I’ve been keeping pretty much mum on this issue since I first became aware of the prospect several months ago, but as of today it has been made official:  starting Fall Semester 2009, I will be the coordinator for director coordinator of the entire Scientific Thinking course here at AUC.  This is a course that is mandatory for all graduates of AUC, and one in which I have been an instructor for the past two semesters.  This means I will be charged with managing some 600 students, divided into 20 sections, taught by 15 different instructors of varied scientific backgrounds, and led weekly in a general lecture series involving at least 10 invited speakers.  In return I will only be required to teach 2 courses instead of 3.  That and the prestige.  ha.

I only pursued the appointment on the confidence that my predecessor has already done much of the hard work in the absolutely positive reshaping the course has undergone this past year.  Did I mention the course, required by all graduates of AUC, just underwent a complete curricular redesign?  It did.  Those of us who actually implemented the changes have found it quite successful.  Unfortunately, the changes have not been uniformly adopted by all instructors.  There is understandable resistance given the fact that Scientific Thinking instructors have historically been given near-absolute free reign to approach the course as they saw fit (which is somewhat correctly perceived as being stripped in the effort to provide all university students with a common experience).  Did I also mention that the median age of the instructors is at least ≥10 years above my own?  This should be interesting.  I have admittedly large shoes to fill.  An iron heel might serve my needs.

More on this undoubtedly to come.  Yay for challenges yet unfaced!

That’s right. I’ll be the first to admit that I look like a huge dork in this picture. What can I say? I loved Cairo. Every single minute I was there. Sure I feared all kinds of things, and yeah, I did go through my fair share of pre-dining Purell, but I loved it.

Maybe it’s because it feels kind of like an adventure or maybe it’s just because the person I love happens to be there, but it is a beautiful place and I hope all of our friends and family can experience it with us at some point over the next two years.

So because I am officially done with being unadventurous and unfulfilled, I am officially moving there. And the best part about it, I’ll be moving with my husband! Aaaah I am so excited! Alie is pretty excited too. She thinks there’s hope for me because she was starting to worry about how much dialogue we were having and she made me delete the part I had typed about how she already asked me to get her suitcase down out of the closet.

So if you see me with this strange expression on my face, don’t be alarmed, it’s just a huge dorky smile and it’s because I am completely and totally elated. It’s going to be hard living my life looking this ridiculous, but I am sure that somehow I will be ok.

So I guess it has been a while since I have updated this.  To be honest, not much has been going on here since Emily left.  It seems most of the action is taking place in and around Portland now in the lead up to the big day.  School has been going well, and the general mood in the air around campus is much more pleasant than that of last semester.  It seems everyone has pretty well settled in to the new campus, with most problems having been ironed out.

In other news, I had my first visitors (who were not persons I wanted to spend the rest of my life with).  So that was exciting.  My great friend and peer-turned-colleague, Ira, decided to spend spring break here with me and Marti and 18 million Cairenes, along with another good guy, Jamey.  It turns out Ira and I have known each other almost 9 years to the day, having first met when I was a visiting prospective graduate student at Arizona State University, where he was a current graduate student in the department of chemistry!  How did we meet?  Ira was the guy who rode up to our picnic at Papago Park with his wife on the back of his Vespa P200, which sported the largest trunk I had ever seen on a scooter (the largest, that is, until moving to Cairo).  Years would pass by us and thousands of shared miles would pass beneath our 10″ wheels.  At one point, after Ira had graduated and remained on at ASU, I had the pleasure of teaching with him, as the TA for his Chemistry and Society course.  It was with even greater pleasure and honor, then, that I had the opportunity to invite Ira to guest-speak to my own classes and department, here at AUC.  In fact, Ira and Jamey pretty much gave me a day off altogether.  Ira kicked it off by leading a departmental seminar in a conversation on careers in science, which has since inspired a great deal of talk about potential collaboration between our schools and student exchanges.  Next up, Ira and Jamey together successfully presented a talk on science policy making to my Chemistry and Society class, despite the presence of one obnoxious heckler (and my own failure to inform them that humor falls upon deaf ears here; too bad, as the two of them seem to have refined their banter and timing down to pure comedic gold!).  After that, Jamey led my back-to-back Scientific Thinking classes through a talk on the Amish and their consideration for and use of technology.  It turns out that while the days of cowboys-and-indians movies are long gone, foreigners still “learn” a lot about American culture and subcultures through great export films and television series’, such as “Sex Drive”, “My Name is Earl”, and “How I met your Mother”.  Frankly, I was surprised no one named “Kingpin” as a source when Jamey asked the students where their knowledge of the Amish had come from.  In the end, I was quite pleased when my students managed to come up with some thoughtful questions for Jamey, well beyond simply the novelty questions of “do the Amish do this?” or “do the Amish use that?”.  Aside from that, the week was filled with cribbage, dominoes, french fry sandwiches, koshary, Stella, visits to the juice-man and the nut-man, sites I had not yet visited, hissing and tongue clicking, and good times had by all.  Way too many pics below: (more…)

the last tarboush maker in Cairo! This hat is for Robin.

