After late nights writing papers and exams, doing readings, and looking over power points I absolutely needed my $1 corner bodega cup of coffee on my way to class. Without it, I may not quite have known where to go this semester. And I don’t mean ‘do I go to the Grad Center or NYU,’ ‘5th floor or 9th?’ This past fall semester I spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sitting as a student and Tuesday and Thursday standing as a professor*. I taught Human Evolutionary Biology this fall (2014) at Lehman College, CUNY. It was an incredibly surreal experience. When I walked into class that first day in August I was barely 15 months out of being an undergraduate college student myself. Under any other circumstance I would have viewed my students as peers, many were most definitely older than me. In the weeks before the first day I fantasized about the super cool impression I was going to leave on them during the introductory class, and what I wanted to accomplish as a college professor*.

First, let me back up. At most colleges introduction to physical anthropology, or some variation of that title, is broadly taken by non-science majors who want to avoid biology, chemistry, and physics. They read anthropology in the title and think it will be an easy class. I don’t want to discourage anyone out there from taking a physical anthropology course, but it is not a cake walk. If that’s all you want, take it from me and register for geology. Anyway, year after year students are surprised to not do so well in a class learning about the scientific method, genetics, meiosis, evolution, and all the hominins – the night before the final exam. Unfortunately, professors anguish over how to challenge the one anthropology major in the class without failing everyone else. Lehman College has circumnavigated this problem a bit by creating Human Evolutionary Biology. It is meant to be a science requirement for non-science majors. The class is presented as a simpler version of introduction to human evolution with emphasis on the larger concepts instead of the mundane details.

That’s where I come in. In my fantasies about what this class would be like I had one goal: to give my students an appreciation of the scientific process and to show them that evolution is real. All I wanted was these business and art and English majors to remember me as they decide how to vote on science education policy in their state or when they read a BS “study” on the latest thing to cause cancer or help you lose weight. I wanted them to become critical thinkers and receivers of science, with a slightly better understanding of how the world around them came to be. Super idealistic – I know.

With as much as I wanted to teach my students, I was surprised by how much they taught me. I gave them lectures and study guides, they gave me in class questions and short answer responses on quizzes. What I got from my students’ feedback was how different the language of a scientist, specifically biologist, specifically evolutionary anthropologist is from the general public. They would ask questions about the differences between two terms that were the same thing or throw in key words I taught them in random combinations. I have definitely taken away a new appreciation for how to communicate what I do everyday with people hearing it for the first time. I hope that lesson comes through in future posts and interactions with the public.

If you want to know what my students think of all this check out my Rate my Professors profile. Disclaimer: All writings are the sole opinions of the individual student, probably correlated with their final grade.

Student Evaluation of Teaching and Learning from Fall 2014

*My title was adjunct lecturer, but I like pretending I am a professor.