Hi Wendy,

For the last c. 25 years, I’ve run a “rock project” for students, in which they identify mineralogy of (usually metamorphic) rocks in hand sample and thin section. If you don’t teach optical mineralogy, this wouldn’t work. But, ultimately, I have them make an oral presentation of their rock’s mineralogy to the class at the end of the semester.

There are basically 3 components: hand sample description, mineralogy in thin section, and interpretation of EDS spectra and SEM images. It’s true that my class includes some petrology, so the presentation includes interpretation of how the rock formed. But, even without a petrologic background, it trains students in basic interpretational skills of physical properties, optical properties, and chemistry. Students in the class are required to fill out evaluations of presentations, and often ask numerous questions after the presentation. So, it helps train them for presentation and professional interaction skills as well.

I provide a written summary of comments and evaluations for each talk when send them their grade. It’s a lot less work than grading papers.

You do need polished thin sections, and these can take a while to have made. So, you’ll want to think ahead about what you want them to look at.

If you really have your act together, and can get thin sections turned around quickly, you can run a field trip during the first week or two, where students collect their own samples. That’s absolutely the best, and you’re in the perfect place to do that, with igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks close by. But it can be a little tight on time and/or pricey for rapid turnaround.

The data students collect have kickstarted several major NSF projects, too. They appreciate making real observations to support scientific research.

After all these years, I think just about everything I’ve ever done in class has been criticized by someone – except the rock project! That always receives high marks. The SEM experience alone is worth it. I’ve had students practially peeing their pants they were so excited.

Best,

Matt

Note: While I may send email outside of regular business hours, I do not expect the same from others.

Dr. Matthew J. Kohn, University Distinguished Professor
Department of Geosciences, Boise State University
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I forgot – I have students work in pairs so they’re not traumatized by (what is usually) their first presentation. I’ve had only one pair disintegrate. If there’s an odd number of students, one can work with a TA (if you have one), or independently. Pick the right student. I also have them self-select partners, I don’t assign pairs.

Best,

Matt

Hi Wendy and fellow Mineralogy folks,

I just finished my first semester of teaching, so take things with a little
grain of salt, but described below (apologies for the length...) is what I
did in my undergrad Mineralogy class. The course was also just Mineralogy,
although I toyed with doing a brief petrology into and did teach basic
phase diagrams.

1. First half of the semester - MINERAL CUP. Like the one on twitter, but
for our class. Each student chose a mineral (any mineral as long as it is
known enough to have some research and basic info available) and had to
fill out a mineral information table, read and summarize three scientific
papers of their choosing (five-paragraph style written doc), and give a
3-minute lightning talk to the class convincing people to vote for their
mineral. I'm attaching the project description document and rubric I used,
the template, and the silly flyer we advertised with -- there are certainly
some things I will change next time, but it's an idea at least. Papers
could be on any topic related to the mineral. Some chose mineralogy papers,
some were petrology, some were materials science, some were art (pigments)!
I set up pairs of minerals to go head to head in the initial votes, and
made similar brackets until we reached the final duo. After each day of
presentations (there were 18 students and we did 6 per day), the class
voted on the three mineral pairs for that day, and after all presentations
we did the rest of the voting, spreading it over several days. Students
were SUPER into the competition and very excited to champion their
minerals! Really fun to see the enthusiasm.

NOTES. Next time I will have students choose their mineral in the first
week of class (we were a bit behind this time), and try to have hand
samples and/or thin sections for them to look at, even if they don't write
about those specifically. I think it would also be nice to have some sort
of classroom plaque with the winning mineral name added each year. I had
people send in their three chosen papers early on, to make sure that they
were on topic and something they could reasonably work through (HW grade
for completion only), and I also gave feedback on a draft of the written
part (another HW grade, completion only). Students were relatively familiar
with how to search for papers, but I spent part of a class period going
over that, and we also discussed how to read scientific papers. I also gave
them an example of some writing/paper summaries. Feedback on a lot of the
drafts focused on removing extraneous info and better summarizing the big
picture parts of the paper, as well as some grammar/writing issues. Some
students wrote their document with a lot of first-person/book report type
phrasing ("What I found interesting was..." "The second paper I read talked
about") but improved significantly with feedback about how to make it a
more scientific writing style. For the presentations, students had a lot of
fun, which was excellent. However, in a couple of cases it went a little
too far into the nonsense realm; I waffle about what to do next time, so I
think I will just remind them another time or two that they can use humor
and have a good time, but to remember it is still a presentation for a
class, which they will be graded on.

2. Second half of the semester - THIN SECTION + DESCRIPTION (brief
synopsis of project attached). Students all collected rocks on our course
field trip to the Duluth complex and associated North Shore volcanics, and
I had them make their own thin section from whatever rock they wanted to
use (from the ones collected on our trip). They went through the whole
process from rock saw to grinding to polishing. Our awesome department lab
manager and I did the embedding and a few steps here and there to help with
backlogs on the equipment or with particularly delicate samples. Once their
sections were done, the project was simple - write a thorough petrographic
description of the specimen and submit a series of microscope images at
different magnifications and polarization settings, with brief captions,
and labeled phases. We were a bit short on time this year, so the written
part here was not extensive, but it was supposed to be professional and
complete.

