What a week! I felt like I never had a moment between worrying about one thing after another. We start driving at 4:30 on Sunday morning, got back for Charlie's party, on Monday, I drove to Worcester, on Tuesday I finished the CSL proposal, on Wednesday I graded papers, on Thursday I taught class, and on Friday I presented to one of the mentoring groups. After I finished, I wrapped up one or two things, left work a bit early, and got on my bike. I selected a hillier route this time and felt much stronger than on my last ride. I'm hoping to ride again today while some warm weather hangs around.
I had an idea for the talk on Friday that I spent several hours trying to pull together. I wanted a single page from a text book that I could pass out and ask the students to construct multiple choice questions. Then, I was planning to ask them to write feedback for what you'd tell students who selected "correct" or "incorrect" answers. I also wanted to demonstrate that, especially in unstructured domains like Biology, there are often a lot of unstated assumptions in the questions you write that allow you make intelligent cases for why more than one answer would be right. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a good page and trying to write a question I was satisfied with. It's hard to write good questions! Eventually, I chose a page from my dad's ecology textbook on climax forest. The question I wrote was
A barrier island is periodically struck by hurricanes, which disturbs the plant communities, uprooting trees, washing out beach grass, and covering vegetation with layers of sand. When you would expect species diversity to be highest?
- Just before the hurricane
- Just after the hurricane
- During the intervening period
As I had anticipated, most of the student questions were simply about the definition of climax conditions. But the audience didn't actually write enough questions to justify having them write feedback -- a few seemed a bit miffed that I was making them do something, rather than just sitting and listening. My presentation suffered a bit from my not having prepared as well as I should have, but it went pretty well.