Integrating the lab and lecture

I find it easier to organize the lab so that it makes sense to me and then schedule the lectures and textbook readings so that they fit the lab organization. The organization reflected in Modern Structural Practice has been carefully thought out with a progressive development of concepts, particularly Chapters 1-5. Each new analytical concept — direction cosines, coordinate transformations, 2nd order tensors — builds on previously presented material and uses real world problems in the exercises to reinforce the concepts. For example, it is easier to understand a transformation in the context of stratigraphic thickness or down-plunge projections than in the context of Mohr's Circle.

If you want to prepare the students gradually for concept like stress and strain, you will need to delay those topics in lecture until the lab "catches up," that is in the fifth or sixth week of the course. Thus, in my structure course, I cover more descriptive aspects of folding and faulting in the lecture while students are gradually getting used to Cartesian coordinate systems, vector algebra, transformations, and simple concepts surrounding matrices in lab.

Like many of you, I use Fossen's textbook for the main readings in the course. In that text, the student is introduced to the deformation gradient tensor on page 26(!), long before we have developed the background to understand what it even means to call something a tensor in lab. Needless to say, we read through Fossen's text in a very non-linear manner! The same site that has the answers to exercises (see below) also has an unpublished draft of a manuscript which emphasizes the important points from an instructor's view point and shows how I coordinate lecture and lab in my own course

Answer Keys & Feedback

I would be happy to provide Instructors and Professors of Structural Geology with annotated spreadsheets and other graphics with worked answers to all of the exercises in Modern Structural Practice. Please use the form to the right to make your request. There is a chance that I may not know who your are (sorry, I don't get out much!), so please include a link to your department web page where you are listed as a faculty member or instructor and use your institutional email address. For obvious reasons, I will only provide access to people who I can verify as being bona fide faculty or other instructional staff. Like everything else on this site, the answers sheets are copyrighted. You may not repost/upload the answer sheets to any Web site or FTP server, nor distribute them to other people, including your students.