education
clock | May 15, 2008The fifth annual Museum Night in Belgrade and other Serbian cities will be held this Saturday, May 17th:
More than 130 museums and galleries in 23 towns in Serbia will be open just for you, so the only decision you have to make is to choose a good company. We hope you are in good shape because there will be so many interesting exhibitions, concerts and performances that you will literally have the whole Belgrade under your feet!
What a great idea - pick a day, have special exhibits, events and concerts, all for free, and get the entire town to come out and enjoy.
bioephemera | May 14, 2008
Holiday of the Reindeer
Senya Koyakin
Watercolor on paper
The watercolor painting above is by Senya Koyakin, a middle school student in Zhigansk, Siberia. Senya's art, and that of other Siberian schoolchildren, is visiting AAAS in Washington, DC, as part of The Student Partners Project: Engaging Students and the Public in the Science of Climate Change.
AAAS hosts an opening reception tonight (May 14) at 6pm, featuring a lecture by Dr. Robert Max Holmes, Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, and a videoconference with the children. The artwork will remain on display until…
drorzel | May 14, 2008Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won't be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus, and the trip itself reminded me of why I don't take public transit, but on the whole, it was a good day. And, of course, blog fodder.
The purpose of the trip was to take students from the intro Astronomy classes to the American Museum of Natural History to see the planetarium show (cue Fountains of Wayne). As this show takes less…
gregladen | May 13, 2008There is a point that I've been trying to make for the last few weeks now, off and on, and it is not working. So I'm going to try something new. Please bear with me, and consider the following three scenarios regarding the idea that the Earth is Round (or, possibly, flat):
Please ask yourself: Which of these scenarios is best? Which is least desirable?
Scenario A: Divided Opinion
Maureen: "I think the world is round."
John: "I think the world is flat."
A public opinion poll indicates that fifty percent of those polled believe the world is round, the other fifty percent believe the world…
denialism | May 12, 2008I'm sorry I've been buried the last couple weeks, as I've just started my general medicine rotation. Today is my post-call day, which means I get to sleep in and then study all day long. The fire hydrant of information is cranked open full bore again, and the shelf exam for medicine is supposed to the hardest. There is an incredible amount to know, and only a limited amount of time to assimilate it.
Inpatient medicine is especially challenging. It's funny because most people's perception of medicine is from all the TV shows about medicine and you see doctors constantly fixing some…
clock | May 12, 2008David Warlick is a local blogger and educator. We first met at the Podcastercon a couple of years ago, then at several blogger meetups, and finally last January at the second Science Blogging Conference where David moderated a session on Science Education.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job?
I've been an educator for more than 30 years, starting as a middle school social studies, science, and math teacher. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that…
gregladen | May 10, 2008How should public school administrators react to students who sit through the pledge of allegiance in the US? This issue came up recently in a small town in western Minnesota, where kids were suspended and possibly humiliated because they failed to stand (in once case entirely by accident) for the pledge.
There is now an on line poll being run by the Star Tribune in Minneapolis asking your opinion on this issue. Here.
Hat Tip: Stephanie Z
drorzel | May 9, 2008Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.
Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:
When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…
grrlscientist | May 7, 2008tags: five easy ways to save the planet, environment, global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, streaming video
An amusing but instructive streaming video describing five easy ways that you can contribute to saving the planet. [3:42].
gregladen | May 5, 2008... This is one of several interesting questions being asked by Bitch writer Maya Schenwar in: Learning Curve ... Radical "unschooling" moms are changing the stay-at-home landscape.
From the article:
Not long ago, homeschooling was thought of as the domain of hippie earth mothers letting their kids "do their own thing" or creationist Christians shielding their kids from monkey science and premarital sex. ...
These days ... parents are homeschooling for secular reasons as well as faith-based ones: quality of education, freedom to travel, their kids' special needs, or simply a frustration…
gregladen | May 2, 2008Boo!
...
That scurrying sound you hear is the pitter-patter of libertarian homeschoolers running to their battle stations. These are the people who make home schooling ... which isn't such a bad idea in some cases ... a bad idea. All the time.
This is a community of people who claim to represent a sizable proportion of home schoolers. If that is true, perhaps home schooling should be shut down as an unregulated, unsupervised practice right now. Or maybe I'm just over reacting. I'm just a bit concerned over the inability to converse normally or reason clearly, the reactionary nature of…
gregladen | May 1, 2008A Missouri House Committee has just approved for consideration of the House an Academic Freedom Bill drafted with the aid of the Discovery Institute.
