Tak­ing Risks: ASMCUE Mus­ings

by Amy Cheng Vollmer

Af­ter miss­ing it for sev­eral years due to other ASM re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, I had the de­light­ful op­por­tu­nity to at­tend this year's ASMCUE, the 'ap­pe­tizer' course that pre­ceded the ASM's Gen­eral Meet­ing in San Diego. The ses­sions at the ASMCUE in­cluded Mi­cro­brew ideas, Try Some­thing New ac­tiv­i­ties, Learn Some­thing New pre­sen­ta­tions, and a fan­tas­tic poster ses­sion, as well as sev­eral ple­nary talks. It was stim­u­lat­ing to be part of the au­di­ence for so many in­ter­ac­tive pre­sen­ta­tions!

Source

In think­ing about the 'take home' lessons from the con­fer­ence, I was struck by the in­tel­lec­tual risk tak­ing by the con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants — a mixed group in­clud­ing young fac­ulty, ex­pe­ri­enced teach­ers, along with vet­er­ans like my­self. In­ter­est­ingly, those wear­ing 'first timer' nametags were not nec­es­sar­ily new to their fac­ulty po­si­tions. Sev­eral were sea­soned re­search fac­ulty mem­bers who were, for some rea­son, mo­ti­vated to come this year.

I at­tended many ses­sions, but one, in par­tic­u­lar, forced me to fire up some old neural net­works: A Bio­math post­doc­toral fel­low from the Uni­ver­sity of Ari­zona, Chris Bergevin, made a pre­sen­ta­tion deal­ing with bring­ing more math­e­mat­ics into bi­ol­ogy. I fol­lowed about 90% of his talk, but got a bit lost, due to my less than stel­lar mas­tery of math­e­mat­ics, in some of the equa­tions. Yet, I stuck with it — through my dis­com­fort — and came out of the pre­sen­ta­tion in­vig­o­rated and stim­u­lated. I heard from Chris af­ter the con­fer­ence. He told me that an at­tendee had fol­lowed up with him say­ing: …when I get back to my cam­pus, I am go­ing to con­tact my col­league in math…" to start a con­ver­sa­tion about bring­ing more math into bi­ol­ogy courses.

We fac­ulty are of­ten the source of some dis­com­fort for our stu­dents when we touch on top­ics for which they have scant or wob­bly foun­da­tions. Be­ing in such a po­si­tion my­self re­cently prompted me to think about how I guide my stu­dents through this. I of­ten re­mind them that, in bi­ol­ogy, growth is of­ten pre­ceded or ac­com­pa­nied by dis­com­fort (or stress), and sug­gest that they be mind­ful of when they are un­com­fort­able and to then mind­fully work through the dif­fi­cul­ties, fo­cus­ing first on the gen­eral prin­ci­ples, then fill­ing in the de­tails.

In fact, in­tel­lec­tual risk tak­ing is what we, as teach­ers, should be en­cour­ag­ing in our stu­dents. What bet­ter way to do this than to model it our­selves? By shar­ing our thought processes with our stu­dents, the way the ASMCUE pre­sen­ters did, is key to keep­ing them on their path.

As I have noted pre­vi­ously, the as­sign­ments we cre­ate are the ve­hi­cles that stu­dents use for their own jour­neys of dis­cov­ery. The stu­dents are in the driver's seat, we fac­ulty serve as their nav­i­ga­tors. Happy trav­els!

Amy is Pro­fes­sor of Bi­ol­ogy, Swarth­more Col­lege, and Pres­i­dent of the Waks­man Foun­da­tion for Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. Be­ing the only de­part­ment mem­ber who stud­ies and teaches about prokary­otes, she notes: I take every op­por­tu­nity to in­crease aware­ness about the con­tri­bu­tions of bac­te­ria and ar­chaea to the his­tory of the earth and their im­pact on hu­mans. A per­fect match for this blog!