Robin in tarboush.

My brother wears hats.  My brother is the perfect Arab gentleman, albeit 40 years too late.  My brother desires peace, but questions the validity of the premises given by the current situation in my part of the globe.  At least, I hope he does.  I hope everyone does. Sympathize with a Palestinian if you can. 

I haven’t even been home a month yet. This is a picture from my scenic tour with Meredith. A benevolent-looking cow-beast.

Nothing like being a box in the corner. Back to the old, better-than-nothing routine!

After all of two days, my Scientific Ethics course only garnered one email of interest – from a graduate student wanting to TA or audit – so it got dropped.  Such is life.  It will be offered again in the fall, and listed/promoted well in advance of registration, so hopefully there will be more interest then.  Instead, I’ve been assigned CHEM 103, Chemistry and Society.  I am happy with that.  More so than if I got stuck with a general chem lab.  It is still a class full of non-science majors, but at least they actually chose the course as an elective that interested them in some way, as opposed to a course that is only meeting a strict requirement.

Scientific Thinking is already off to a great start.  After the rough time we had fall semester anything would be an improvement, but the students in my sections this term are already aces in my book.

I talked with Adam a while back about how neither of us had ever actually read any Feynman, so I made sure Six Easy Pieces was included in the small library Emily smuggled overseas for me.  It seemed like a good place to start, given that I am a chemist and not a physicist (as opposed to Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, among others).  I have only just started it, but included in our repository of Scientific Thinking-related document files was an excerpt from a talk he gave to the National Science Teachers Association in NYC in 1966, on the topic of What is Science?, so I decided to give it to my classes as the first reading assignment on Sunday.  Today I walked them through the whole thing with a slick powerpoint (sorry openoffice, I really like you and use you whenever I can, but presentation just doesn’t cut it).  You can read it for yourself, but the closest Feynman comes to an actual definition of science is the following:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Everyone seemed to like that.  It only seemed fair, then, to talk a little bit about the expert/author of the reading, Richard Feynman.  By the end of the class I had everyone staring up at the light fixtures as I flicked the switch on and off, on and off, attempting to explain Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) to a room full of freshman business and mass communications majors.  Common sense tells us the light waves we perceive have travelled the shortest distance between the two points, the bulb and our eyes; QED tells us the path travelled is actually the sum of all possible paths between the points.  Absurd! And yet, the fundamental theory on which QED rests is the same on which all of modern chemistry depends.  What better way to illustrate the true nature of Science than to highlight a model which best explains the evidence and observations we have to date, and yet is so contrary to common sense that you can’t help but seek a better one?

I went 7 minutes past the end of class today, blabbering on about double slits and single particles interfering with themselves, and not a single person got up to leave when they rightfully should have.  Someone in the back wondered aloud if Relativity was not equally absurd, and I tried to keep my cool as a wave of goosebumps covered my body.  Not a single person even brought the overtime to my attention, and I eventually called an end to class, myself, with multiple enthusiastic hands still in the air.  In all my experience of teaching, this was a first.  No barkin from the dog, no smog; today was a good day.

Alie missed us

Brandon’s dad sent us this picture of Alie while I was still in Cairo. I think she is still harboring a bit of resentment. I never knew until now that it was her lifelong dream to ride a camel at Giza. I keep telling her that Marti didn’t get to ride the camel either, but it’s no use. At least she finally seems happy I’m home now, and thank goodness, because I would otherwise be pretty lonely. Too bad she doesn’t cook for me.

For twenty-six days this apartment felt like home.  Now it is just empty and cold.  I see one too many of everything, but I can’t bear to put them away.

For now, the unused chair at my side remains.

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The new course I had proposed and have been working on was finally approved and listed in the Spring09 schedule.  Unfortunately (and partially my fault), this only finalized less than a week before classes begin and approximately one month after registration officially closed.  So I have the one week drop/add period to try to convince at least 10 students to enroll, lest the course is canceled, and I am stuck with a section of Gen Chem lab.  The course prospects for the fall, at least, are much stronger.

On a side note, from a design perspective Arabic must be absolutely perfect to work with, as any word can be stretched indefinitely for any need.  Thanks Emily for teaching that me those long straight lines randomly appearing in written Arabic words mean essentially nothing!  This poster could certainly use a bit more uniformity and symmetry, especially in the top block.  Or maybe it is a good thing, distracting the eye from the lame Byrds reference.

I leave for Portland tonight at 4:00am, and our cab is coming to pick us up at 1:30am to get us to the airport.  I don’t even know what to say!

This has been such a great trip, but the clock’s ticking so I will have to get sentimental later.  Perhaps I’ll post again from Portland.  I will be looking forward to all of Brandon’s future posts.  Two words: more Marti.