education
gregladen | September 12, 2008Life Science Teachers: Take special note!
This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component.
What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text.
We start with the basic…
gregladen | September 11, 2008The Minnesota Science Standards are currently in the process of review and updating. This is what the governor of Minnesota thinks. He's wrong about the "local" thing. He is such a ball-less ass. Oh, I so wish he was in Palin's position. Maybe.
If you are in Minnesota and want to provide your feedback on the standards, and you are not Tim Pawlenty, please click here. If you ARE Tim Pawlenty, bite me.
clock | September 10, 2008Vedran continues to spread the Openness in Serbia:
"Anglo-American School Belgrade, a small private school in Belgrade, started its academic year with an opening ceremony celebrating the joy of learning.
Teachers who gathered on the first day of school learned about the intention of the school management to offer them a number of links to Open Access repositories and Open Access RSS feed aggregators for use in educational practice. Teachers learned about the freedom of knowledge and, with great enthusiasm, started to explore a variety of resources of information in order to enrich lectures…
ddobbs | September 9, 2008I've often wondered why there wasn't more focused discussion on a great paradox in the way public-school teacher contracts are structured in this country. On one hand teachers seek to be considered as professionals; on the other, they seek (and generally get) union contracts that structure their employment like that of trade unions or cops. Paralleling this paradox are my own mixed feelings as a parent with kids in school: I feel the best of my children's teachers are not paid enough but find it enormously frustrating -- well, make that maddening -- that the worst ones have tenure and seem…
grrlscientist | September 8, 2008A reader of mine posed a series of questions to an earlier blog entry that I unfortunately neglected to respond to at the time. I am researching an article that I am freelance writing for a journal (deadline TODAY, YIKES!!) and ran across her original comment, which I reposted below the fold, and I am really interested to read your thoughts about this.
A couple months ago, Chardyspal asked;
I have a few questions for those who consider blogging to not be a good thing for scientists to do...hopefully the connections to blogging will not be difficult to make -
What do they think of teaching (in…
clock | August 31, 2008Just as I posted this clip about the way kids use blogs and social networks, David Warlick posted this intriguing analysis of the way kids use online technologies. Dave posted an interesting graph that shows that kids assess that they acquire various skills equally in school and in off-school online environments.
What?
Yes, there used to be a time when you went to school to learn A, B and C: facts, learning skills, social skills with peers, and then went home to learn skills D, E and F: how to deal with adults, perform acts of personal hygiene, and learn to do household chores.
But today, the…
bioephemera | August 31, 2008My friend mdvlist sent me the link to some rather odd educational materials, called "Lyrical Life Science." They're folk songs set to familiar tunes, but the lyrics are all biology. I realize that folk songs about science have a storied history. But these are kinda weird - like "Sirenians" set to "Drunken Sailor," or "Oh Bacteria" set to "Oh Susanna" ("though lacking any nucleus, you do have a cell wall. . . ")
mdvlist claims that the kids in her party LOVED these CDs, although she was not impressed by the quality of the music. Nor was I - in fact, I couldn't understand half of what they are…
rallain | August 29, 2008I teach classes. I ask questions in class. I wait for answers. All faculty do this, so who cares. If you are in a class or teaching a class, how long do you wait for someone to answer your question? Well, I asked two questions of my class this week.
1. Estimate how long I wait when I ask you questions.
2. How long should you (ideally) wait in a class for someone to answer?
Here is the data I gathered: (and I will tell you how long I actually wait)
This is a class of about 30 students. Below is a histogram of how long they estimate I wait for an answer. To make things work out, I…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2008There have been a lot of comments on this post about using molecular evolution to teach evolutionary biology. A couple of people were worried that creationists will look at molecular data and claim that it is 'microevolution' and thus compatible with creationism (I've dealt with the creationists' macroevolution canard before). I'm not worried about this issue.
First, even when a study (or project) is focused on a single species, if you're building trees, then you typically need an outgroup (sequence from another species). And now, once again, we're in the world of common descent....and…
drorzel | August 29, 2008No, not me. Not literally, anyway-- I'm quite happy with my current family.
Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called "Adopt-a-Physicist to help high school students learn more about what careers in physics are like:
Physicists and students interact through discussion forums for a three-week period. Before the three week period begins, the physicists and classes (via the teachers) each create a brief introduction page. After registration closes, teachers choose some physicists for their classes to interact with, preferably from different career categories.
