A Slightly Greener Ski Season

As you may or may not know, I try, where possible, to be "green." This means that I recycle, use a personal cup at Starbucks, buy eco-conscious products and clothing, and try my hardest to get good gas mileage.

It's a terrible shame that ski racks cause so much aerodynamic drag when you're driving at relatively high speeds (40+ mph). Your car feels sluggish and your gas mileage tanks (pun totally intended). One way to help that is to buy a fairing. It eliminates the area between your ski rack and the top of the car, thus keeping your top profile continuous, and reducing drag. I won't go into all the nerdy details, but they really help.

I've been meaning to get a ski-rack fairing for quite some time now, its just been a matter of money. I had a birthday recently and got an excellent present from my father in the form of a check. Which I used a rather large chunk of at REI to buy the fairing that was made for my ski rack. Much to my dismay, and not much to my surprise, it didn't fit. I seem to have a non-standard cross bar for my car, which gives me no end of trouble. So now disgusted not only with the product I bought, but the outrageous price I paid for it, I took it back.

Then while I was in class this afternoon, I got a great idea to just build my own! The university has tons of scrap materials, and they'll let you use the machine shop any time its open. So I took an hour this afternoon and fashioned my own with some rudimentary measurements of my rack. The results of my labor and dumpster diving are...


Amazingly, it worked on the first try. Any of you who know me, know that I can hardly ever get anything right the first time. I tried it out on the highway and there was no rattling or buzzing or anything! I coated the bottom edge in cloth (hockey) tape so that it wouldn't scratch my roof.

I paid $3.60 for raw materials (instead of the $80 REI wanted), spent an enjoyable hour in the machine shop, and came out with an easy way to make my car more efficient. Not only did I stop that annoying whistling sound that the rack makes when there are no skis in it, I get to show a little nerd pride with all the stickers.
-Ty

You'll also notice I'm saving water by keeping my car absolutely filthy!

Professors

I am now a few weeks into my Master's career at CU Boulder, and I have begun to notice several differences between the masters program and the bachelors program. The classes are smaller, the work is more difficult, there is quite a bit less supervision, and the most striking thing is that students get the chance to actually meet and interact with the professors on a regular basis.

This has given me a chance to see the teaching styles and personalities of my professors, and compare them to one another. Even after only 4 weeks, I can easily decide which professors I like and which ones I do not. But less obvious is deciding if my reasons for liking or disliking them means that they are a good or bad professor.

For the sake of example, we'll call one professor A and the other B. I didn't really like professor A as an undergraduate, he taught a class that was wholly uninteresting to me and I had a little trouble understanding him. Where as professor B taught my favorite subject and while he talked strangely, was not difficult to understand. After taking graduate classes from each professor, I have come to realize that I liked/disliked each professor more because of the subject they taught than because of the type of teacher/person they were. I never went to office hours as an undergrad, but my friends always told me that professor A was very nice and helpful, while they said professor B was sort of hard to get a hold of.

Since being a graduate student, I have had nothing but good experiences with professor A. He IS helpful, and patient, and genuinely seems to want to listen to your questions and answer them. With professor B however, I have gone to his office on many occasions, some with prior arrangement and some without. In both cases, he had someone else in his office, or was not even there. One occasion he was chatting with the department's AA for 20 minutes of my hour with him while I sat in the hallway waiting. He even said to me on one occasion, that he would not help me, because I am a graduate student and he wouldn't hold my hand. Which I would expect if I went in there and said, "do this homework for me." But I had gone in wanting him to clarify his lecture because I had no idea what was happening.

Each professor's attitude toward me has greatly influenced the method in which I learn for the class. In professor A's case, I email him asking my question. Without fail, I get a helpful (if sometimes vague, which is fine) answer back within the hour. In the same situation with professor B, I rarely ever get an email, so I am forced to go to his office hours, where he tells me he won't help. I got through the last few assignments by going to one of his graduate students and asking them if they had any source material that would help, and I went home and read it.

I think each professor's style can be broken down into one of two categories: Teach Yourself, or Learn by Asking. It's easy for me to pick my preferred method, and I presume my readers can guess it just by the tone of this post so far, but I vastly prefer the latter option. I pay exuberant amounts of money to have interaction and instruction from intelligent individuals who's job it is to instruct me in the complexities of our field. If I wanted to teach myself, I could just go to the library and read the material there for free. It is much easier to learn when the knowledgeable individual answers questions, and leads the student to the correct conclusion. That way, both the student and the professor know the student is on the right track. In the Teach Yourself method, how is the student ever to know if he or she has drawn the wrong conclusion at any of the million steps it takes to learn a subject matter?

While my preference is clear, does either method mean that the professor who employs them is a bad or good teacher? Having the students be actively engaged in their learning does seem to be an effective method. And you do learn quite a bit by teaching, so perhaps having students learn on their own, and then teach others is an effective method. But it begs the question, what do you need a teacher for? And it begins to feel a little like the blind leading the stupid. Perhaps the solution to this problem in the Teach Yourself method is to provide light supervision and direction to make sure the students are learning the correct things on their own. But this is a very difficult thing to do, and most professors aren't very good at it.

I used to think that research professors made terrible teachers, but it seems to be that anyone can be a good teacher as long as they give thought to the learning that their students are doing. Therefore it seems perfectly plausible to have a good research professor, who is also a good teacher (as in the case of professor A). Unfortunately, as in the case of professor B, it is equally plausible to have a professor utilize the Teach Yourself method (while not my favorite, a proven method) to avoid active participation in his student's learning.
-Ty