education
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2006...it's pretty clear the Republicans don't give a damn about America's children. There's growing evidence that the Republican political establishment doesn't believe in the Christian Right's lunacy. So all the hot air about putting intelligent design creationism into the classroom was crapola to placate the Christopath base. In other words, the Republicans were willing to degrade science education, waste time in the classroom, and divert teachers and scientists from doing their real jobs simply to maintain their grip on power.
Heckuva job, Bushists.
grrlscientist | October 13, 2006
What's a noun without a verb to make it zoom!
Verb you're so intense
Every sentence has a subject
Noun, person, place or thing
Find that subject, where's the action?
Verb can make the subject zing
Take the subject, what is it?
What's done to it?
What does it say?
Verb! You're what's happening!
I can question like,
What is it?
Verb! You're so demanding!
I can order like,
Go get it.
Verb! You're so commanding!
When I hit I need an object!
When I see I see the object!
I get my thing in action!
Verb! That's what's happening!
To work, to play, to live, to love.
.
tags: schoolhouse rock,…
clock | October 12, 2006This is what I do and this is how I think about what I do (from February 13, 2006)...
I teach Biology at a community college, but not on the main campus. Instead, I teach at a satellite campus dedicated to adult education. Those are all accelerated courses, which means that classes meet for about three hours once a week, either in the evening or on Saturday, and the classes last five, eight or twelve weeks.
Biology lasts eight weeks, although I teach the Lab over four weeks, doubling the face-time each week - that way more gets done, students are happier, and if an experiment does not work…
apalazzo | October 11, 2006For some reason I have this irrational love of statistics. It could be due to the fact that as a microscopist I am very weary of qualitative data ... it's easy to see what you want to see. Quantification is the attempt to provide a more objective assessment of the world.
This fascination of statistics could also stem from the fact that as a kid growing up in North America, you are bombarded with numbers. From sports (who scored the most goals for the Canadiens in 1983?), to the Almanac with all of it's lists, to pop culture (I can hear Casey Kasem now "and the top song of the week is..."),…
clock | October 10, 2006Durham Literacy Center is in trouble and needs your help.
Mold in DLC Office:
For several years, the presence of mold in the DLC building has been a nagging but manageable concern. In the past 4 years, DLC has spent more than $15,000 to contain and destroy the mold that grows in the building's damp basement and the attic. Unfortunately, conditions worsened significantly early this fall. The occurrence of allergic symptoms associated with mold increased. When it became clear that staff were having allergic reactions to the mold, we asked two environmental engineers to assess the building. The…
drorzel | October 7, 2006Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item.
Here's the honest version of the graph, redone using data from this table (the relevant figures don't appear in the report cited in the original piece). (Click on the graph for a larger version.)
I've plotted the normalized test score (the score for each country divided by the reported maximum score, because I'm a physicist and like…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2006
We had a truly impressive lightning storm the other night here in NYC. So impressive that the nurses here at the hospital were all commenting about it. As a result, I was inspired to link to this Schoolhouse Rock primer about the weather.
Welcome everyone,
It's the weather show!
Bring your bathing suits,
Don't forget your boots and coats.
Folks, we guarantee the show that we perform
Is never dull, if there's a lull,
It's just the calm before the storm.
Watch it change from icy cold to toasty warm,
And rearrange from sunny days to crazy storms.
The curtain's rising, we're so glad to have…
clock | October 5, 2006'Hip Happy Prof' teaches over MySpace, bosses protest:
N.C. State Professor Tom Hoban is offering Sociology 395-M, "Social Movements for Social Change," on the popular social networking site that claims to have 100 million active users worldwide. But administrators say it's the wrong space for teaching a university course.
Hoban says he received approval over the summer from his department head to teach via MySpace. But last week, Katie Perry, senior vice provost for academic affairs, told Hoban to move the course to university servers.
Hoban has refused.
"N.C. State's distance education is…
drorzel | October 5, 2006Last week, Mike Dunford was struggling with some teaching issues, relating to what level of effort he should expect from his students. His original decision drew some harsh criticism, both in his comments and from Sandra Porter, leading Mike to reconsider matters.