NOTES. This project was scaffolded by previous labs. After a couple labs
learning to use a petrographic scope and identifying minerals and noting
properties, we did a lab with similar rocks but a different goal -- write a
paragraph-style petrographic description of the sections, starting to think
about the sizes of minerals, their shapes, their relationships to each
other, their abundance, etc. (stepping up from pure identification and
description of properties). That lab also included them doing color
sketches of each of the three thin sections assigned. The last lab of the
semester was a brief intro to the SEM, in which groups of 5-7 students
looked at one of their thin sections. As part of that lab, students
collected BSE images and turned in neat, labeled images. The hope was that
they would figure out what program worked for them and how to make nice,
publication-quality labeled images on the computer, so they could then do
this for the microscope images of their thin own sections. We had one scope
with an attached camera, but many students just used their phones on the
other scopes and got pretty nice results. I've considered investing in a
couple of phone mounts for future classes. The biggest issue with this
project was having only 1-2 sets of thin section equipment for people to
use at once. I allocated one week of class/lab for students to work on this
project, but the equipment backlog was still an issue. It was also the
largest Mineralogy class Macalester has had, so might not be as problematic
in the future. Another issue was that it simply got late in the semester
before we could take the field trip (thanks, snow), so everything was on a
tight schedule. Although I tried to be clear from the start that they would
need to describe and try to identify minerals they'd not seen before,
students still seemed taken aback. Throughout the semester they were
reticent about using the classroom textbooks to look up unknown minerals
(rather than Google or asking friends/me to help them), so needing to
actually use books for this project, since they were the only truly helpful
resources in some cases, was a bit more of a chore than I expected it to
be. I stayed after class/lab many times to help students and look at their
sections, and allocated at least one additional block of time when I would
be in the room if they wanted help. A little intense in that way, but
students quite enjoyed picking their own rocks and making a thin section of
their own that they could be proud of. Also, looking at the quartz around
the section edges to determine optimum thickness as they ground down was a
great way for them to see how thickness affects interference colors.

I hope that at least gives you some fodder for ideas or parts of ideas. I'd
love to hear about other projects going on in Mineralogy classes across the
country/globe!

Cheers,
Emily
.....................................
Dr. Emily First (she/her)
Assistant Professor of Geology
Macalester College

Olin-Rice Science Center 113

Saint Paul, MN 55105 USA
(651) 696-6415
website https://www.macalester.edu/geology/facultystaff/emily-first/ |
efirst@macalester.edu

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your own work hours.

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:08 AM Nelson, Wendy R. via MSA-talk <
msa-talk@minlists.org> wrote:

Dear Wendy and all,

I have really enjoyed getting students working with instrumentation especially with mystery minerals and every-day materials that are crystalline or have mineral components (e.g. post-it-notes and shimmer chapstick).  My classes have been really big (30+) and sometimes our instrumentation has been down so I have not always done well getting students to play the role of researchers to help fuel a major class project.  I have, however, for many years continued to keep a class project as part of their assignments.  My current favorite part of their mineralogy term paper is to get students investigating the role that minerals have in active research.  I need to write this up for SERC.  But….here’s a bit more info about what I have been doing recently.

I am fully aware that not everyone I teach will become a mineralogist, but minerals are essential for a vast amount of other investigations.  To help bring this idea to light, I ask students to explore the website for a recent GSA meeting (sometimes I open it up to wider meetings—which is especially cool when I have biologists in the class) and to look into themes/sessions that look interesting to them.  Once they do that, I ask them to find a presentation that includes a mineral as part of research described in the conference abstract.  For their term paper, students then both summarize and expand on their findings and write about the role the mineral played.  It doesn’t matter to me how major or minor the role is, but seeing that minerals are infused into research across a variety of topics is my goal.  In particular, this paper assignment does a few things very well...

1. It provides a space for us to enhance students' scientific literacy skills and where we can talk about the role of a conference abstract and how it differs from an abstract connected to a journal article.  I even have our librarian representative come in and talk about abstracts and how they “look” in research databases and then what they can or can’t do for a student.

2. It provides an opportunity for a student to pursue a theme that is of interest to them.  They might be in love with Mars, or archaeology, or the environment.  All of these broad topics fuel sessions at GSA and help expose students who are early in their careers learn more about what geologists “do”.  For students who already love a particular mineral, they can search a meeting for it specifically.

3. It exposes students to the mere notion that there are these things called “professional meetings” and perhaps helps inspire them to participate.  I have had students in the past, attend GSA and make specific plans to catch a presentation because of their mineral project.  I have also had students reach out to the authors of a conference abstract to find out more.

Past papers have looked into topics such as:
-zircons, and their role in dating
-carbon sequestration minerals
-biominerals and effective prosthetics

These papers have been fun to read and are just different compared to a more traditional mineral paper.  Hope this helps and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like more info.

-Dori

p.s.  With your instrumentation there at Towson, I would also encourage you to embrace the “mystery mineral” project.  I’ve done this and students have helped enhance/edit/add to our current mineral collection based on the XRD and other chemical data they were able to obtain.

I second creating for Wikipedia in lieu of a paper! I have done that in a
few classes (I am pretty sure that some of you may have received emails
from my Petrology students in 2021 for this project on different rock units
that did not have Wikipedia pages). My students got SO much out of that,
and were so proud of their work, and have even linked to their pages they
made on their CVs. The WikiEDU program is useful for training, although I
do recommend modifying the exercises and completion credits via your own
course management system to be specific to what you want them to do.

I'm not going to lie, this can be an enormous amount of work to evaluate
(depending on class size, and because Wikipedia pages are living documents
you need to go deep in the history to see the students edits if another
person edits before you get around to grading them), but it is such a
useful teaching tool and I found that students are really engaged when they
know their work matters and will be read by an audience that isn't just you.

Sarah

On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 10:02 AM Saini-Eidukat, Bernhardt via MSA-talk <
msa-talk@minlists.org> wrote: