The Forest and the Trees:
Teaching Biochemistry at the
University of Arizona

I've been asked to introduce myself and tell a bit about my teaching role in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, with my own views of the two biggest undergraduate courses in our department, BIOC 460 and 462a,b. I was born in Florida, grew up in Pennsylvania, got my undergraduate degree from Bucknell University and PhD from Harvard (med school biochemistry dept.), and did a postdoc at the University of Illinois in Urbana between the labs of Gregorio Weber and Tom Baldwin. My scientific background is in protein chemistry and protein folding, involving a long and intimate relationship with the enzyme bacterial luciferase. The ability to combine my fascination with biochemistry with my enjoyment of opportunities for interactions with students resulted in my deciding to concentrate my professional activities in undergraduate teaching. I never cease to marvel at the variety of backgrounds and life experiences students bring to the university. Interactions with colleagues are another benefit of university teaching — over the years I have sat in on biochemistry courses taught by many colleagues, and I think that my own teaching has benefited enormously from what I have learned from them. I've also learned that teaching styles can differ enormously and yet each be extremely effective – there's no single approach or style that's the "right" way.

I moved to the University of Arizona in August 1999, after 18 years of teaching at Texas A&M University, the last 12 of those in their undergraduate 2-semester combined majors/nonmajors biochemistry course sequence. (They've since instituted a separate 2-semester sequence for majors.) I'm delighted to be here at the University of Arizona, where I've now had experience teaching in BIOC 460, the 1-semester course for nonmajors, and in both BIOC 462a and 462b, the 2-semester sequence mainly for biochemistry majors. As most readers of the Catalyst know, before university students can take any biochemistry courses, they generally are required to complete 4 semesters of college-level chemistry (2 semesters each of general chemistry and organic chemistry) and at least one semester of college-level biology. So they don't really get into their major subject until their 3rd year, and occasionally not even until their 4th year. Thus my interactions with freshmen and sophomores have mainly been in an advising context. I'm slowly learning the "ropes" as an advisor here at the U of A, largely due to the generous sharing of information and insights from colleagues like Bill Grimes, Marc Tischler and Mike Wells, and sometimes from the students themselves.

This may seem like a chauvinistic thing to say, but it's true: biochemistry is really the linchpin of all life science, since it encompasses how living systems work at the fundamental, molecular level. When I entered graduate school (shortly after the dinosaur extinctions), having had a one-semester biochemistry course and little research experience, I had a somewhat fuzzy, romantic notion about working on the molecular basis of cancer or developmental biology. As a first-year graduate student, I soon realized that, at that time, a real understanding of such complex problems at a molecular level was far off, and I chose to work on questions that were then more amenable to immediate biochemical approaches. In the intervening years, as a result of the hard work of many biologists/biochemists, cancer and developmental biology and many other exciting but complex biological questions now can be and indeed are being very actively investigated at their molecular "roots". Underlying my entire approach to teaching is a desire to infuse students with the excitement that I feel about how biomolecules work, the application in a biological context of the same principles they learned in organic chemistry, the molecular logic and consistency of it all, and the integration of what's going on at the molecular level with the needs of the organism as a whole. I think it is safe to say that my goal and that of all the other faculty involved in teaching in both BIOC 460 and BIOC 462a,b is to help to equip all of the students who take these courses to think about biological problems at a molecular level. That's a tall order, and it has to involve a partnership between student and instructor. As with any partnership, some student-instructor combinations are more successful than others.

The bodies of knowledge in all scientific fields have exploded in the last 50 years, and biochemistry is a prime example. The challenge for writers of textbooks and also for course instructors is to make decisions about what aspects of the field to present in order to best convey the essential concepts. That challenge is certainly relevant in a 2-semester sequence like BIOC 462, but it's especially critical in BIOC 460, with only one semester to work with. Biochemistry, like many other fields, involves concepts that are impossible to explain or discuss or really understand without some specific vocabulary and chemical structures within which to frame them. It's never a simple matter to strike the right balance between two extremes: so thoroughly avoiding specific information (total elimination of requirement to learn details) that the concepts themselves have no context in students' minds and thus are not well understood and the course turns to "mush", vs. swamping the students in a sea of detail that makes some of them, at least, focus so totally on the trees that they can't see the forest. However, though it may be belaboring that analogy, no one can understand a forest if they don't know how the trees "work".

There are many faculty in our department with vastly more experience than I in teaching both BIOC 460 and BIOC 462, but perhaps most of them haven't been teaching the two courses back-to-back as recently as I have. The two courses are quite different. BIOC 460 is a survey course for nonmajors intended to convey concepts and principles in just one semester, taken by students who come from a wide variety of majors: molecular and cellular biology, general biology, nutrition, chemistry, microbiology, physiology, pharmacy, plant science, psychology, even occasional business majors! Many of the students follow BIOC 460 with either BIOC/MCB 411 (molecular biology) or BIOC 461 (nucleic acid structure and metabolism, protein biosynthesis, control of gene expression). Some of the students in BIOC 460 are aiming for medical school or other health professions. The best of the students in BIOC 460 are outstanding – able and hardworking in all their courses, they see the applicability of what they're learning in biochemistry to the material in many other upper level life science courses – connections to microbial metabolism, circulatory physiology, cell biology, etc. Such students will rise to almost any challenge posed by an instructor – the more opportunity and encouragement they have to learn, the more they learn, and the more excited they become at the connections they see! However, as with any course that's a specific requirement outside their own major departments, inevitably some students in BIOC 460 find it very difficult indeed, and the diversity of student interest and ability in the course makes it very challenging to teach effectively without moving to a "lowest common denominator". It is common for universities to have 1-semester courses like 460 for nonmajors, and it is surely possible to teach one-semester courses effectively, as other faculty members involved in BIOC 460 have been doing here for years. Unfortunately, my own years of teaching biochemistry in the 2-semester sequence at Texas A&M probably have been a drawback for teaching in a one-semester course like BIOC 460. After so many years of developing ways to help students to understand essential concepts in the time available in a 2-semester course, I find it difficult to revise my approach to fit into one semester. As I gain more experience in teaching BIOC 460, I hope I'll home in better on an approach I'm comfortable with, and I'll be able to relax and enjoy it more!

BIOC 462a,b, the 2-semester sequence, is a different kind of course. For me, teaching BIOC 462 is on the face of it simply more fun because there's more class time and more flexibility in breadth and depth of coverage of specific areas, with latitude to delve into nuances and discuss more real-life applications of principles. The students in BIOC 462 are all interested enough in the subject either to be majoring in biochemistry or (in the case of non-biochemistry majors, frequently MCB or chemistry majors) to be choosing to invest 2 semesters of effort (and a total of 8 credit hours) instead of the single semester and 3 credit hours of BIOC 460. They tend to ask more sophisticated questions, and generally indicate more interest in learning biochemistry and aren't concerned solely with what their grade will be. Some of them are planning to go to graduate school in biochemistry or related disciplines, some are pre-med or pre-other health professions, and some are interested in careers in industry, generally biotech or pharmaceuticals. While teaching such bright and interested students involves a lot of preparation, the contact time with them is a real pleasure. The weekly discussion sections for BIOC 462, the 4th credit hour each semester, involve several other faculty members besides those giving the lectures. Those small groups provide the opportunity for students to apply problem-solving skills and get feedback, and permit more personal interactions of faculty with students. While I still have a long way to go in improving my teaching in BIOC 462, I'm fairly comfortable in that forum.

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The University of Arizona
Updated June 1, 2004

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