I was asked, or more precisely, ordered one semester, to do some lectures to the undergraduate physiology class on thermoregulation and thermogeneration in mammals. More simply stated, a series of lectures on how we keep warm. The senior lecturer for the class gave me some outline material and also the types of test questions that the students generally needed to answer. Giving me the old test questions to teach from is following an old adage that goes something like, “begin with the end in mind,” and the ending for the students attending the lectures was to pass the test. So with the test questions I could figure out what to focus on and at what level. It was extremely fortunate that Dr. Adams gave me those materials because I would have made the lectures much too difficult.

Even though I was only three or four years older than the students in the class, I had had so much science crammed into my head in those additional years that I had forgotten what it was like to be a 19- or 20-year-old in a college class. So I quickly skimmed through the text Dr. Adams was using, made sure to not use much math or calculus in my lecture, and skipped the sections on uncoupling mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation to change membrane potential and capacitance – too complicated because there is no easy way to simplify that concept. I talked instead about how there was a transfer of heat from skin to air or water or clothes and how hair is an insulator. Animals have fur but humans need clothes and this keeps our heat in. I dramatized the concept of heat loss by talking about a hypothetical mouse and elephant who died at the exact same time in the forest. They both have a body temperature of 99°F, when they die. The mouse reaches air temperature in a few minutes, whereas the elephant’s body takes a couple of days to get there. This is because of the volume to surface area. The large volume of the elephant keeps in the heat, as the small volume of the mouse loses heat fast. So a mouse needs to work harder to keep warm. I gave a simple, but still correct lecture.

I worked really hard to try and give accurate information that would eventually answer those test questions, without getting too technical. I made handouts for the students but tried to lecture with animation and energy to keep their attention. Despite my best efforts often everyone in the audience looked bored and many were asleep – it was an 8:00 A.M. class. I gave my last lecture and as usual took time for questions and there were none. I handed out the requisite surveys for the students to fill out to tell me and the university how I was as a lecturer. According to University policy a student was asked to collect the surveys and hand them in to administration. I was not allowed to see who wrote what/ or who turned them in and who didn’t. I am happy to say that apathy is alive and well, in that there were almost no surveys turned in and the one that was said that I was too technical and did not give them what they needed for the test questions. I showed the survey result (yes, singular) to Dr. Dillon and he said that it was typical. He had talked to some students in the class and the verbal feedback was good, he assured me. He said that the written feedback was often lacking because the students just wanted to leave class at that point and not hang around any longer to fill out a survey.

Even without any substantive feedback on the lectures, I enjoyed them and hoped the students did too. I rarely enjoyed a lecture myself, but maybe disliked some less than others. So I guess I could hope that the students disliked my lectures less than others’ lectures.

We were in an advanced physiology class comprised of only the Ph.D. students. While we were all friends it was a highly competitive class because everyone in it was very intelligent. The tests were grueling and the class constantly involved group discussions. A typical assignment in preparation for a group discussion would have a faculty member assigning a paper or two for us to read and be ready to discuss. The papers would be on a particular subject and we often would do background reading to understand the methods and strengths of the authors writing the paper.

It was expected that the whole class would have read the papers and be ready to answer questions from the professor. One of the goals of these assignments was to teach us how to read papers objectively and critically. There is bad research in the published literature and it takes training to spot it. One particular paper was being discussed one day and I was the first person asked to give my impression of it. The paper was trying to explain how the kidney controlled blood flow to manipulate the production of urine. Part of the conclusion from the paper was that some cells in the kidney contracted like muscle cells to control urine flow. The cells were not proven to be muscle cells though but still contracted. I felt I had spotted a bad paper and criticized it thoroughly. I said that the conclusions made by the authors were not substantiated by the data they presented and gave reasons. Almost always the whole class would have compared notes on a paper and come up with a consensus. But for reasons I do not recall, for that paper I was unable to make the consensus discussion and went with my gut impression. I figured the rest of the class would have seen the same flaws I had seen. I was wrong. For the next several minutes every other person extolled the virtues of the paper that had been presented. I was the lone person with a “bad paper” vote.