Mary C. Henry

As the semester comes to a close, I find myself thinking about my classes this semester and considering ways to improve them the next time I teach them. Two of my classes (hazards and landscape ecology) will be put on the shelf until next August, but I will be teaching physical geography (GEO 121) again in just over a month (yikes!) Now would be a great time for me to make notes about what worked well, how the timing of some things worked and didn't work, and other thoughts for next fall. Even though I'll be teaching GEO 121 again soon, there is a good chance that I'll forget about some changes I wanted to make before then, so I should make some notes about that, too! One of the things that I struggle with in GEO 121 is making the class interesting and more interactive. The lecture part of the class has 90 students and we meet in a lecture hall with seats that are bolted to the floor and I'm stuck at or near a large stationary podium. This setup is not conducive to stud...

Well, I had really intended to update this more regularly, but that hasn't happened and now the semester is almost over. Next week is our last week of classes, then finals are the week after that. We are on a pretty late calendar this year with grades due on December 22nd! Between now and then, I will be spending a good amount of my time grading. Grading papers. Grading exams. Grading projects. I assign written assignments in all of my classes, because I think it is useful and valuable, but this time of the semester I often start second-guessing my wisdom about this when I have 80-some-odd papers, 16 research papers, 9 project reports, (and a partridge in a pear tree) to grade- not to mention hazard journals, labs, and exams. My friends on Facebook are used to me complaining about grading and often ask why my teaching assistant doesn't do it. Well, I only have a TA for one class and his/her job is to grade labs and exams. I have usually graded any papers myself. It's not th...

As I expected, things have been generally hectic so far this semester. Teaching every day means that I don't get a work-at-home-gather-my-thoughts day, so this usually falls to the weekend. I am not too behind on grading so far, but do have a virtual* pile of grading to do right now. Here are a few observations of how things have been going: The online quizzes seem to be working out pretty well for GEO 121. Students have from Monday morning until Friday night to go in and take the quiz. I've already had one slip-up where I forgot to post the quiz, so I gave the students an extra day to take it (even though I only posted it two hours late!). Then there was a Blackboard outage this morning, so I extended the time even longer. I'll be sure to get my quiz for next week posted today! I have still been dealing with technical problems in our lab, but I am optimistic that things will finally be settled in the next week or so. Our setup for logging into the computers was changed ove...

My job can be really funny in some ways. I go from having ultimate flexibility in the summer to the structure and schedule of the semester. There is no transition. One day, I just get up and classes are back in session. I am teaching mornings this semester, so I have gotten back into a schedule of getting up early and coming into campus to teach. My afternoons are more open for labs, meetings, research, class planning, etc. and by 10pm, I am pretty wiped out. The first week back is always a shock to the system- I slept for 10 hours last Friday night! Once I get back into a routine, things are fine. I feel pretty good about how my classes are going so far. In my intro physical geography class, I am trying online quizzes for the first time. Every Monday morning, a new quiz is up for the students to take and they have until Friday night at 10pm to finish them. They are graded automatically, since I have the correct answers built into the quiz. There were a few technical glitches for the f...

It's that time of year again. The students will be arriving this week and classes will be starting next Monday. I feel pretty ready, since I started working on class planning extra early this year, but I still need to finalize some things and catch up on some new reading assignments. We have a lunch with the new graduate students this week, but otherwise, everything happens next week. I am teaching five days a week this semester. That may seem like an unreasonable complaint, but teaching is not the only work I do. I need time for research and service*, too- not to mention time to plan what I teach. I like semesters when I have one or two days a week that I can work at home. My schedule this semester won't allow that, so I'll have to be more creative about planning my days and work schedule. I'll post more as the semester gets rolling! *I am missing an OGA meeting next week, since I have class. If I didn't teach every day, I might have been able to go! (If it weren...

One of the first things I do to prepare for a class is to write the syllabus. It's the first document the students receive and contains all of the vital information about the course, such as required books, expectations, grading policy, and the schedule for the semester. Mine have tended to get longer and longer- especially for the large general education course that I teach. My syllabus for GEO 121 is currently four pages of text, a page with the schedule, and an additional page describing the requirements that the course fills. For my upper-level courses, they tend to be shorter (three or four pages total). Why is that syllabus so long? First, I like to explain more about the course content than in other courses. Most students taking GEO 121 are not geography majors and never will be. They have registered for the course because they need it to a fill a requirement (a physical science with a lab) and usually have very little interest in the subject (although maybe this changes at...

We have just over four weeks until classes start, so I am trying to get things organized and finish a few things before the students get back into town. I am teaching three classes this semester and need to write the syllabi and plan those for the semester. This means I have to make my final decisions about attendance monitoring in GEO 121 , update reading packets for GEO 333 and GEO 444/544 and plan out the sixteen weeks that start on August 24th. It will be hectic when classes start, so the better I plan things now, the easier things will go then. I also need to think about how to revise assignments I've used in the past. For instance, I always have some kind of journal assignment in my hazards class, but usually tweak it a bit each year. I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, so I need to think about how I can modify the assignment. I also need to decide on some things for GEO 121: whether to keep the paper assignment this time (or put more weight on exams), decide about usin...

We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr...

