Academia
Category archives for Academia
Homework Is Evil?: “The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 14, 2013 
One of the perennial problems of teaching intro physics is getting students to do their homework, so I was very interested to see Andy Rundquist on Twitter post a link to a paper on the arxiv titled “How different incentives affect homework completion in introductory physics courses.” When I shared this with the rest of…
Wolfgang Pauli, Father of the arXiv
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 10, 2013 The book-in-progress (which is coming along, albeit slowly, thanks for asking) is built around making analogies between scientific discoveries and ordinary activities. This necessarily means telling a lot of historical stories, which is both good and bad. The bad part is that actual history is way messier than the streamlined version you get to use…
On Talent in Sports and Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 16, 2013 Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for an elite basketball player. I’m taller than average (about 6’6″, a hair under 2m in SI units), but I’m not especially quick, or agile, or all that good a jumper. And I’m carrying at least 40lbs of extra weight above what a really good player my size would…
Real Scientists Have Families, Too
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 15, 2013 I was re-reading bits of James Gleick’s Feynman biography, and ran across a bit near the end (page 397 of my hardcover from 1992) talking about his relationship with his children, talking about how ordinary he seemed at home.I particularly liked the sentence “Belatedly it dawned on them that not all their friends could look…
E. O. Wilson and Learning the Wrong Lesson
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2013 One of the reasons I held off on commenting on the whole E. O. Wilson math op-ed thing, other than not having time to blog, was that his comments were based on his own experiences. And, you know, who am I to gainsay the personal experiences of a justly famous scientist? At the same time,…
Math and Science Are Not Cleanly Separable
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2013 One of the hot topics of the moment is the E. O. Wilson op-ed lamenting the way math scares students off from science, and downplaying the need for mathematical skill (this is not news, really– he said more or less the same thing a few years ago, but the Wall Street Journal published it to…
The Trouble With Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 10, 2013 
For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950: In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality…
Blogging Doesn’t Have to Be a Career
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 4, 2013 Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It’s basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago,…
I Teach for Free, They Pay Me to Grade
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 25, 2013 Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a bit of a rant about what students perceive as grading on a “curve”: Moreover, many students have only the foggiest idea of what a curve is. Many (though probably not all) of their high schools had fixed grading scales with fixed percentages for each letter grade. The A/A-…
Hey, Ho, Ohio: Two Talks at Wright State, Thursday March 28
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 25, 2013 Kind of short notice, but if you’re in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I’m giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I’m doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, “Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How…
