education
bioephemera | April 25, 2008
Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life, 1953
Via eliz.avery's flickr stream
Happy DNA Day!
It's been slow here on the blog lately, for a number of reasons - the most salient of which is that I've been on the Hill all week at the Congressional Operations Seminar sponsored by the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown. I highly recommend this course - it was a lot of fun. But unfortunately I didn't have a functional laptop this week, and thus couldn't blog. (At one point, my poor Mac burped up a blue screen of death - I didn't even know such a thing was possible!)
Yesterday, I just missed…
bioephemera | April 25, 2008
This is just plain cool! It's amazing how intuitive data can be when plotted visually. And as of Tax Day, you can plot your own data on a stripped-down version of this software, thanks to Google, which bought Trendalyzer from Gapminder in 2007. I can hardly wait to try this out for myself. . .
drorzel | April 25, 2008Given the amount of time I've spent writing about academic issues this week, it's only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work in the New York Times. Here's Ed's introduction:
Except they don't really work. A new study shows that far from easily grasping mathematical concepts, students who are fed a diet of real-world problems fail to apply their knowledge to new situations. Instead, and against all expectations, they were much more likely to transfer their skills if they were…
edyong | April 24, 2008You all know the score. A train leaves one city travelling at 35 miles per hour and another races toward it at 25 miles an hour from a city 60 miles away. How long do they take to meet in the middle? Leaving aside the actual answer of 4 hours (factoring in signalling problems, leaves on the line and a pile-up outside Clapham Junction), these sorts of real-world scenarios are often used as teaching tools to make dreary maths "come alive" in the classroom.
Except they don't really work. A new study shows that far from easily grasping mathematical concepts, students who are fed a diet of real-…
drorzel | April 24, 2008We had a great time on our visit to Japan last summer, but we had one incredibly frustrating experience, on our first day in Yokohama. We couldn't bring three full weeks' worth of clothing with us, so we brought a bit more than one week's worth, and planned to get things cleaned there. The hotel laundry rates were outlandish, so we loaded up a suitcase with dirty laundry, and when we got to Yokohama, we asked directions to a local laundromat (Japanese word: "ko-in ran-da-ri," or "coin laundry"). The nice lady at the hotel desk gave us a tourist map, with a route indicated on it.
This created…
drorzel | April 23, 2008As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School's loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil Corporate Scum, the funds they provided to help pay off her loans were a crucial element of our finances for the first few years of our marriage. In fact, you could argue that they're the reason there's a physical Chateau Steelypips in the first place-- even in 2002, I…
drorzel | April 22, 2008The release of Expelled has generated all sorts of chatter, almost certainly more than it deserves on its merits as a film. It's also produced repeated mentions of the fact that it's the eight highest-grossing political documentary of all time-- most recently, Tara Smith writing at Correlations.
That claim reminds me of a long-ago student whose application for a summer program described him as a student at "the fifth best university in Florida." None of the people reading it could come up with four, let alone the fifth. And God knows, I would have a hard time naming seven high-grossing…
sheril | April 21, 2008Last week, I expressed concern over science illiteracy in the United States. While it's obvious we have a long way to go (evidenced by survey information provided by NSF), I have renewed optimism for tomorrow's leaders.
The reason over at Correlations...
drorzel | April 18, 2008(Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post...)
Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing:
As I've said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during 'lecture', and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving -- and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don't know.
I see this as…
gregladen | April 15, 2008"Academic Freedom" bills seem to come in two flavors: Those that protect students from the possibility of learning certain things, and those that protect subversive teachers from getting in trouble for being bad teachers. In both cases, they are bills typically introduced into state legislatures by conservative republicans expressing concern with the Liberal Bias. There is a vague institutional connection between the concept of Academic Freedom Bills and the organization founded by conservative David Horowitz, "Students for Academic Freedom." The motto of this organization is "You can't…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2008I've never understood why so many liberals and progressives think the Democratic field is strong. Yes, the candidates aren't insane, but neither of them are particularly good on economic issues. There is nothing in either Clinton's or Obama's records or speeches that suggests that they will do anything significant to reduce income inequality, other than perhaps letting the Bush tax cuts expire (and Obama has even been waffling on that).
And keep in mind, that income inequality isn't just a matter of economically integrating more people into society. That's not some gushy, "it's not fair"…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Finally, something really important to blog about:
Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.
Here's Johnny Lee's site, where you can download the software.
See also The Whoops of Wii
gregladen | April 10, 2008... if you live in Baltimore ...
Details and a poll for you to take:
An art teacher at Baltimore's Reginald F. Lewis High School says she was beaten by a student in her classroom in an attack that was recorded on a cell phone camera.
Jolita Berry says the attack happened Friday. The chief of the Baltimore City school police said Tuesday he had not been notified of the attack and planned to begin an investigation.
The video of a classroom fight showed up on MySpace.com. Berry says the person being beaten is her.
She says the attack began when she told a female student to sit down and behave…
gregladen | April 10, 2008Yes, and it probably should. The bill requires that the home schooled students receive instruction from qualified individuals, and that the students be registered with the state. Both are reasonable requirements for any educational program, home schooling or otherwise.
But this is considered unacceptable by many homeschooling proponents (but not all). I found an interesting commentary from Michigan that demonstrates what I think is a widespread viewpoint among home schoolers. (Home schoolers by the way often insist that they are a diverse group, but I have seen very little dissent from…
gregladen | April 9, 2008This is a brief overview of one school's foray into the OpenSource operating system Linux.
drorzel | April 9, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne waxes rhapsodic about her calculator, a HP-15C. This is such an obvious Dorky Poll topic that I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier:
What sort of calculator do you use?
My students, particularly the future engineers, are always shocked by my answer:
I use a TI 30Xa. Actually, I don't know that off the top of my head-- I had to dig it out and look at it to come up with the model number. I think of it as "A $10 scientific calculator that I bought at Safeway."
This does everything I need, though-- it adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, does square…
drorzel | April 9, 2008The much-promised peer-reviewed research post is going to slip by another day, becuase I had forgotten about a talk by Neil Lewis last night on campus. Lewis is an alumnus of Union, and a writer for the Times best known for writing about the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he was speaking as part of the Alumni Writers Series.
He had prepared remarks, but his speech still had a very off-the-cuff feel, and he tried to get through the prepared stuff quickly to get to a more open Q&A period. He talked about Guantanamo here four years ago, and joked that he was going to re-use that…
gregladen | April 8, 2008In a move that now sends the deceptively named "academic freedom" bill to the Florida Senate floor, the Senate judiciary committee voted 6-3 to approve it. It looks like some Democrats can see the potential (almost guaranteed) lawsuit pitfalls to come, but the bill marches on nonetheless. I'll have more later ...
What's wrong with you people? Do we not ridicule you enough? Do you not feel stoopid enough? Are your jaws not slack enough and your chromosomes not homogeneous enough?
Get out there and De-Elect these Senators!
Florida Citizens for Science may have more soon. Here.