education
grrlscientist | July 29, 2006
This animated tutorial allows you to view the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. It then moves through space towards Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. Then the animation moves from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
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tags: orders of magnitude, exponential notation, powers of ten, animation,…
grrlscientist | July 28, 2006
It takes three legs to make a tri-pod
Or to make a table stand.
It takes three wheels to make a ve-hicle
Called a tricycle.
Every triangle has three corners,
Every triangle has three sides,
No more, no less.
You don't have to guess.
When it's three you can see
It's a magic number.
Do you remember those Saturday mornings, sitting around in front of the TV in your pajamas when you were a kid, waiting for that week's episode of Schoolhouse Rock? I do. So I have decided it would be fun to watch one of the Schoolhouse Rock videos with you each week, just like the good old days, except I will…
drorzel | July 27, 2006Inside Higher Ed had a piece yesterday about leaks in the science pipeline-- that is, reasons why so few students end up majoring in science, math, or engineering these days. The hook for the article is some Congressional hearings on the subject, but the author lists some possible explanations related to the structure of academia (bold headings are from the article, the summaries are mine):
Greener Grade Pastures: Students in science and engineering get lower grades than humanities students, and some students choose majors based on projected GPA.
Weeding Out: The culture of science presumes…
clock | July 27, 2006 This post I first wrote on February 28, 2005, then re-posted here on December 10, 2005. About conservative relativism and the assault on academia:
I have hinted several times (here, here, here and here) before that relativism (including moral relativism) is not consistent with the liberal core model (in Lakoffian sense). Instead, postmodernism is used these days as a tactic by conservatives to push their pre-modern views within a modern society. In other words, faced with the reality of a modern world, the only way conservatives can re-intorduce their medieval ideas is by invoking…
drorzel | July 27, 2006Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber is enthusiastic about something that appears to be that rarest of rarities, a new idea in the education funding debate: instead of giving the best students money to move to different schools, let schools bid for the best students.
Betts suggests this: first fund the schools equally on a per-student basis. Then distribute trade-able rights to admit highly advantaged students; and allow schools to auction those rights. Schools would then be forced to figure out how much they valued the money they were spending relative to the highly advantaged children they…
clock | July 20, 2006
I wrote this first in February 2005, then republished in December 2005. After War Churchill got fired last month, I think that this post is still relevant.
I was asked the other day what I thought about the Ward Churchill affair. Frankly, I had not followed it at all (but you can) . Apparently, Wingers want to kill him, or at least get him fired, while Progressives are divided: some distance themselves from "an obscure nobody that Right-wing pulled out to push their agenda", while others assert that he is telling the truths that are unpalatable to those whose emotional health depends on…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2006A bookseller in Seattle who was a friend of mine often told me that his customers really wanted a durable and reasonably-priced field guide that focused on Washington State birds and was targeted specifically to beginning, visiting and relocating birders. Finally, after years of breathless waiting, that book, Birds of Washington State, by Brian Bell and Gregory Kennedy was recently published (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine, 2006).
In short, Birds of Washington State is the most user-friendly bird field guide I've seen. It has a sturdy softcover that allows the user to quickly and easily flip through…
drorzel | July 19, 2006I'd be remiss in my academic-blogging duties if I failed to point out this Inside Higher Ed piece on teaching core courses. Like many articles published in academic magazines, it's aimed directly at English composition, but the main points can be extended to intro classes in other disciplines. In particular:
10. Don't compare students' attitudes to your own. A colleague of mine who taught business at a private university constantly made scathing comments about his students' seeming lack of effort. "I can't believe you guys don't know this stuff!" he would shout at them. Time and time again,…
clock | July 19, 2006The 76th Edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Education in Texas.
Carnival of Homeschooling #29 is up on Nerd Family.
apalazzo | July 19, 2006From today's NY Times editorial section:
The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children's chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.
...
This point was underscored last week when the United States Education Department released a…
drorzel | July 16, 2006
In the lecture hall yesterday, from left to right: A dewar of liquid nitrogen, a tube of racquetballs, a squeaky dog toy, a handful of yellow balloons, a vase of flowers, an inflated red balloon, an insulated glove, and a 4-liter jug of liquid nitrogen.
The dewars, the vase, the glove, and the dog toy survived the day.
More details, and video, tomorrow.
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2006
There has been lots of discussion on the internets about a Department of Education study that compared fourth and eigth grade reading and mathematics skills in the U.S. (The full report in pdf format is here). While many have been concentrating on good news for the public schools--that there's no overall difference between public and private schools once social factors are considered--what intrigued me was the poor performance of the conservative Christian schools (note: Catholic and Lutheran schools were not counted as conservative Christian). After adjusting for social factors,…
clock | July 13, 2006. This is a post intwo parts - the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.
Great Men and Science Education - Part 1
There is an interesting thread here about "faith" in science and the way science is taught. Why no science textbook is a "Bible" of a field. Here are some of my musings....
So much science teaching, not just in high school but also in college, is rote learning. Memorize Latin names for body parts, Krebs cycle, taxonomy of…
drorzel | July 12, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so:
[...] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our heads, since in many cases what we are really doing is contrasting our students' experiences with our experiences in school. By that I mean, our expectations are pretty out of whack if we expect our students to be the kind of students we once were, because once upon a time we were the kind of…
grrlscientist | July 6, 2006200 years ago in 1806, Noah Webster published his very first dictionary. A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language contained 37,000 entries, thousands of which were not listed in any other dictionary. In 1843, upon Webster's death, the Merriam brothers acquired the rights to Webster's dictionary.
Keeping with the spirit of Noah Webster and the Merriams, Merriam-Webster adds new words as it releases new editions. The company just released nearly 100 new words that will appear in the fall in the best-selling Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.They have a quiz…
drorzel | July 6, 2006p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics.
For the past 6 years I've taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100's years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic; there is little time for fun. And if we want to make room for something like that we usually have to squeeze out some other topic. Whoosh!
It gets worse. At the UW we are lucky enough to have a large contingent of students from excellent high schools. This means they have seen almost all of…
clock | July 6, 2006When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response.
From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here):
Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2006
Say Cheese!
VENUS Image of a squat lobster at a depth of 90 meters using the instrument's digital camera.
The Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS) facility, led by the University of Victoria, Canada, recently opened a data portal that provides access to scientists and the general public to an online warehouse of images, sounds and live data from the ocean floor.
The $10.3 million VENUS facility offers the world's first interactive, real time portal to the ocean. The underwater network of fiber optic cables and instruments, connected to the Internet, provides a portal to the…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2006Forgive my self-indulgent navel-gazing essay, but the upcoming issue of the blog carnival, I and the Bird, is celebrating its first anniversary. In honor of that auspicious occasion, they are linking to essays that conform to a specific theme. The theme consists of the response to one (or more) of several questions that they posed to anyone who has contributed to making the first year of that blog carnival into a success.
The Questions: Why do you blog, why do you watch birds, or why do you blog about birds?
I write a blog because I enjoy the community of blog writers that I unexpectedly…