P.C. Shannon

I taught my first two classes of the new semester today, and it went pretty well. The big thing I learned today is that you have to set the mood from the first time you walk in the door — or at least the first time you open your mouth. So I greeted everyone and asked them all their names. I made a sincere effort to learn the students names and call on them by name. They seemed to respond very well to that. They were a little bashful about coming up to the board to work problems, but they did it and seemed to take to it well.

Setting this kind of friendly, jovial classroom environment is a big step for me. I’m usually kind of quiet and reserved. I’m certainly in the habit of waiting for others to set the mood and then fitting myself into that. Of course as the instructor, it’s up to me to set the mood.

I really enjoy teaching, at least in a smaller classroom where you can interact with the students. I don’t envy the professor, having to stand before 115 blank faces and drone on for an hour about Mendel’s experiments. The part of teaching I hate the most is the grading, which the prof — lucky bastard — doesn’t have to do. I suppose there isn’t a way to have your cake and eat it, too.

Anyway, the course website is here, and you can see the website for Dr. Iyer’s lab here. He does very cool stuff with microarrays, a.k.a. gene chips. He got his PhD from Harvard and did his post-doc in the Brown Lab at Stanford, which played a big role in developing microarray technology.