The…
mikethemadbiologist | August 26, 2008In the midst of the kerfuffle about atheism, religion, and teaching evolution in high school, the NY Times article made me wonder if focusing part of the curriculum on molecular evolution would be a better way of teaching evolutionary biology* (and ScienceBlogling Sandra describes some good ways of doing so).
I pose this as a question--it could be a dreadful idea, but here are some things to consider:
Molecular biology is viewed as more 'scientific.' Like it or not (and I don't), molecular biology is viewed as more rigorous than organismal biology.
DNA sequence is pretty easy to understand…
clock | August 25, 2008It is so nice teaching biology to adults when there are no (obvious) Creationists in the classroom. It does not always happen that way - I have had a couple of cases in the past - but this time it was really nice as I could freely cover all topics deeply within an evolutionary framework (not always seen in my public notes, though, as I try to gauge the class first and then decide how overtly to talk ebout everything in evolutionary terms). It is always a conundrum. If there is a potential resentment of my lectures, I have to thread carefully. I have to remember that I am not trying to…
gregladen | August 25, 2008David Campbell is a life science teacher in Florida who was recently profiled in the New York Times because of his involvement in the debate between Creationism and Evolution. This discussion is being picked up in the Blogosphere, and this is very timely, as this is the time when teachers in most US school districts are just heading back to class.
My "back to school" contribution is a repost of one of my more popular bits on the problem of the bible thumping student. This is revised and reposted from my old site. Enjoy:
.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own…
clock | August 24, 2008I love the way Web works! So, I was on FriendFeed earlier today and I saw through this link there that Paul Jones posted a note on Pownce (on which I am registered but never check) about this article in Raleigh N&O:
An iPod Touch for each student?
A Chapel Hill middle school could become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys.
It's still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school…
cmooney | August 20, 2008In my latest Science Progress piece, I crusade head on at a piece of misinformation that is incredibly prominent of late--the idea that U.S. scientist production is in decline. Looking at the data, whether on Ph.d. production, bachelor's degrees, graduate degrees, or graduate enrollments, I show that the contention is simply false.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about competition from India and China--for as I say in the piece, China's rate of increasing Ph.d. production is greater than ours. However, if we're going to do something to change the way we currently produce and train…
drorzel | August 20, 2008Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart's "Mathematician's Lament" (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I'm fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart, in particular, strikes me as being an excellent example of the dangers of being too attached to a subject.
He writes with great passion and at great length about the fun and creativity involved in math, which is all very nice. Unfortunately, it also leads to paragraphs like this…
grrlscientist | August 19, 2008tags: Who Blogs, blog writing and personality, Big Five personality inventory, social psychology, technology, computers, internet, researchblogging.org
You all read blogs, and many of you write them, too. But what sort of person writes a blog? Are there particular personality traits that make certain people more likely to write a blog? If so, what are those personality traits? Do you have them, too?
A team of scientists, led by psychologist Rosanna Guadagno from the University of Alabama, wondered what personality traits made some people more likely than others to write blogs. To answer…
bioephemera | August 18, 2008Jen Ouellette takes lethal aim at the myth of the sexless girl-geek in this post, which made me want to pump my fist and cheer and go out dancing in a sexy dress and look in a microscope and write a blog post all at the same time:
The mistake many people make, however, is to over-compensate too far in the other direction, wherein anything remotely "girly" is somehow exerting undue pressure on young girls, with no thought to the possibility that maybe some girls genuinely like this stuff. Maybe this is part of who they are. Maybe they also like science and math. Ergo, we are putting a whole…
drorzel | August 18, 2008Via Alex, WNYC's Radiolab podcast features a wonderful commencement address by Robert Krulwich to the Caltech class of 2008, making the case for the importance of telling stories about science to the general public.
This fits in wonderfully with what I said last week about science popularization. He comes at it from a different angle (and make an explicit connection to the evolution/ creationism debate, which I was avoiding), but it's the same basic argument.
And, as a bonus, he has a good NPR voice, suitable for helping get a slightly fussy infant to go to sleep...
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2008Olivia Judson, in an excellent op-ed, lays out the utility argument for why students should learn evolution as part of biology:
The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve -- and fast. And I'm not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that…