Links for 2011-03-02

"Because turnaround is fair play...or some nonsense like that."

"So in graduate school, I wrote a question and answer column for StarDate magazine, out of the University of Texas, and that became a book, and when you have a book, TV shows want your views on things-one thing leads to another. But in all cases, the common denominator is that it starts out by writing.
So my advice to someone who wanted to be a science communicator is, you write. Writing is the excuse you can give yourself to organize ideas in coherent sentences in ways that make sense not only word to word, but sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. And that is the art of communication, being clear and succinct. And the proving ground for that is writing."

"At the end of each semester, as I read the last papers and enter the final grades, I wonder: how much of this will students actually remember a year from now -- or a week from now? They ought to remember something. In a typical semester we will have spent some 40 hours together. Something must stick. But what is it? Material from the course? Skills they've mastered? The time a kid in the back row had his desk collapse right before a test?

A year ago I decided to try to find out. On each of the final exams I have given over the past three semesters I included the following question, worth one point of extra credit: "What one thing from the course did you find most memorable? Explain why.""