"Clearly" and other words of caution for the classroom

What my first day back as a student taught me about being a better teacher

I’m taking a physics class, so I assume I’ll be learning about spherical cows. Image generated by Google’s Gemini.

Yesterday, I sat as a student in a class for the first time in 15 years. I’m enrolled in Introductory Physics at my local community college (the same community college where I teach Introductory Biology, though I’m not teaching this year). I’m taking the course for two reasons:

1. To learn physics. I’ve never taken a physics class!

2. To reacquaint myself with the experience of being a novice in an introductory science course.

Number 2 is especially important to me right now as I embark on writing a textbook for Introductory Biology students. I need to be able to balance deep disciplinary knowledge with the ability to make the content approachable and accessible to novice learners. The more I learn about biology, the farther away I get from the novice experience! I’m hopeful that being a novice in a physics class will provide insights that are transferable to both my writing and teaching.

Over the next semester, I’ll share my insights here.

Define discipline-specific jargon, especially early in the course

This one seems obvious when teaching novice students, but, in the student role yesterday, I experienced it in a new way.

My instructor was explaining how we talk about phenomena that occur on very different scales of size. She put up a slide showing a list of objects and their size. The first object in the table was “size of a nucleus.”

Powerpoint slide from the first day of my physics class.

I automatically assumed “nucleus” meant the nucleus of a cell. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why the size of a nucleus would be listed as smaller than an atom. Eventually, I figured out that we were talking about the nucleus of an atom.

I’m a cell biologist by training, so of course I assumed that the term “nucleus” referred to a cell nucleus. While most undergraduates are not experts in a discipline like I am, they do take a variety of courses at the same time. They are constantly transitioning from one discipline to another, sometimes within the same hour. It’s completely feasible that a student would come to my classroom, or open my textbook, directly after attending a chemistry or physics course where the word “nucleus” always refers to the nucleus of an atom.

Now, I don’t think I need to specify “the nucleus of a cell” every time I refer to the nucleus in my textbook or in my classroom. But I do think it’s important to consider students’ experiences – not just as novices, but as students who are learning other disciplines concomitantly, where similar language may have different meanings. And I think it’s especially important to do this early in the course when we are inviting students in. By explicitly defining jargon and norms, I’m imagining that my textbook and classroom will say, “Welcome to the discipline! Come in, let me show you around.”

Be careful with language that implies students’ prior knowledge

Using jargon without defining it assumes students’ prior knowledge implicitly, there are explicit, possibly detrimental, ways of assuming prior knowledge that we should be careful with.

During my physics class yesterday, my instructor was explaining the additive property of vectors as it applied to velocity. She said, “remember to arrange the vectors tip to tail,” though this was the first time she mentioned it. She did go on to explain what she meant, but that one word, “remember” made it sound like she expected us to know that detail already.¹ I can imagine this assumption of prior knowledge could feel alienating for a student who is already intimidated by the topic (hello STEM courses!) or who is especially challenged by the material.

There are several words that have the same effect: “Remember,” or “obviously” or “clearly” all imply that certain knowledge should already be in the student’s brain or is so self-evident that it doesn’t need explaining. Not only can this reduce a student’s sense of self-efficacy (self-efficacy = a feeling that “I can do this!”), but it can suppress question-asking. If the instructor has just said, “Obviously XYZ,” it would require a lot of courage for a student to then step up and say, “Wait, can you explain X? It’s not obvious to me.”

I’m sure I do this in my classroom by accident. I know from a past experience that I can easily assume background knowledge that my audience doesn’t have.² But yesterday’s physics class helped me remember what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that assumption. Going forward, in both my writing and in my classroom, I’m mentally tagging the words, “Remember,” “Obviously,” and “Clearly.” Before I blurt them out and potentially alienate my students, I want to make sure that I really mean to use them.

Are there other terms like these that assume a certain amount of background knowledge? Share them in the comments!

I’m looking forward to learning about physics this semester, remembering what it’s like to be novice in a STEM classroom, and sharing my insights with you here.

Not everything you read on the internet was written by a human. For full transparency, here is how I used AI to help me write this post:

I used Gemini to generate the image of the spherical cow at the top. I used Claude to review the text of my draft and provide feedback; its only suggestion that I took was to use the subtitle “what my first day back as a student taught me about being a better teacher.” All of the text in the main part of the post was written entirely by me.

1. I do not fault my physics instructor; it was the end of class, she was rushing, and it’s hard being in front of a classroom of new students!

2. On a train trip a decade ago, I was talking with the person next to me about my post-doc research on bacteria. At one point, I said, “I mean, you know that about half of the cells in your body are bacteria cells, right?” To his credit, he said, “No, I don’t know that, why would I know that?!” I so appreciated his candor! It helped me remember to think harder about what my audience already knows, or doesn’t.