Teaching is hard!
Jun 9th 2008Wallabynerd alert
… and I haven’t even started doing it yet.
The phone interviews with “Hobart U” continue to go well, so I’ve allowed myself to anticipate the final result a little bit. Classes start at the end of August, I need to start down there at the start of August, so it really seems pretty reasonable to hunt for apartments and stuff 
I also started thinking about a syllabus, which has actually been surprisingly difficult to do. I have very little information on what my students-to-be will already know. For instance, I know that they’re mostly going to be seniors, and that they will have had organic chemistry and physical chemistry. Therefore, they *should* know the basics of NMR and mass spec, including how they can be used to identify molecules and the basic theory of how they work. They should, but do they? They’ve already had two semesters of physics, so they should already know as much about light and electricity as they need to for this class on instrumental analysis. But do they?
I suppose that the safest thing is to assume nothing. Cover anything in class that they really need as background. The downside is that that means spending precious class time on stuff which isn’t nearly as interesting as what we *could* be talking about.
(For instance, I know Skoog’s book still talks about basic electronics, but I really don’t see the point of teaching that chapter. Getting into the details of how stuff like that is put together, and the real performance considerations like how fast this particular circuit tracks a transient signal, is going to take either a far better electronics teacher than I, or several lectures, or both. And very few analytical chemists really *need* to do that sort of building anyway – it’s certainly not necessary for a class that doesn’t focus on instrument design. My two cents.)
I guess what I’ll wind up doing is leaving the details open until I can get down there and corner some of the other professors to see exactly how much NMR and such the students are likely to know.