Final Final

So, after the last lecture there was the final—the final final of my career at Davis. I think my exams may stress me out more than my students.

Writing an exam is stressful. I choose some biological topic—a type of diatom, biofuels, wine, what happens to a dead whale—and ask questions about it. The theme for this exam was the origins of life. For the students, a “themed” exam requires the application of stuff from the class, rather than just knowing it. For me, such an exam means an excuse to meander through the literature on a subject I find diverting. I still have to make sure there are still a good distribution of easy and hard questions, that the questions are precise but not too lawyerly in their wording, that the wrong answers are clearly wrong but at least slightly plausible (this is much harder than it sounds) and that the answers are not all “c”.

The final was scheduled for Monday at 3:00. Having a deadline helps, since otherwise I tend to just do more and more meandering through the literature and write weirder and weirder questions. This deadline was made more difficult by a couple of factors—the chaos of moving and having work done on the house was one, and an absolutely essential concert by the Alexander String Quartet the previous evening was another. (During the intermission at the quartet concert, I overheard one of the audience telling his companion that “I really should be at home writing my final exam right now—but I couldn’t miss this!” I told him that I sympathized, and found out that his final, in Chinese history, was scheduled for 10:00 AM on Monday. So, I’m not the worst.) At any rate, the exam was more-or-less complete by 3:00 AM Monday. I emailed it to the TAs for critical comments.

Physically producing the exam can also be stressful. Monday morning, I incorporated most of the TA’s editorial work, rearranged the questions to make A, B, and C versious of the exam, printed it, answered emails from panicking students, and went off to Davis. Since I never get my exams ready far in advance, I never can get them printed by campus reprografics, so I end up copying and sorting them myself. Usually this goes smoothly, but this time was an absolute nightmare. One copier kept jamming; another said that it had made 100 copies of one version of the test, but had only produced 60; another ran out of paper and wouldn’t tell me how many copies it had produced before it quit. It was a real copying nightmare, and what should have taken less than an hour still wasn’t finished in an hour and forty-five minutes, when the exam was scheduled to begin. I ended up starting a third of the class with incomplete exams, and had to run back to the copier to finish up and give them the remainder of their exams a half hour later.

The real stress is the interim between the start of the exam and the grading. Normally this is bad enough: I hope so badly that the students all ace the exam. If I’ve done my job properly, and they’ve done their job properly, then the class average should be about 90%. I know this is never the case, but the stress comes in wondering just how far short of my hopes reality will be. I can write an easy exam, or a challenging exam, or a boring exam—no matter what, the class average is usually somewhere between 60% and 75%, and I count 75% as a raging success. Anyway, I am on pins and needles from the moment I hand out the exam to the moment I look over the question-by-question analysis of the test results.

This normally stressful situation was made even worse than usual for my final final. There was the aforementioned copying snafu. There was my own cellphone ringing during the exam—our realtor with an urgent update on the house we want to buy in Oregon. There was my own cellphone ringing, again—our realtor in Sacramento with an urgent query about a detail of our house we’re trying to sell. One of my students, who I was aware had neurological issues, had a seizure late in the exam period. Fortunately, one of her neighbors was a first-aider, and the paramedics came rapidly, but it made for a very nervous and disruptive experience all around.

Two weeks later, it’s almost all done. Almost. The mean for the final was about what I expected, in the low 60's. The distribution of overall grades in the class was also about what I expected. The smart students got A’s, the steinkopfs failed. But it’s not all over. The TA in charge of running the scantrons somehow missed five of them, and couldn’t find them until after I had submitted my grades to the registrar. So I’ll have to file some annoying paperwork on Monday, but then, I’ll relax. I’ll be finally finally done.

First class, last class

First Class/Last Class

I typically have a rough time with last lectures. First lectures are easy—your head is clear, there is no personal history between you and the students to complicate communication, and you haven’t made any mistakes yet. Last lectures are tough. The stress of the end of the quarter fills your mind, and standing at the front of the chalkboard is like standing at the focus of a parabolic reflector of undergraduate anxiety. A class of undifferentiated freshmen has become a class of individuals: the ones that are smarter than you, the ones who planktonically drift towards failure, the angry whiners and grade-grubbers, the earnest strugglers who through might and main are dragging themselves from a C to an A-. Addressing a class is just public speaking; addressing these individuals who you know personally demands personal communication.

The hardest thing on the last lecture is the mistakes. I should say "mistake," because it's always the same one: I’ve somehow forgotten to tell them just how much they should love the subject for its poetry and emotion. So, I read Darwin’s tangled bank, or emphasize how a single mutation can change the history of life on earth, or how every atom in their bodies was formed in a star and recycled through thousands of lives…and I get choked up. Usually, I make it through, but it’s rough.

