Nuggets = Pasta = Radiation Therapy?

A response to the Thought Vectors and Nuggets Activity
created by Rahul Mohla (@rmohla)

Number of views: 16

“For me it’s about context. I teach fully online courses, so students access resources and communications when it’s convenient to them each week of the course. I’ve used a mix of text, audio, and video to convey concepts and provide feedback, but when it comes to weekly engagement with one another, my activities kinda stink.”

The aforementioned resonates with me, and quite loudly at that, because of what the past few years have brought with them. I dislike bringing up this past, specifically the P word, or the pandemic, which was a less than ideal time for so many. This was further evidenced most probably by all educators on the planet. Going online made student engagement superrrrrrr difficult. How do I know this? I knew what type of student I was in the past. Procrastination was the name of the game, and I was good at it, which made it almost “allowable”. If I was this type of student, is it possible that some, if not at least one, resonate with this type of student. The answer invariably is yes. Unfortunately, being online and not face to face for our lectures meant I could not ascertain from non-verbal (let alone verbal) expressions whether students were interested. In an online platform, students are less likely to turn on the mic and to chat, and would I blame them if they were not there at all and simply signed in (or out)? No.

My job as an educator is to engage my students and show them the WIIFM as it were. This is further exacerbated by the course I teach: Treatment Planning. Essentially this is physics, and we can all appreciated the prejudice that the word physics invokes. How do we make this engaging? Knowing our students, respective their backgrounds, and using that in our explanations. For example, I knew from our ice breakers that we had a number of students of Italian background in our cohort who loved pasta. Therefore, I would use analogies from the making of pasta to explain how it is directly connected to treatment planning.

As a quick example, after the mixing, kneading, folding, and cutting, you need to boil your home made pasta in salted water. Now a situation as simple as this has so many facets to this:

  • the material within the pot i.e., pasta, water, salt
  • the heat applied from the stove top
  • the time to boil the pasta to taste (to taste!)

All three of these steps can be likened to our bodies and the unfortunate cancers that can develop. Cancer is made of a certain material, and surrounded by a number of other entities of different materials i.e., water, bones, lung. Heat that is applied to pasta to cook, is similar to the energy that we impart to the cancer (i.e., the DNA of the cancer) to cure the patient and remove the cancer. We only apply the energy for a certain amount of time, otherwise the patient can experience untoward side effects. In other words, the pasta is overboiled and we need to redo the whole procedure!

As I am typing this, some self reflection is kicking in and I am realized how crude this explanation is. I guess that comes with the job when we are trying to save our patients day in and day out and our students understand that.

You know, I’m something of a cook myself.
byu/_Shyok_ inmemes

Nevertheless, it most definitely worked and students were very engaged within a course even as “onerous” as physics can be. This is just one way I would engage our students, but certainly the topics in the module outline were applied in various other ways!

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