Why Geology and the Earth Sciences Count: Teaching at a Community College

So what was Geotripper doing providing advice on human relationships on a geology blog yesterday? Randy got it exactly right, I was teaching chemistry! Haven't you ever wondered what holds the world together, how a bunch of supermicroscopic atoms can stick to one another and form such beautiful rocks and minerals? A great many people might be interested in knowing, but feel intimidated by the level of knowledge seemingly required to understand such things. To understand a crystal, one needs to know of protons, electrons, neutrons, elements, and bonding. To fully understand an earthquake or a tsunami one needs some basic understanding of the behaviour of waves. To understand the twinkling of a star in the sky, one needs some grounding in the nature of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is a tall order, but not impossible. The knowledge is there for anyone to comprehend if they wish to...I will explain the specifics of our Dear Gabby advice at the end of this post.

Geology and the earth sciences occupy a special place in the academic universe. They are the very tangible examples of chemistry and physics at work in the real world. Not the strange world of atoms and smaller objects where Newtonian physics falls apart into strange new rules. Not the vastness of an unimaginably strange Universe. It is the ground beneath our feet, the flooding of a nearby river, the shock of an earthquake, the price of gasoline at the local pump. It is the prediction of next week's snowstorm, the drought of the next decade, and sea level rise in the next century. It is the planning for the end of an oil economy. An understanding of the earth sciences is critical to making the best choices in resource use and allocation in an overpopulated world.

National parks and monuments are not generally established because they preserve some aspect of physics and chemistry. If they don't preserve a historical battleground or unique plant or animal, they are there because something of geology is worthy of our interest and protection. We may photograph the bears, deer and squirrels that inhabit Yosemite, Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, but the meaning of the parks is in the rocks. The squirrels live everywhere, but the geysers, rock strata and gorges make these places unique. Communicating the meaning and value of these parks to society is prime concern of the park's interpretive rangers.

That brings us to the challenge. To be a geology/earth science major, one needs to be a real polymath, a Homo Universalis (look it up! I had to). It is generally recognized that the candidate needs to master calculus, physics and chemistry, usually in classes that has him or her competing directly with actual math, physics and chemistry majors. It is not the easiest major to pursue. In an ideal academic world, the geo-major would have prerequisites in all of these listed fields before ever setting foot in a physical geology course.

This is not feasible or possible in my world of the community college. A prerequisite like that would leave me with three or four students each semester (hmmmm....that's a thought). Our community colleges serve many constituencies and few of my students will actually end up as majors. They will become teachers, nurses, accountants, firefighters, small business owners and so on. They take a geology/earth science class for many reasons, but most often because it is one of the listed physical science lab electives they need for their general education requirements. Our goal is not to produce geologists and earth scientists (although it is nice when that happens), but to produce an informed community of educated citizens.

So, I have the challenge (and privilege) of assisting my students in understanding some basic principles in physics and chemistry without getting bogged down in aspects of the sciences that they won't need in order to understand introductory geology. Chemistry is covered in about 2 hours and 40 minutes. The boiled down version of chemistry that I present would probably appall my colleagues down the hall, but they will have time to fix it when my students take a chemistry course a semester or two later. In the meantime, the students will have more than enough to try and understand; why not make it as memorable as possible?

They tell us we should not anthropomorphise inanimate objects like atoms (atoms don't "want" to do anything or "behave" in a particular way, they just act according to the laws of physics). But that sort of takes the fun out of explaining atomic activity.

So...atoms are in fact couch potatoes, in the sense that they exist and react in such a way as to maintain a stable low energy state. This generally involves having a specific number of electrons in the outer energy shells. They achieve the stable outer shells by giving up or taking in electrons from the local environment, i.e. from or to other nearby atoms. This leaves atoms in an ionized state, meaning they now have a positive or negative charge. The oppositely charged particles are attracted to each other to form an ionic bond.

Other atoms achieve stability by merging their orbiting electron shells and sharing the fast moving particles. Such outer-shell electrons are called valence electrons, and the bond is a covalent bond.

In some minerals like gold, silver or copper, the electrons flow freely throughout the solid and are not tied to any specific atoms, a so-called metallic bond (ever wondered what electricity actually is?).

And as Randy points out, the noble gases already have filled outer electron shells, so they don't react or bond with other atoms at all. These elements include helium and argon gas. A moment of truthfulness here: I was actually thinking of the very weak Van der Waals bonds, but the example of the noble gases works much better as a metaphor of non-commitment!

The next step is to understand how these bonds lead to the formation of the crystals (and crystalline solids) we find scattered throughout the crust of the earth (such as the amethyst quartz above). I love crystals, not for spiritual new age reasons, but for the assurance they provide us that there is order in the Universe. They are beautiful reminders of the accomplishments of atomic couch potatoes seeking that nirvana of the lowest energy state possible.

Don't Let Them Fall Through the Cracks! An Accretionary Wedge...

The Wedge is back! This month's new Accretionary Wedge, hosted at Geology Happens, is asking what we geologists are up to:

"Not everything I am studying ends up in a published paper, well actually nothing I study ends up in a published paper. Sometimes my HS students hear about my adventures and sometimes I write a blog post, but mostly it is just for me.