Late last fall, I joined the steering committee for the Ohio Geographic Alliance (OGA). A retired colleague (Professor Emeritus Dr. Howell Lloyd) was stepping down after many years serving on the committee. We attended my first meeting together and I was thankful to have someone at the meeting who I already knew and also someone to help me navigate to Ohio State University for the first time (where OGA is based). OGA is one of many state geographic alliances and is sponsored by the National Geographic Society . Established in 1990, OGA is an organization devoted to enhancing geography, as both a physical and socialc science, in Ohio's K-12 curriculum. It is a partnership that includes K-12 teachers and university geography professors who work together in pre-service, inservice, materials development and public engagement activities. (from OGA website ). I was very excited about the prospect of joining this organization, because I have wanted to get involved in K-12 education and ...

So academics have their summers off, right? We may not be teaching (although plenty of us teach at least some summers), but we have plenty of other things going on. Here's what I have on my plate this week: Meeting with my REU student to go over more preprocessing steps. We have five Landsat images to process and analyze and are just getting into the preprocessing now. It can be very tedious and requires great attention to detail. Attending a MA proposal defense. Graduate students have to have committee approval of their proposed thesis work before their travel funding is released. Most students finish this in April and May, but some are still working to plan their field visits in what remains of the summer. Attending a REU cluster meeting. We are going to be discussing articles from two visiting speakers. I still need to read the papers and they are on topics quite outside of my discipline and area of expertise. Reading like this is usually best done near a computer so that I can ...

We had a cluster meeting today and spent the entire hour letting the students update us on their research progress. The projects include lake water sampling, monitoring ant populations, relating plant cover to remotely sensed data, and modeling BTU output for potential biofuel applications**. Each student talked about what they had been doing so far and what kind of data collection and analysis they would be doing. Some common themes ran through each discussion, such as steep learning curves and struggling with defining and explaining research. In this program, we mentor students, but expect them to take ownership of their projects and ask them to explain their planned work early on. It's always a struggle for me to keep quiet when my student is talking about the work at this stage. I always worry that I am not providing enough guidance (or too much guidance without being clear about the big picture). It can be challenging for the students early on, but I thought they all did a goo...

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a work-related blog, was to give me an opportunity to do some less formal academic writing. All the wise academics recommend writing on a regular, even daily basis. This is not something that I have been able to achieve over my academic career, but I would love to get to that point. As an academic, I do a variety of writing: teaching related writing includes things like syllabi, assignments, lectures, and exams; and research writing, which means writing abstracts for conferences, full-length research papers, and proposals. And let’s not forget all of the email correspondence that is required these days: student emails, emails from collaborators, administrative emails, etc. When contentious issues arise, these emails can take a lot of time to read and compose responses. A lot of my research writing lately has been collaborative, so paper and proposal drafts have been emailed back ...

Global EVI Summer 2000. Image credit: NASA MODIS Gallery We are technically about to start week 4 of the summer around here (!), but I feel like I am still trying to get in gear. The REU students have arrived and I think we have another excellent group. We assign our student-mentor teams into research clusters. Sometimes these clusters work collaboratively and other times we are grouped by a common interest. I am part of the “Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology” cluster with four other faculty and three other students (in addition to mine). We meet in our clusters about once a week during the summer and discuss research articles and what progress we are making on our projects. My student will be working on part of my USDA grant to map Amur honeysuckle. She will do some field work, but will spend a lot of her time learning about and using remote sensing and image processing. For students who do not have a strong background in remote sensing, I usually start...

Miami University has a summer research program for undergraduates in Ecology, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. Our REU Program was recently renewed for a third three-year term (2009-2011) and this year’s students will be arriving next week. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor from a range of departments like Botany, Zoology, and Geography. I will be working with a student this summer- the fourth student I have advised for REU. I am also now on the steering committee for our REU program, so I was involved in writing the proposal for the renewal, selecting student applicants, and helping with other planning. I am always impressed with the students that participate in our program. My three former students are all in graduate school now (the student from last summer will be starting this fall) and I have even been able to publish with one of them (a...

Almost every semester in every class, I determine grades partly based on “participation”. Usually, this is largely based on attendance, but students are also assessed on contributing to class and/or completing in-class assignments. For most students this amounts to “free points” and I often consider eliminating it from the grade completely. However, I like to know who is attending class and that can be tricky in large lecture courses (my GEO 121 course enrolls about 90 students). I also don’t like to feel like I am holding students captive. How many students will show up if it is left to their discretion? College students are legal adults, so if they want to skip class, they can deal with the consequences. It can often be disruptive to have uninterested students in class, since they talk to their friends and text during class (despite me asking them not to). In the fall, I am thinking of doing an experiment by not monitoring attendance in GEO 121. Stude...

Spring semester 2009 has just ended and I am trying to catch my breath. Grades were due this past Tuesday, then I spent two days helping with Miami-Talawanda Science Week. Robbyn Abbitt (our GIS Coordinator) organized the program for third- and fourth-graders to visit extreme places using Google Earth . The kids seemed to enjoy it- especially at the end when they got to search for their houses and look at Disney World (the 3-D buildings are REALLY cool!) I am collaborating on a proposal and have a manuscript to review, in between fielding emails from disgruntled students! It may be summer, but it’s no vacation!