education
apalazzo | March 31, 2006Harvard announced yesterday that it would waive tuitions for undergrads whose families earn less than $60,000 annually. From the Harvard Crimson:
The newly expanded financial aid program, which will also reduce the contributions of families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $80,000, is expected to cover more than 1,500 students--nearly a quarter of the College--in the next academic year, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons '67 and Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser said in a joint interview this evening.
With the announcement, Harvard jumps to…
drorzel | March 30, 2006I realize that I've been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent Tuesday night writing up a lecture on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
This Quantum Optics class is turning out to be a really interesting experience. It's a truism that you don't really find out what you know about a subject until you have to teach it to someone else. That's…
drorzel | March 29, 2006Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you're accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here.
Below the fold, I will list the three most important decisions you will make in choosing a graduate school:
Choosing a research advisor.
Choosing a research advisor.
Choosing a research advisor.
It might be a slight overstatement to say that the choice of advisor is the single most important…
jstemwedel | March 28, 2006You'll recall that the Lancaster(California) school district has recently adopted a "science philosophy" that calls for critical thinking about evolutionary theory ... but no other scientific theory in the curriculum.
You'll recall that the school district trustees didn't seem to view this as having anything to do with opening the door for the teaching of creationism or intelligent design.
If you read the comments, though, you've discovered that Alex Branning, the entrepreneur who spearheaded this new policy, and who claimed to have no truck with creationists or ID proponents, is the…
drorzel | March 28, 2006There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of "Affirmative Action for Men." The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student she had rejected:
Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they…
drorzel | March 26, 2006Classes start today for our Spring trimester, which is both the home stretch, and one of the most brutal academic death marches in the business-- we wind up running into June every year (last day of finals is June 7), well after most colleges are out of session. By the end of the term, the weather is nice, the students are cranky (because the weather is nice, and their friends at other school are all out), the faculty are cranky (because the weather is nice, the students are cranky, and their friends at other schools are all out), and everybody's sort of tip-toeing around, because the whole…
jstemwedel | March 26, 2006Hey, guess what? A California school district has adopted a new science policy aimed at getting students to think more critically ... about evolutionary theory. It is not entirely clear whether members of the Lancaster School District board of trustees recognize that the policy effectively singles out evolution for scrutiny, or whether they were duped. But I'm pretty sure I've heard this song before.
Here's the coverage from the Antelope Valley Press:
LANCASTER - The Lancaster School District board of trustees voted to implement a "philosophy" of science instruction that encourages…
drorzel | March 26, 2006Orac beats me to commenting on today's depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict "No Child Left Behind" requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math:
Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.
Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym.
Because God…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2006The last two meetings of my ethics in science class have focused on some of the history of research with human subjects and on the changing statements of ethical principles or rules governing such experimentation. Looking at these statements (the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report especially) against the backdrop of some very serious missteps (Nazi medical experiments and the Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis experiment), it's painfully clear how much regulation is scandal-driven -- a reaction to a screw-up, rather than something that researchers took the time to think about…
drorzel | March 20, 2006Question on the evaluation form:
If there was a writing component in this laboratory, please comment on the attention given to it with respect to the improvement of your writing
Student response:
Dude, my writing totally improved.
And so, we close the book on another academic term...
drorzel | March 15, 2006(For reasons unclear to me, Mixed States doesn't seem to pick up scheduled posts in the RSS feed, even after they're published. I don't know if other RSS aggregators have the same problem, but if you were wondering what happened to the promised True Lab Story, here it is.)
A question from yesteerday's final exam, paraphrased slightly:
Element X decays into Element Y with a half-life of 30 minutes. You are given a sample containing three times as many atoms of Y as X. If the initial sample was pure X, how long ago was it prepared?
One student wrote:
It seems like a lifetime ago...
(He also…
drorzel | March 8, 2006Next term, I'm slated to offer one of our "Advanced Topics in Physics" upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I'd rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead.
I call myself an atomic physicist, and I go to the annual meetings of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (this year in Knoxville, whee!), but most of what falls under that heading these days is not what old-school guys would call atomic physics-- spectroscopy, atomic structure, etc. Most of what…
drorzel | March 7, 2006I'm not sure what I did to PZ Myers to make him draw my attention to Fred Hutchison, but whatever it was, I apologize. Mr. Hutchison is apparently a columnist writing for a web site run by Alan Keyes-- the right-wing kook for people who find David Horowitz to be a little too sedate-- and prides himself on his knowledge of science. In fact, he's currently taking great pride in "defeating" two professional scientists in email debates about relativity and global warming. He has also previously posted an amazingly loopy piece about how Einstein is wrong about everything.
Now, it's been a bad…
drorzel | February 28, 2006I'm currently teaching our sophomore-level modern physics class, which is titled something like "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." We've finished with the basics of Special Relativity and abstract quantum theory, and have entered the mad sprint through applications (Union is on a trimester calendar, so classes end next week)-- three classes on atoms and molecules, three on solid state physics, two on nuclear and particle physics.
I've taught this before, so I have a rough idea of what I want to do in the remaining classes-- Wednesday is a lecture on semiconductor…
drorzel | February 21, 2006Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I'd like to say:Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what's the big deal about answering the kid who wants to know about school supplies? It's almost kind of sweet that the student asks, actually. I get queries from junior high school kids who want me to do their homework for them, more or less: what does it cost me to be gentle and modestly accomodating in return? A few…
drorzel | February 21, 2006I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I'd like to address comes from Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who asks about the student whose plight started this whole thing:Were there just so many kids to get through, and so little in the way of support (on the extra-help/shifting to a different course/evaluating for…
drorzel | February 20, 2006(It's Presidents' Day, so remember to vote!)
Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape is something to reflect upon. Maths that we assume to be fundamental elements of our mental toolkits would have been beyond the very conception of the most brilliant minds of our species over one thousand years ago.
I'm not really happy with this, because…
drorzel | February 15, 2006A continuation of the lecture transcription/ working out of idea for Boskone that I started in the previous post. There's a greater chance that I say something stupid about quantum measurement in this part, but you'll have to look below the fold to find out...
At the end of the previous post, I wrote:We can verify this by doing the experiment with single particles, and what we see is exactly the prediction of quantum theory. If we send one electron at a time toward a set of slits, and detect the electron position on the far side, we see individual electrons arriving one at a time, in an…
drorzel | February 14, 2006I'm teaching our sophomore-level modern physics course this term, which goes by the title "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." The first mid-term was a couple of weeks ago, on Relativity (special, not general), and the second mid-term is tomorrow, on Quantum Mechanics, and then we get three weeks of applications (basically, whatever topics out of atomic, molecular, solid state, nuclear, and particle physics I can manage to fit in).
I like to end the quantum section with one lecture on superposition and measurement, which isn't covered particularly well in the book. It's…
drorzel | February 9, 2006In a comment to the AP post, "hogeb" asks an excellent question about pedagogy:
I'd like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the application of a force and the just getting in the way of, among other things, and I try to point out why this isn't just semantics but truly important conceptual skills. I'm not sure they hear me, or how well they hear me, they rarely do well on these questions on my tests. If you can try to go back to…