This AW is to share your latest discovery with all of us. Please let us in on your thoughts about your current work. What you are finding, what you are looking for. Any problems? Anything working out well?"

This seems a great opportunity to find out what kinds of things one can do as a geologist, and I hope lots of bloggers and readers out there are responding. As my readers must probably know by now, I teach geology at a community college. I've talked many times about the joy and motivations of being a teacher of geology (here, here, here, and very recently, here), but I don't think I've said much about the day-to-day grind.

As a professor at a community college, I wear a number of hats. Unlike many four-year universities, we are oriented more towards teaching rather than research. The school loves to tout our research if we pursue it, but it is not expected of us. Consequently, the teaching load is larger than it would be at other schools (15 hours a week of instruction time is considered full-time, plus required office hours). A teaching overload is not unusual. I teach classes in physical and historical geology, geology of California, and a distance-learning course called "Introduction to Geology". Laboratory sections are taught as part of the first two classes. Because geology is such a field-oriented science, I teach several field courses each semester, with an extended five-day trip to the Cascades, Death Valley, or the eastern Sierra Nevada, plus a number of day trips to Yosemite, the Coast Ranges, or the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. The summer usually includes a two week exploration of the American southwest, or Pacific Northwest. If you have read my blog for any period of time, you know that taking students into the field is my favorite part of teaching.

I spend lots of time grading lab reports and tests, which I don't particularly enjoy, but responding to the student's work is one of the most important things I do; in a classroom people can hide in the back and not participate verbally, but their written work and my response is an important direct line of communication.

My job includes other responsibilities. As part of a philosophy of shared governance, we are generally expected to serve on committees, such as Academic Senate, Curriculum, Petitions, Scholarship, and so on. We participate in department and division meetings. All professors, full-time and part-time, are periodically evaluated, which includes peer review, so we spend time sitting in on other prof's courses, and providing advice and guidance. We are also involved in the hiring processes of both professors and administrators.

Finally, although it is not always spelled out in our career announcements, we are ambassadors for our school. We visit elementary school classrooms to talk to children about our work, we give presentations on geologic topics to the community (I talked about the Haiti earthquake a few months ago), and we provide expertise to local governments. I get visits all the time from people who wish an explanation of the strange rock specimens that they have discovered.

Community colleges fill many roles. We provide a bridge for high school graduates who are unsure of what path they want to follow into the future (some data suggests that our students may change majors six times or more) and we are also a cheaper alternative to high tuition universities (our transfers often do very well). We have many reentry students as well, people who need a new career after being laid off or divorced, or need to develop new skills for a changing workplace. And some students, well, they have a life-long love of learning. We are trying to make sure no one with an educational need is falling through the cracks (I had to justify the title somehow...).

So that's what I do, if you have ever wondered (no doubt all of three or four of you), but if it sounds like something you might like to do as a career, you will need to earn at least a master's degree in geology or related science. Most geology departments at California's 112 community colleges are fairly small, so full-time openings are relatively uncommon, especially in difficult budgetary times (like right now, for instance). On the other hand, the average age of us professors is, well, not so young, and many retirements can be expected in the next decade or so.

It is not very often that a newly minted college graduate scores a full-time position as a professor. Many people teach part-time at several schools for a time, or like me, work in a related capacity for a few years (I know some of my old colleagues at Santa Barbara City College occasionally look in on the blog: thanks from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful opportunity you provided me back in the 1980's!).

Teaching at a community college is a great career choice. I'll never be financially wealthy, but I have had a rich life. I have never regretted it for a moment.

Losing Field Studies: Budget Crisis Continues in California

The continuing recession (and here in the Central Valley of California it is a depression) and the California state budget crisis is hitting our school hard. Got word today that our summer field studies program, a two-week field studies program that takes our students all over the American west and to international destinations, has been eliminated for 2010 and probably for 2011 as well. It is a truly unfortunate development, because aside from the instructor's salary, the program was funded by the students. It didn't really cost the school much, but the college has decided to focus on the core classes for each discipline, and running the field studies would mean one less math or English class on the schedule.

I'm not complaining exactly, because I still have a job, and a great many people have it far, far worse (although I did lose one teaching job this year already). I am simply saddened that our program is losing one of the best tools we have for training geology and teaching majors the core principles of the geosciences. It's one thing to describle rock types on a chalk board or in a box in the lab, and quite another to pick up rocks and minerals in the context of where they are found in nature. Teachers who have seen the things they talk about, whether volcanoes, faults, fossils, glaciers or whatever, will be better teachers. Geologists without field experiences are at a severe disadvantage in academic and employment settings.

For the time being, some of our more local field studies will go on in the fall and spring semesters, but I fear what is coming in the next year. Even if the economy improves it may be years before the state budget improves to an extent that will help the community college system. That somehow seems wrong, because it is the community colleges that are at the forefront of retraining workers during times of economic upheaval. But we are closing our doors to new students these days.