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I attended a (primary and secondary) school with no grades and it was great! Since the classes were small teachers evaluated each student on their progress at the end of each term. At the end of th...
The first difficult block I remember getting in college was understanding moments in statics. What was counterintuitive for me is that moments (or torques) are represented as vectors perpendicular ...
During my junior year I took a 400 level course in Kinesiology that highlighted "health prescription". This was a class of about 100 students and there were multiple subsections of the class for la...
One of the best courses I had in ecology was an Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) tropical ecology field course in Costa Rica. While being in this beautiful country didn't hurt, it was the s...
I can remember having almost exactly the same issue with transcription and translation. I couldn't get how all these things just seem to randomly "know" how to connect with the right other thing. ...
one of the hardest concepts in cell biology for undergrads is understanding DNA topology. How a right handed twist can become a left handed interwound writhe, then taken up by a toroidal writhe whe...
I am fascinated by the recent move by the NIH to require all graduate students and postdoctoral researchers funded by grants from the NIH (or funded by their PI's NIH grant) to explicitly outline t...
When I was an undergrad, I had to take a calculus class. It was not difficult for me, but I can't forget what the professor said in class that I thought was amazing and inspired me in other courses...
I took a graduate-level bioinformatics course at UC Davis, which had a lab component in which we learned basic Unix and Perl programming skills. This was a great lab, which incorporated aspects of ...
In my third year Quantum Chemistry course, I recall a learning moment. The instructor was gifted a helping us see through the complex mathematics. A whole new set of symbols are introduced - many...
I had a degree in Biology and took my first engineering course, Intro to BME. At the first biomechanics lecture, our professor put up a picture of an arm bent at a right angle holding a suspended w...
When I was taking the first semester of calculus-based physics, I remember having an "ah-ha" moment when I made the connection between angular momentum and regular linear momentum. The instructor ...
As a young graduate student learning to write fellowship proposals, I took a course in which the main assignment was to write a research proposal. This involved several rounds of peer-review and pr...
As a STEM learner I relied heavily on creating organizational charts of the subject at hand, plus a fair amount of memorization. Since I was an undergraduate in a very different environment (Spain...
As a young undergraduate taking my introductory chemistry and sophomore organic chemistry courses, I was really good at answering "how" chemical change happened, but I was really bad at answering t...
While I was an undergraduate I did an honours type project for which I had to produce a paper modelled like a scientific journal article. A postdoc of the professor I was working under read over on...
As an adult re-entry student in math at community college an instructor played an important role in my journey through school. She found a way to get through to me that challenged me and pushed me ...
