What's the deal with the stuffed animals?

If you're here, you likely fall into:

1. Someone who saw that I had a page labeled "Plushies" at the top of my blog about various things like experiences in academia, and were confused or,
2. You met me at a conference, saw that I had a large stuffed animal with me, and asked why, which led you here.
3. Someone sent you this as a citation for reasons. If it's this case, stop reading here and just listen to them, hopefully they're right.

Not surprising.

After a conversation with a lovely person at a conference in April of this year, I realized that I had too much to say for the group of people who'd be most likely to ask.

Reason One: Physics Education

At last updating this page, I've yet to begin my Masters' program. I'm still very much a student, and have little experience comparatively from the teaching end of things. Nonetheless, through several semesters spent observing professors at my undergraduate institution, I noticed a few things, and further, had the opportunities to test things out.

From numerous conversations, there's plenty of evidence [1] that teacher/student interaction improves student performance relatively across the board. Additionally, across multiple fields, there are studies that show that teacher immediacy [actions to lesser the gap between the student and teacher] helps these interactions occur [2]. However, as a student, it's my feeling and observation that there are numerous students missed by the gap that teacher immediacy wishes to fill. Those students need tools to narrow the gap between the teacher and them, rather just the teacher intending to narrow the gap.

However, these students often don't care about class at all, especially if they're struggling. Few educators want to leave these students behind, but they simply don't have time to do what work would be necessary. Further, even if mind control technology was somehow developed, the history of psychology as a field is rife with ethical concerns that mean anyone with an appropriate level of concern for considerate treatment of their fellow persons wouldn't dare consider using these to encourage students.

So, if we can't mind control students to engage with teachers in the classroom, what can be done? I posit that we mind control play to their interests! Run with me now.

People love soft things. It's rare to find someone that doesn't like a soft thing in some form, be it a dog, cat, other pet, fluffy blanket, stuffed animal, or a litany of other things.

From several semesters of observation in help-sessions, and one semester of full-time class participation, I can anecdotally say on account of two of my undergraduate professors that students generally benefit from the presence of stuffed animals in the classroom. Now, it's important to mention that my usage of stuffed animals for this is because I already had several and was using them to cheer up our nicer than usual (but still dingy) student research lounge. I fully believe that other things can be used to improve student engagement with the classroom, stuffed animals are just the method which I like most for implementing these ideas.

Elaborating on that classroom participation, my final semester at my undergraduate institution, I left a stuffed toucan (named Bobo) in the Algebra-Based Physics II classroom in my department, with permission from the professors teaching that class. Over the course of the class, one of the professors mentioned several people who did not seem like the usual type of person to interact with stuffed animals were always happy to see them. Further, by being a toucan, the other professor would bring Bobo to exams, telling the students that "Toucan do it". This frequently got laughs from the students, right before beginning their exams, a historically stressful experience for every student taking physics at practically any level.

I interpret that act as distracting the students from their test anxiety through humor. That idea of distracting people through humor goes to something implemented by a general chemistry professor at my university, who has 20 or so ducks compete in a 10 second race before her night exams each semester, because the simple but competitive nature engages people's innate tendencies, and pulls their minds away from the exam, hopefully helping them start the exam from more neutral ground.

In general, I think the general idea is to invoke some sort of mental whiplash in students. Make them want to ask questions about why whatever you have brought in is there. I need to do more reading, but I would like to investigate the relationship between these sorts of things and the aforementioned effects on student achievement. I think stuffed animals accomplish this particularly well in physics classrooms, especially when the students in them are primarily Pre-professional students of various programs, because physics has this connotation of being an intense bastion of difficulty.

When one of these people walks into a help session and sees a large stuffed elephant, they are by no means expecting to see that large stuffed animal just chilling, because of preconceived notions. My hope is that even if it doesn't incite questions directly about the stuffed animals, this whiplash brings the students to a state that they can more comfortably ask questions later in the future.

We will see what happens as I journey through graduate school programs, but I'm excited to see what might happen.

Reason Two: Conferences are Scary?

Part of my plan for this blog is at some point to include a page with CV/grant application stuff, from my prior experience with applications for graduate school and the GRFP, etc. One thing that got reactions from people when I was applying was my relatively large amount of presentation experience, with 11-12 presentations (mostly talks) before beginning my graduate degree.

