talking about the
Quantrell Awards, which are
based on student nominations,
for people who don't know.
Students have obviously really appreciated
the messages that the two of you
are trying to get out to them.
So as we wrap up this interview,
do you have any thoughts
for these students,
recommendations to them going forward?
Not even specific to
this time of pandemic,
but just in general as
they go through college
and think about their lives going forward?
(Jocelyn laughs)
- Just want to empower them,
I want them to do whatever,
to feel like they can accomplish
what they want to accomplish,
because, they can.
- I would say that the
course is never finished.
The course is only a model
for how they should continue
to think and operate
and study in the future.
Presumably gives them
a way of assimilating
and evaluating new things
that'll happen in the future.
I think that to give an
education which is static,
or frozen, on the day you
graduate, would be silly.
What we want is that they learn a process,
by which they can continue to evolve.
I mean, as I mentioned earlier,
I went to a medical school,
but you can imagine what
kind of physician I would be
if I simply only knew the
state of medicine 50 years ago.
What you wanna be able to do
is accommodate and integrate
all the changes that will be
taking place in the future,
and that's what I think
the real challenge is.
- All right then, that's
a fantastic message
and a great place for us to end,
so we thank Eric and David very much
for taking the time to talk to us,
and congratulate you again on
this very prestigious award.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Thank you guys.
