Last week, I attended the annual conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) which took place in Minneapolis (United States). While the central topics of this conference were all related to cutting-edge research in the field of magnetism, I still had the chance to think and talk about teaching physics and materials science. Therefore, in today’s blogpost, I would like to touch on a few of my thoughts and conversations.
First of all, I have talked to a few collaborators about our ongoing efforts of writing a manuscript on the use of computational methods in teaching science and engineering. We came to the conclusion that we would like to broaden the scope of our paper a bit further compared to the initial idea, which had a narrower focus on the use of micromagnetic simulations in a course on magnetism. The generalization of our article has mainly been triggered by the literature survey on computational contents in teaching that we conducted and the feedback which we received from students. The latter was obtained from personal interview surveys with a number of students that took around half an hour each. These conversations were an amazing experience for me personally, especially since this has been the first time for me to conduct such interviews. I do not want to give away the contents of these discussions yet, but it was striking to see how most students enjoyed working on numerical simulations, but also how different their background, experience and critical comments were — very helpful for us and hopefully likewise for a broader readership!
I spent most of my time at the conference attending numerous oral presentations and roaming around at the various poster sessions. In this context, I noticed how remarkably well some scientists presented their research results and I believe that these people must also be excellent teachers. Some notable observations that are inspiring me to further work on my teaching and presentation skills include: (i) some speakers’ ability to strongly reduce the number of slides and bullet points while focusing more on clearly explaining and conveying a few selected messages instead of overloading their talks with too much information; (ii) certain people’s capability to answer any kind of question, regardless of who was asking it and how well it was formulated; (iii) the way how some folks are able to explain complex contents in a clear and engaging way to an audience that might not always consist of renowned experts in this specific field. These may not be the most surprising observations, but it is still worth to remind ourselves of such abilities.
On another note, I also had some time to reflect on my first-ever lecture in front of around 150 (or even a few more) students that I taught during the week prior to the conference. This was part of an introductory experimental physics course for freshmen at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. It was a lot of fun, despite the fact that I was talking about a sometimes inaccessible (yet important) topic, namely the types of measurement errors and some related statistical considerations. Students asked me a lot of questions, I was able to convey most of the contents that I had planned for this 90-minute lecture, but I also immediately noticed a few things that I should do better next time. I will try to make the next class more interactive and provide more examples instead of focusing on lengthy mathematical derivations on the blackboard (the latter, however, was probably unavoidable for this specific topic). Next week, I will substitute the primary instructor of the class again and introduce important concepts such as force fields, work and potential energy. I am grateful that I have the chance to present such essential contents to future physicists and physics teachers!
Furthermore, I am also currently writing an article on teaching magnetism for the newsletter of the IEEE Magnetics Society. Even though most of the activities and discussions within the society are centered around research contents, I think that it is important to start the conversation about our responsibility as professional scientists and engineers with regard to educating next-generation researchers as well as the public. This is also underlined by the fact that only recently a chapter named “Students in Magnetism” was founded within the society.
In conclusion, even during a scientific conference there exist opportunities and time to think and talk about teaching. I hope that this little diary of mine may inspire some readers to think about teaching and education.
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