I was really worried that this time would worse—after all, not only the last lecture for this class, but my last lecture at Davis. I decided to try a slightly different tack. This was the first biology class for most of my students, and rather than make the envoi about me and my love, I made it a challenge for them: ten big problems that I thought could be solved during their science careers. This list is by no means comprehensive—in fact, it was designed as much to prompt review as anything else. I could add lots of other things, but it was fun to think about:

1. In the laboratory, make a self-replicating molecule or assemblage of molecules.

2. Make a simple cell from scratch (not Ventner’s reboot), or completely model one on a computer.

3. Effectively use biological systems to clean up the messes of the 20th century—from superfund sites to Hanford nuclear reservation. This will require an understanding of metabolism and genetics

4. Make a solar cell that simply comes close to the efficiency of rhodopsin or a chlorophyll-based photosystem.

5. Understand photosynthesis—from the initial excitement of an electron by light, to how to split water at room temperature, to consuming CO2 to make fuel.

6. Fix nitrogen efficiently. The Haber process, which produces ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, and which modern agriculture depends upon, consumes somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of all natural gas production worldwide.

7. Understand the central dogma in Archaea. We just don’t understand how these cells work.

8. Understand how proteins fold, so that we can not only predict the structure that comes from a given sequence of amino acids, but design a sequence of amino acids that will give a specific structure.

9. Use viruses for therapy. This includes “gene therapy,” which has been the medicine of tomorrow for about three decades, as well as phage-based antibiotics.

10. Understand the role of Viruses, Archaea and microbial Eukaryotes in the environment. These have been called the “Dark Matter” of the biosphere, and we just don’t know what they do. It’s as if 70% of the economy was the black market.

(Bonus number 11—understand development. This is another thing we just don’t fully understand in biology, and it’s a neat problem.)

Well, I managed to get through it without choking, and to my surprise, I got a round of applause at the end. Kind of gratifying, but I’ll be happier, more like ecstatic, if one of my students goes on to actually solve one of those problems. I think they can.

Feel free to suggest further problems to be solved in the next 20 years.

Much too busy

The week before last was not really enjoyable. It featured the end of the Bis2A class, the final, grading conniptions, frantic students, and a leave-taking from the department that has been my professional home for the last decade; an unending parade of contractors, usually two every day, getting the house ready for sale; the process of actually marketing the house; packing up a housefull of belongings (including a piano) and getting them moved; trying to buy a house and dealing with an idiotic bank; and then finally, packing up to go to SoCal for a couple of weeks for the violin-building workshop.

Much too busy. The last week, purely focusing on lutherie, has been highly therapeutic. I have spent hours at a time not thinking about any of the noise that has been complicating my life.

Friday Flora Saturday edition

The Real Doctor and I are back in the Southland for the violin building workshop, which means a visit to my parents--and my mother's garden, which is better than yours. Here's a double-header of Orbea variegata.

Familiarity breeds...

Familiarity breeds something that is not contempt. This is becoming evident as I leave this neighborhood, in which I am one of many “familiars”. As it becomes known that the Real Doctor and I are leaving, people who I don’t know very well—and who don’t know me very well—tell me that they’ll really miss me.

It’s possible that they’ll really miss Opal, and I am lumped together with her. But it’s even more likely that Opal and I—or, “Tall Guy With Funny Hat and Cute Doglet”—are simply a familiar feature in the neighborhood. We’ve been here, walking around, every day for about a decade. We’re part of the atmosphere, just like Lady With Two Scotties, and Oriental Woman with Petunia the Puppy, and Cigar Guy, and Frizzy-haired Mom Who Walks Her Two Kids To School.

Like just about every other animal, we humans love regularity and habit, so we come to love these familiars. Heck, Cigar Guy could be an axe-murderer in his spare time, but he’s friendly and says Hi, and he’s a regular—so even though I don’t know him at all, I like him. This is probably what these familiar strangers are expressing to me and Opal when they say we’ll be missed. “Oh, there’s Tall Guy With Funny Hat and Cute Doglet—all’s well with the world.”

Take away those familiarities, and all is not well.

Another of the familiars who make me feel that this neighborhood was home was Elderly Italian-American Couple. They used to always go for a morning walk together, until he developed some joint issues and started walking separately. So I got used to seeing her pacing along by herself, and him slowly measuring out his walk with his cane. Both were good for a cheery hello and a brief discourse on the weather. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve only seen her, and barely ever.

I saw her this morning, and crossed the street to talk with her, mainly to say that I’ve liked seeing them and that I’ll miss them when I leave the neighborhood. However, she told me—barely checking the tears—that her husband had been killed a couple of weeks ago. He was out for his morning walk, and a car backing out of a driveway in too much of a hurry ran him over. He died from his injuries. She had told him that he should go thataway that morning, and he did; and so he died. She can barely walk from grief. She makes it to church and back, crying both ways.

I’m pretty shaken by the loss of this familiar stranger. Like most of the familiar strangers, I know nothing of the personal lives of Elderly Italian-American couple; I can guess that they’d been married for a long, long time. I can be pretty certain that the loss of five decades of intimate familiarity feels like the end of the world.

Before and After

Gratitude

I am thankful for the unidirectional, noncyclic nature of time. It means that no matter what, I won't have to experience yesterday ever again.

(A day that begins with the Unnamed Cat somehow opening the valve on your Thermarest bed at 5:30 AM, and ends with wrestling a leaky toilet to a very damp draw at midnight just isn't ideal; I'll just say for now that those weren't the worst bits.)