Among these, I traveled to my first conference in Minneapolis alone! I'd traveled alone before, directly related to research, but that conference was also the largest conference I've ever attended! It was immensely daunting to do, and I was giving a talk. Thankfully, my prior travel with my advisor meant I knew people there, and the person presenting after me in my session was someone I spent a summer with, but if I hadn't had that, I would barely have known anyone there.

In my conference experiences since, I've had some really great experiences. I went to Hawai'i, and while I was sort of trapped at the resort since we didn't know anyone with a car, I talked to enough people there that I didn't exactly feel like my time had been spent poorly. Even at that first conference, I was able to have a conversation with a professor which directly led to my receiving the GRFP.

Like anyone else, my experiences form a lens through which I see things. For conferences, I've found myself very much for undergraduates attending conferences. Those who attend definitely need to have an open mind, and they should be prepared to understand little, but an adage I've heard many a time and had the fortunate experience of already seeing come true is the importance of repetition when it comes to understanding things on the bleeding edge of physics research. For those outside or new to academia, it takes years for that research to propagate to the point where it can be taught in the classroom in a significant way.

However, all of this is really hard to actually get down to the undergraduate level. Academia, especially physics, is a HUGE case of you don't know how much you don't know, and it's so hard to see the picture even up until your final years of undergraduate programs.

So, why yap about all that? This is motivating stuffed animals?

At time of writing, last fall I had the privilege of feeling relatively comfortable taking a large stuffed shark (shown below):

around that conference, thanks to my advisor's participation in the development of the conference, its size, and the experiences from the first section of this post. Not too much happened there, but it emboldened me for the second conference I attended that month.

At that conference, there was a contingent of high schoolers participating in an FRIB (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams) program, who were there for many reasons. They, among other people, approached and commented on the shark, which I found really nice! Some of the mentors from the undergraduate conference program I was participating in also made positive comments about the shark, even making a comment about how it acted as a highly recognizable marker for my group when we were doing sessions for that program.

Other students, mostly undergraduates, also approached me and complimented me on the shark. All of that to say, for the most part it was well received and was, on some level, accomplishing what I was hoping. It's important to know, as well, that my goal was never to damage the core purpose of conferences in academia. It's a stressful environment to be in, and I greatly admire all the people I've seen present who clearly have anxiety about doing it, and then give an INCREDIBLE presentation despite those concerns. If I was in their shoes, I would probably be really thrown off if I saw a shark stuffed animal in the crowd, so I always did my best to make sure that I kept it hidden during parallel sessions.

At the next conference I went to, I saw numerous people from the past couple of conferences, some of whom I didn't even remember because I'd never interacted with them, but they remembered me, which was an interesting thing to experience for the first time. Some of those high schoolers were also at this conference, and they specifically talked to me (and one of them, her mother! Incredibly cool person, wish I remembered her name), and I also got to talk to the person in charge of that program about it!

Further, I had some excellent conversations with people that were mostly sprung off of 'is that a shark'? From program chairs at the APS, to various professors, postdocs, and graduate students, I really deeply valued what that led to, and I find that it improves my anxiety substantially because by carrying the shark around, it sort of acts as a two-way interface in line with the same motives from the classroom.

Conclusion:

All of this to say, the main motivations for the conference presence of the shark are a bit less straightforward to describe, but I find that in general, it's a relatively cohesive goal. I think communication with undergraduates is so important across the board, and having just graduated from my own undergraduate program, one of the goals of writing blog posts now is my hopes that it will help me retain a modicum of that context.

Academia can be really scary for a variety of reasons, but it really doesn't deserve to be because of the people. I've met so many cool people, and according to my mother and QFT professor, I would've met them even without a giant shark mediating our interactions, but I find that people showing their personality makes it so much easier to talk to them, and this is my expression of that.

P.S. To the person with the cosmic microwave background dress/skirt, thanks for inspiring me to make this blog. You're such a cool person <3.

P.P.S. And yes, I do wash the shark.

[1] Allen, J., Gregory, A., Mikami, A., Lun, J., Hamre, B., & Pianta, R. (2013). Observations of Effective Teacher-Student Interactions in Secondary School Classrooms: Predicting Student Achievement With the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary. School psychology review, 42(1), 76–98.
[2] Estepp, C. M., & Roberts, T. G. (2015). Teacher immediacy and professor/student rapport as predictors of motivation and engagement. Nacta Journal, 59(2), 155-163.