education

Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics: It is the very apotheosis of "a mile wide and an inch deep." They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only Newtonian mechanics but also optics, sound, electromagnetic theory, Maxwell's equations, special relativity, quantum mechanics and even AC circuits. They don't understand any of it, but they've seen it all. They come into my class thinking, by and large, that objects move due to the force…

When Pittsburgh paleontologist Matt Lamanna jokingly promised his fellow scientists that he would eat a duck foot if they unearthed a rare bird fossil, he never expected that they would discover a large group of them in northwest China. This discovery, the most significant in the past 25 years, was made in the Changma Basin, a desert located more than 1,000 miles away from the famed Liaoning fossil quarries. "The dinosaur-bird transition is the hottest topic in dinosaur paleontology," says Lamanna. Some evolutionary biologists think that birds and dinosaurs are too different to be directly…

Thursday night, I needed to work late, so rather than upset the dog by going home for dinner, and then leaving, I went for sushi at a local restaurant. I had a very pleasant meal, which I spent reading through the first few chapters of the textbook I plan to use for my Quantum Optics class next term (to make sure it will work for my purposes), and listening to the woman at the table next to me talk to her kids (ages 7 and 9, and cutely overactive). Eventually, the kids wandered off to go pester the sushi chef (they're apparently regulars), and their mother asked me "What is it you're reading…

There was a postdoc in my research group in grad school who had a sister in college. She called him once to ask for help with a math assignment dealing with series expansions. He checked a book to refresh his memory, and then told her how to generate the various series needed for her homework assignment. A week or so later, he asked how she'd done. "Terrible," she said. It seems that he had just plunged ahead with generating series terms without doing the convergence tests and other proofs that a mathematician would do for the same problems. She told him, "My professor said I answered all the…

Dodos, rabbit poop, Mt. Rushmore and poker .. what more could you ask for than to make sense of the controversy regarding the teaching of so-called "intelligent design" versus evolution in science classrooms. To this end, the artistic community has teamed up with scientists to produce a film that explores strategies used by proponents of so-called "Intellegent Design" to confuse and mislead the general public about evolution. Advance screenings; February 2 - KANSAS 730pm, Glenwood Arts Theater, call 913.642.4404 for tickets. February 6 - HARVARD 700pm Geology Lecture Hall February 10 -…

Here in California, I had hoped we might be safe from the high school Intelligent Design follies playing out in other states. Turns out, not so much. Frazier Mountain High School in Lebec, California, part of the El Tejon Unified School District, offered a class called "Philosophy of Design" which has prompted a lawsuit from the parents of 13 students arguing that the course violates the separation of church and state. "The course was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life, including creationism and its offshoot, 'intelligent design,'" the suit said. "Because the…

Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the class from getting stale. This has led to a reduction in blogging because I've been preoccupied with educational matters. Happily, PZ Myers comes along with a post about education. It's one of those chain-letter sort of posts, starting with an op-ed by Olivia Judson with some unkind words about high…

One of the more contentious recurring topics around here over the years has been education policy, mostly centering around the question of teacher evaluation and teacher's unions. It's probably the subject for which there's the biggest gap between my opinions and those of some of my regular readers. As this is a good time of year for peace and reconcilliation, let me point to this guest post at Calpundit Monthly, in which Paul Glastris talks about the problems of "gifted" kids under the "No Child Left Behind" system, and pushes a Washington Monthly article on Value-Added Testing. The idea…

It's that time of year again, when eager undergraduates start thinking about their futures, including the possibility of graduate school. This inevitably leads to emails of the form "Hi, Professor, could you write recommendations for me for these nine schools? And by the way, they're due Friday. Thanks!" Happily, Sean Carroll comes to the rescue of those of us in need of a way to put off writing recommendation letters, by offering unsolicited advice on getting into graduate school in physics. The advice he gives is mostly good, and comes from the perspective of someone who has read…