The bill has a nice twist to it in that it prohibits the consideration of any boundary or difference between religion and non-religion in regards to what to teach or how to teach it. In other words, the bill requires that state agencies, school administrators, and teachers ignore the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in deference to state law. Therefore, challenges to this…
drorzel | May 1, 2008One of the interesting things to come out of the switch to Matter & Interactions for our intro classes has been some discussion among my colleagues of how the books treat specific topics. A couple of people have raised concerns that the coverage of certain topics is different from the traditional presentation, in a way that isn't entirely accurate.
This is interesting to me not because it calls the books into question, but because the standard treatments of these things aren't entirely accurate, either. Both the new book and the older book are full of lies-to-children.
"Lies-to-children"…
drorzel | April 30, 2008The Mad Biologist, like 80% of ScienceBlogs, is mad at Chris Mooney:
Here's the problem: you keep coming to evolutionary biologists with a problem (the perception of evolutionary biology), and you don't have a solution. Do you think there's a single evolutionary biologist who is happy with public opinion regarding evolution and creationism? But you're not giving us concrete solutions.
Between teaching and research, along with all of service obligations expected of us (including public outreach), we have too much to do. When we are then told that we need to somehow organize a pro-…
sb admin | April 29, 2008Dear Floridians,
Greetings, and an early "hello"! I'm heading your way at the end of the week to spend my tourist dollars, and I can't wait to see you!
But first, some important business.
Your representatives in the Florida House have just passed a so-called academic freedom bill. I strongly recommend a deep suspicion on your part regarding this bit of planned government intrusion into your children's academic future. It is up to you, through your elected Senators, to stop this misguided intrusion of politics into science. It would also be wise to reconsider those who voted "aye" when…
gregladen | April 29, 2008Home schooling is probably a really good idea for a lot of people, but only for a certain (unknown) percentage of people who actually do it. And, among those who do manage to home school, I would guess that the effectiveness of home schooling varies from pretty good to dismal because homeschoolers are doing it for the wrong reasons, in some cases for just plain bad reasons, and/or they really don't know what they are doing.
I have yet to meet a teacher who would claim that they are generally happy with what shows up at their classroom door from Home Schooling Land ... even though most…
drorzel | April 29, 2008We had a talk yesterday at lunchtime from an alumnus who graduated with a physics degree, got a Ph.D. in Physics, did a couple of post-docs, and then decided to give academia a miss, and went to Wall Street where he's been a financial analyst for the last 12 years. He talked, mostly for the benefit of students, about his path to the world of finance, and what's involved in financial jobs.
This was terrifically interesting, and really useful. Given the way academia works, people who manage to get tenure-track faculty positions almost never have any first-hand experience of the other career…
gregladen | April 28, 2008This is described in UDreamOfJanie:
Ronda R. Storms is a Florida sate senator (Republican) who has spearheaded efforts against Planned Parenthood, against her local LGBTA community, and so on, is now linked to the Discovery Institute in regards to her latest project, the Florida "Academic Freedom" bill.
In regards to Academic Freedom, Storms ...
...took the age-old ethical high-road known as 'Lying for Jesus'. She insists that this bill is about the freedom to inquire about all `scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution…
drorzel | April 28, 2008Today's episode of "Thrilling Tales of Physics Pedagogy" is brought to you through a comment by CCPhysicst who picks up on the implications of last week's schedule post:
You are ripping right along in that course. You do E and then B and only later get around to circuits?
Yes and no. We are ripping right along, because our insane trimester calendar demands it. We're not ripping along quite as rapidly as this might make it seem, though, because we're using a new curriculum based on Matter and Interactions by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood. It approaches topics in a somewhat idiosyncratic…
gregladen | April 27, 2008With all this talk about Expelled!, the creationist movie, I thought it was about time to resurrect the review I wrote many moons ago of Flock of Dodos by Randy Olson, along with some updated information.
Flock of Dodos is a much better film than Expelled!, and explores the same issue, with somewhat different conclusions. So, for instance, if you are going to use one of them in a school or church to explain the ID/Evolution controversy, I recommend Flock.
(That's a picture of Randy with some big birds at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Plus, since its been out a bit longer, Flock of Dodos is…