Spring Break!

Today I finished the twentieth class (out of thirty) in my Molecular Modeling course – but who's counting? It's going well, but I'm tired, and I'm ready for Spring Break, which is next week. (It actually starts for me tomorrow, because I've set aside the full day to stay home and work on The Book.) When I was a student, it never occurred to me that the only person in the class who was more ready for breaks than me was probably the professor...

This point in the course marks a sharp boundary. We've finished the stuff that was reasonably well prepared coming into this year (because much of it has been there since the first time I taught the course in 2004, and it's been growing and evolving ever since). We've finished six tutorials with Oscar, the nice little program that Geoff Rollins wrote for me last year. Lying ahead is the last third of the course, the part through which I've sort of stumbled and faked things in the past, or which I've hoped to cover but never actually gotten to... Over the break the kids will carry out their first NAMD simulations, on two models of myoglobin (with four xenon molecules), an in vacuo case, and a solvated case. I've got Burak working hard to develop two or three more NAMD tutorials – the kids will have to do about one per week – and we'll finish with the structure prediction problem and the free energy perturbation simulation that Geoff developed last year. But I still have ten lectures ahead, none of which is really solid... Some of the material covers things I know little about. In particular, there are substantial gaps in my knowledge of recent literature. I need to identify appropriate material – then actually sit down and digest it. So I've still got my work cut out for me.

I love the material, and I like many of the students. And of course I like standing up in front of any group and talking... I think one of my strengths as a teacher is that I care how the kids respond and how I come across. I always try to get things to an appropriate level for them. My biggest weakness is that I strongly prefer the best students – I love it when some kid pulls some insight that I hadn't thought of out of thin air, but I get frustrated pretty quickly when the slower ones don't grasp the most basic things. Since I wear my heart on my sleeve in everything I do, I suspect that I'm not very good at disguising my prejudices in this area. And I've long believed that the best teachers are those that bring the slower students up to their potential, whatever it may be – anybody can "teach" the bright ones who figure things out on their own. So I think I'm a decent teacher, but not a really good one.

Teaching is hard work. Satisfying, but hard. It's amazing how much time I have to spend preparing for two 2-hour classes each week, even though I've taught much of the material in the past five years. Part of the problem is that I procrastinate, so the day of the class (and often the night before), I'm racing to get something done for class, often finishing at the last minute. And part of the stress comes from the fact that I'm too much of a perfectionist when it comes to details of figures – I rework and rework my PowerPoint presentations and handouts far more than I should.

And one special part of the difficulty this year is that I really want my syllabus (and figures) to crystallize into the form this material will take in The Book...