education
ddobbs | November 4, 2008Earlier today I posted about Paul Tough's Clay Risen's* Atlantic profile of Michelle Rhee, the controversial Washington DC school chancellor. I forgot to mention that there is also an interview of Rhee on the Atlantic website.
*correcttion made 11/09/08
ddobbs | November 4, 2008
Michelle Rhee
photo by David Deal, from Atlantic Monthly
To my surprise, one of the most-read posts on this mostly-science blog is "Are Teachers Profesionals of Public-Service Workers?", which looked at a NY Times Magazine piece on school reforms by Paul Tough. Tough now has Now there is a piece by Clay Risen* in the current Atlantic Monthly about perhaps the country's most notable school reformer, Washington D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is aggressively pushing reforms -- higher-paid, non-tenured teacher contracts among them -- on the D.C. school district.
The nut graf is below.…
bioephemera | November 3, 2008In the current New Yorker, Margaret Talbot summarizes the gaping chasm in attitudes toward teenage sex in Red and Blue America:
Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Already, dear readers, you are making a difference. For example, today, an impoverished classroom in American's capital city learned that they will be able to learn how to identify wild birds in Washington DC because you donated enough for them to fulfill their funding request. Thank you!
Of course, I will be sharing all updates with you that they and all "our classrooms" send during the upcoming school year.
Birding in Washington, DC
Dear GrrlScientist,
Birds…
clock | October 31, 2008Today is the last day! I know most of my readers are donating to Obama this year, but still, my challenge is on the very bottom of the Scienceblogs.com list....
bioephemera | October 30, 2008I can't freehand a parallelogram to save my life, but I can bisect an angle with the best of 'em! Woohoo!
How good are you at eyeballing geometry? Test yourself with this game. It's addictive, although your eyes will tire quickly if you have an inferior monitor. And at the end, it gives you a snazzy little readout of your scores, like this:
bioephemera | October 30, 2008
stag beetle
Albrecht Durer
source
... But life in nature manifests the truth of these things.... Therefore observe it diligently, go by it and do not depart from nature arbitrarily, imagining to find the better by thyself, for thou wouldst be misled. For, verily, "art" is embedded in nature; he who can extract it has it. -- Albrecht Durer
Thanks to your generosity, yet another of my DonorsChoose projects has been funded! Woot! And several very generous donors who have given in the three digits, with the leader at $300. That means to have a shot at the original watercolor, you'd have to give…
grrlscientist | October 29, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
The end of the month approaches, and with it, Hallowe'en and -- even more important -- the end of ScienceBlogs' DonorsChoose Challenges! I am truly impressed with your generosity towards impoverished kids throughout America as their teachers struggle to improve their science education -- afterall, these kids are going to be voting soon, and if they have a crappy science education, they too will join the ranks of Sarah Palin and John McCain by berating important…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can't: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I'm a philosopher: I use philosophical values of "fun"). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I'd love to…
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Start your day off right by helping America's poor children to get a good basic education in science. This is a project that focuses on human evolution in a high-poverty Massachusetts classroom -- they need another $771 to complete their funding request. Won't you help?
9th Graders Study Evolution: Did We Really Evolve From Apes?
I am the high school biology teacher at my school. Our school is severely lacking materials in the Science Department. We have the…
bioephemera | October 27, 2008Amazingly, it's already the last week of the DonorsChoose fundraising drive! SEED has generously kicked in matching funds for each blogger, which enabled me to contribute to several more projects - but we only have a total of $1,026 so far. That's much less than Chad is getting for promising to dance like a monkey.
Honestly, I'd dance like a monkey too, but none of you wants to see that, I promise you. I have no rhythm whatsoever.
So here it is, readers: I'm going to do something to persuade you to donate, too. I'm going to give away a painting. A new, original, watercolor painting that I am…
grrlscientist | October 27, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Already, dear readers, you are making a difference. For example, today, a classroom in Tennessee learned that they will be able to learn how to see microscopic life because you donated enough for them to fulfill their funding request. Thank you!
Of course, I will be sharing all updates with you that they send during the upcoming school year.
Dear Grrl,
Hooray! I can't believe my students will soon have a microscope! We are all so excited and looking forward to…
clock | October 27, 2008Just five days left to go in our DonorsChoose drive! We are ending on Friday! And my chellenges are going really slow....
Seed will match some of your donations. Seed Overlords are also pitching in some cool prizes for people who donate to any of the SciBlings DonorsChoose challenges, including mine.
And don't forget that you can win one of my prizes as well. Just click here....
grrlscientist | October 24, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Excellent news, my peeps! Seed Media Group has stepped up to donate matching funds of up to $15,000 to our DonorsChoose! This money will be divided evenly between all 21 of us ScienceBloggers who have set up a DonorsChoose Challenge.
Collectively, and thanks to our wonderful readers, all of the ScienceBloggers have raised more than $18,000 for our DonorsChoose Challenge classrooms. Best of all, the average reader donation has been slightly more than $75 each, so we…
gregladen | October 21, 2008If you live in or near Boston, Raytheon is one of those companies that you know about because you know someone who works for them. Or, you've been to the "Raytheon ... something or 'nuther" funded by the Defense contracting giant. Back when I lived in the vicinity, they were famous for making Patriot Missiles. Ah ... suddenly the name "Patriot Missile" makes sense, doesn't it!
Anyway, like any big giant company, Raytheon tends to fund stuff, and one of the things Raytheon funds is math and science education. I have received word of a revamping of Raytheon's MathMovesU scholarship…
gregladen | October 20, 2008African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper.
Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.
The researchers consider…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
This proposal has only 15 days left to be funded, and I am hoping that all of you can donate -- even one dollar -- to fund this project. You are strongly encouraged to set up a matching funds challenge for this or any other DonorsChoose proposal, either through your employer or among your co-workers or friends.
This teacher, Mrs. R., teaches grades 3-5 in a high poverty school in Tennessee. She seeks funds to purchase a microscope and two sets of prepared slides…
drorzel | October 16, 2008One of the annoying things about trying to explain quantum mechanics to a general audience is that the weirdness of the theory forces you to use incredibly convoluted examples. Pop-science books about quantum physics are full of schemes that the producers of the Saw movies would reject as implausibly complicated.
I wish I was posting to say that I had found a way around this, but I haven't. So here's another entry in the thriller-movie school of quantum analogies.
Imagine that you and a friend are out hiking, and find yourselves kidnapped by a sinister conspiracy of some sort. You're taken to…