I meant to comment at the time, but I gave an exam last Thursday, which kept me kind of busy, and then there was the SAT Challenge to get ready.The issues Mike raises present some tough questions: on the one hand, you want students to learn to learn for themselves, and that occasionally runs counter to their immediate impulses,…
clock | October 5, 2006Brian Russell is organizing the 2007 Podcastercon. Let me show you how much fun the last year's Podacstercon was by reposting this January 16, 2006 post (also cross-posted on Science And Politics) about the exciting education session led by David Warlick of 2 Cents Worth blog:
Sorry for three days of absence from this blog. I needed some time to recuperate after the Podacstercon which I attended last Saturday. It was a marvelous experience. For more information check out the Podcastercon blog, the wiki, a nice article in News and Observer, the blog reports via Technorati tags, Technorati…
clock | October 3, 2006The 87th edition of The Carnival of Education - A World-Wide Carnival - is up on The Current Events in Education. It is a lesson in geography.
The 40th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on HomeSchoolBuzz. It is a lesson in history.
Oh, and in case you missed it, the 13th Teaching Carnival is right here.
clock | October 1, 2006Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Teaching Carnival where we discuss all things academic, from teaching to college life, from HigherEd policy to graduate school research. Last time, I separated the Two Cultures in a way. This time I want to keep them mixed - both sides of campus often deal with the same issues anyway. There are tons of links, so let's start right away...
SATs and getting into college
Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles commented on the top SAT essays published by the NYTimes. He argued that writing a decent essay in 25 minutes with a prompt not known in advance is…
grrlscientist | September 29, 2006
We're talkin' 'bout dollars and sense,
dollars and sense;
Them green-back bills with the pictures
of the Presidents.
Since life is one experience
that spares us no expense,
Gotta use them dollars
with a little bit of common sense.
We gotta use them dollars
with a little bit of common sense.
Are you sure Dolly Parton started this way?
.
tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
clock | September 28, 2006First posted on December 12, 2005 on Science And Politics, then re-posted on January 16, 2006 on The Magic School Bus and most definitely worth reposting again here...
The new article on PLoS, Evolution for Everyone: How to Increase Acceptance of, Interest in, and Knowledge about Evolution by David Sloan Wilson, describes a successful experiment of teaching evolution to a broad segment of the student population at Bighampton College (the paper looks nicer in PDF format).
Here are just a couple of snippets:The main problem with accepting evolution involves implications, not facts. Threatening…
drorzel | September 22, 2006I'm teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I'm giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week's was "How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School."
I've probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I'm too lazy to look for it, and this particular presentation was slightly different than anything I may have put on the web in the past. And I might as well wring another post out of the topic, while it's fresh in my mind...
There are several steps to the grad school application process, but the most…
grrlscientist | September 22, 2006
This streaming video is clumsily made, but at least the visual quality is good.
I'm a victim of gravity.
Everything keeps fallin' down on me.
No matter where I go
That forces that I know,
Just a pullin' me down, down, down, down, down.
It's all around town now,
It's like a magnet deep inside the ground.
When I lift something up,
I can feel it pulling down.
It pulls me in the pool,
It pulls rain down on me.
I'm a victim of
Down, down, down, down, gravity, yeah.
.
tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
clock | September 21, 2006But this Science Fair project comes really close...
(Hat-tip: Pratie Place)
mikethemadbiologist | September 21, 2006Ed Brayton describes the support of intelligent design creationism by the Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. Says the hopeful candidate:
I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design -- that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory -- that that theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.
If by "credible", he means utterly unsubstantiated and without a single testable hypothesis, then, yes, intelligent design creationism is "credible."
Moron.
clock | September 21, 2006Right after last year's ConvergeSouth I tried to get my school to let me teach a class on blogging. Posted on October 13, 2005 here and again on January 16, 2006 here.
Somewhat related to the whole ConvergeSouth experience. I've been pitching a blogging course to my school for a while now (not NCSU, but a community college where I teach). It's been slow and disheartening so far. Nobody knows what blogging is. Also, there is a rule that one needs to have an appropriate degree for a class. In the case of a blogging class, this would mean, or so they said, either journalism school or computer…