Academics
pharyngula | February 3, 2012The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.
Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the…
pharyngula | February 2, 2012The Indiana Senate has approved this bill:
The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology.
I've heard a few complaints from Hoosiers about this, including teachers. One high school science teacher has asked me to post this open letter on the subject; they've asked that I not include their name, which is sad in itself. Not only is the legislature…
pharyngula | February 1, 2012The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a "C". Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate?
The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are some bright spots: Minnesota is doing a good job in the life sciences, but where we got dinged hard was on the physical sciences, which are "illogically organized" and contain factual errors. Here's the introduction to their evaluation of our life sciences standards:
Important life science content is…
pharyngula | January 30, 2012You already know my feelings about that exploitive science publisher, Elsevier; I'm not the only one, and there's been a long, long history of anger over their publishing model — and it's not just scientists, but scholars in other disciplines who have been peeved.
Now a boycott has coalesced. If you publish, edit, or review Elsevier journal articles, make your opinion known and sign the petition.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | January 27, 2012Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery?
It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery…
pharyngula | January 26, 2012We're having a visit today from Shawn Lawrence Otto, a fellow who has been fighting against the un-American war on science on the web and in a book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He's speaking on campus tonight at 7:30 Central, in the HFA Recital Hall — I urge local community members to show up, he has important things to say about education and climate change — and that talk is going to be streamed live, so all you distant strangers can also watch the show.
It was a little strange, though, to get messages from the university administration telling me I'm expected…
pharyngula | January 24, 2012Even in pre-school.
Think what fury there would be if this teacher couldn't spell, or had poor grammar, or couldn't read Goodnight Moon fluently. But not knowing how a fundamental property of the universe works? Pffft. Not important.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | January 19, 2012Here's an opportunity: you could work with Reed Cartwright at Arizona State University!
pharyngula | January 12, 2012Now and again, some well-meaning but clueless person gets it into their head that teaching creationism in the schools is a good idea — that the clash of ideas is a good pedagogical technique. There are cases where that would be true, but doing it in the public school classroom and hashing over a bad, discredited idea vs. good science is totally inappropriate. Reserve that technique for issues where there is substance on both sides.
But now Jay Mathews is trying to revivify this nonsense in the Washington Post, suggesting that Rick Santorum has a good idea with his plan to "teach the…
pharyngula | January 9, 2012We've all had them, but none quite so annoying as the one that afflicted Dr Caitlin Zaloom of the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Dr Zaloom gave a simple enough project to her students, to go down to the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zucotti Park and write an ethnographic analysis. It seems reasonable, but one student, Sara Ackerman, had a melodramatic breakdown over it. She has been ranting at the administration about it, and the emails have been made public.
Professor Caitlin Zaloom forced myself, and my classmates to do an ethnographic assignment on Occupy Wall Street a…
pharyngula | December 8, 2011Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in…
pharyngula | December 6, 2011Minnesota tuition rates have also been skyrocketing. My salary has been creeping upward at single digit percentage rates — low single digits, and we also had a freeze for a few years — and also, we haven't been hiring swarms of new faculty, but only replacing retiring faculty (which, by the way, immediately reduces salary expenses). Why is this happening?
The answer is easy: state governments have been jettisoning their responsibilities and not paying for the educational institutions earlier, wiser generations invested in. Thank you, Republicans, the party of irresponsible spendthrifts, for…
pharyngula | November 14, 2011I hate to see a great university system get thumped upside the head by chowder-brained legislators, but that's what's going on in New York. The chancellor of CUNY is pushing for a major revamp of the curriculum, system-wide. This ignores the unique culture at each institution and tries to turn them into cookie-cutter degree factories, and ends up targeting the lowest common denominator.
City University of New York's Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is about to turn the prestigious system of senior and community colleges into a glorified high school. And few people seem to even want to try to stop…
pharyngula | September 23, 2011What a curious phenomenon: this is a video of the notorious Fox Effect, in which an actor pretended to be an expert and babbled fluff and nonsense at an audience of psychiatrists, and they sat and swallowed it and came away with an impression that the speaker was competent. I knew the content was going to be garbage, but I have to wonder if my prior knowledge colored my perception, because listening to it now, it all sounded immensely vacuous — I kept trying to catch a cogent or useful point, and he never delivered any.
I wonder if this could be pulled off in front of an audience that deals…
pharyngula | September 8, 2011I think I like this guy.
Science is the litmus test on the validity of the educational enterprise. If a school teaches real science, it's a pretty safe bet that all other departments are sound. If it teaches bogus science, everything else is suspect.... I want a real college, not one that rejects facts, knowledge, and understanding because they conflict with a narrow religious belief. Any college that lets theology trump fact is not a college; it is an institution of indoctrination. It teaches lies. Colleges do not teach lies. Period.
That's from William Crenshaw, who was an English…
pharyngula | September 1, 2011The American education system is a mess — thanks to the right wing cranks, we keep trying to apply free market principles to a process to which they don't apply. Watching America deal with education is a lot like watching the old USSR trying to cope with competitive economies — that there's a place for everything does not imply that one strategy is the solution for all problems.
What we ought to do is look at other countries around the world that have successful educational systems, and emulate them (isn't that a good capitalist value? Steal the ideas that work?). I have a suggestion: Let's…
pharyngula | August 25, 2011I hate to discourage teachers (we need them!), but there's a problem in teacher education.
Well, guess which students earn the highest grades? It's future teachers. According to a new study by Cory Koedel published by the American Enterprise Institute:
Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes…
pharyngula | August 24, 2011Here's an educational opportunity for everyone!
The Community College of Rhode Island [CCRI] has proudly announced that this fall, a "reiki master" will be holding a seminar on "crystal and mineral healing" at the college. This, we're told, is
…a type of alternative therapy that involves laying crystals or gemstones on the body. Each student will experience a crystal therapy session and get a really good idea about how it changes your energy and rebalances you.
This instructor at CCRI also does "Cranio Sacral Therapy," and uses such advanced quackery as "Bio Magnets," "Light Life Tools," "…
pharyngula | August 23, 2011Today is the day I get together with all of my new advisees and tell them how to survive the next four years.
Tomorrow, the new semester begins — once again, I've got an 8am course to teach on developmental neurobiology.
The madness begins.
But at least this year I've got a new tie!
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | August 17, 2011A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It's not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don't know that we can just blame Texas, but it's true — the system is often set up to give athletes (including cheerleaders) academic privileges that other students don't get. Student athletes were expected to always pass their classes to maintain eligibility, no matter how poorly they did, and teachers were chastised if they compromised athletic eligibility.
Here's a letter that was sent out…