education
mikethemadbiologist | September 20, 2010I swear every time I go on vacation, there's an outbreak of stupidity. One symptom is a ridiculous plaint by law professor Todd Henderson, who whines about barely getting by on $450,000 per year.
No, really, I'm not kidding. I suppose the rest of us should just eat a bullet or something (and bullets are cheap!). Thankfully, Michael O'Hare and Brad DeLong (aka 'Mr. Deling') tear down this staggering display of narcissism. I would only add that when one has $500,000 of student debt, you probably shouldn't buy a million dollar house. Or maybe, you'll have to forgo part of the $100,000…
esiegel | September 19, 2010"On the chess-board lies and hypocrisy do not survive long." -Emanuel Lasker
Along with art, music, math, and sports, it's well known that the game of Chess is one of the best activities a child can engage in to develop their mind. I can think of no better song than Kings and Queens by Loudon Wainwright III to lead you through this article, so here's a great little live version of it:
Kings and QueensAs someone who learned chess at age 5 and continues to play as an adult, I am positive that chess offers some things that almost no other competition does.
First off, chess is always a…
catdynamics | September 16, 2010There are some things to be said for staring at scatterplots and times series plots
Calculated Risk, in case you hadn't heard, is one of the best economics and finance blogs on the Net.
Bill at CR is a demon for generating plots:
This one is Business Outlook Survey - question is, of course, what is the instantaneous second derivative.
Or look at Government Employment - Fed, State and Local, and now, with Education sector excluded!
There is the Infamous Employment vs Recession chart
and
why you should go to university... (click to embiggen)
- modulo opportunity costs of course
CR…
sastyk | September 16, 2010Science Blogs is celebrating the beginning of the new school year with a series of 101-style posts, introducing the basics of a concept. I've got a couple of basics posts I'd like to do, but this one seemed particularly apt to me. I'm a homeschooler, but it isn't only homeschoolers that struggle with the question of how you frame our ecological situation for children in ways that are honest, not too frightening, engaging, and age-appropriate. Because most schools of every type offer a very superficial education in ecology, most parents of kids going to school will need, just as badly as…
jdupuis | September 15, 2010From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian.
One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment.
We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials.
Scott…
jdupuis | September 14, 2010Yet another science blogging community: Wired Science Blogs.
From Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers:
At Wired Science we are always looking for new ways to deliver you more science and more awesome. Starting today, we are bringing on a group of hand-picked, superstar science bloggers to help us do just that.
*snip*
We hope Wired will give these bloggers the platform and attention they deserve and help bring quality science blogging to the forefront of science discussion across the web. In recent weeks, several science blogging networks have sprung up, including PLoS blogs,…
kbonham | September 14, 2010[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
Back in July I wrote about an editorial published in Nature about the future of science communication and what place blogs had in that future. Though I agreed with them that blogs are a great resource, I also thought that they were being a bit disingenuous about their desire to relate with the public considering that almost all of their material is locked behind a paywall, so the public doesn't have access. I even wrote a comment to that effect on their website:
It's all well and good to talk about public accessibility of…
mikethemadbiologist | September 14, 2010In light of yesterday's post about teachers and education, I think this column by The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy comes very close to identifying the a key problem facing urban education. Milloy:
From a commentary by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee that appeared in the Feb. 8 issue of Spotlight on Poverty and Education:
"I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education's power to reverse generational poverty," Rhee wrote. "But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett [the billionaire investor]…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Via Tom, the folks pushing for a Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall in DC (because if a clown like Glen Beck can do it, why not an actual comedian?) have found a uniquely useful way to try to boost their signal: encouraging charitable donations:
See, anyone can join a reddit or Facebook group or sign a petition. It takes, like, one minute and doesn't demonstrate much effort. So the rally movement has been looking for ways to show that they're serious, that they're willing to lift a finger to make this happen. And an idea has just been hatched: pony up some cash to one of Stephen's favorite…
cagapakis | September 13, 2010The new season of Science in the News starts next week with a great schedule of science lectures by Harvard grad students free and open to the public. If you're in the Boston area, definitely check it out!
Here's the schedule:
September 22: Evidence-based Medicine: A Case Study of Vaccines and Autism
September 29: Bots That Mimic Bugs: Flying, Crawling, and Squishy Robots
October 6: You Are What Your Mother Ate: The New Science of Epigenetics
October 13: Beyond Agribusiness: New and Old Ways to Grow Food
October 20: The Laser Turns 50: A Brief History and New Frontiers
October 27: Forget-Me-…
mikethemadbiologist | September 13, 2010One of the subtle, but important things that influences national discussions of education is that the Washington D.C. public schools are dreadful. Not only do students do worse than would be predicted based on the poverty rate, but, according to the NAEP, the schools also do a worse job of educating poor students. Due to this repeated 'discovery', opinion makers, pundits, and politicians are bombarded with bad news about education and how our educational system is failing (in a fair number of states, our educational system surpasses that of every OECD country, so this really isn't a '…
drorzel | September 10, 2010A simple one, that I'm sure all the faculty in the audience will recognize. What is the proper approach to meeting with a professor outside of class:
You email a professor asking to meet, and he responds "My office hours are from X:00-Y:00, or I'm free at Z:00." You:online survey
Even if we're talking about a quantum physics class, faculty are classical entities for all practical purposes, so you can only choose one answer.
jdupuis | September 9, 2010That's the question Eugene Wallingford asks in a recent post at his blog, Knowing and Doing.
If you studied computer science, did your undergrad alma mater or your graduate school have a CS culture? Did any of your professors offer a coherent picture of CS as a serious intellectual discipline, worthy of study independent of specific technologies and languages?
In graduate school, my advisor and I talked philosophically about CS, artificial intelligence, and knowledge in a way that stoked my interest in computing as a coherent discipline. A few of my colleagues shared our interests, but many…
drorzel | September 9, 2010Over at EphBlog, Stephen O'Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there's some good general advice in there as well.
I particularly liked his story about the professor who saved his college career:
Looking back, it's borderline shocking that I recovered as much as I did academically, given how horrifying my grades were that first year. And, it must be said, my first semester as a sophomore. But while I accept full responsibility for getting…
drorzel | September 9, 2010Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important.
I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…
gregladen | September 8, 2010Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
gregladen | September 8, 2010It happens. A very large percentage of life science teachers are creationists. In Minnesota, and Minnesota is not that unusual, about half the population or more are creationists, but among life science teachers, that number is reduced by almost one half. In other words, one in three life science teachers are creationists, although most, one would hope, only barely so.
This does not mean that creationism is being taught in the classroom. Some, perhaps many, life science teachers who are creationists know to not teach creationism in the classroom. But I find it difficult to believe that…
drorzel | September 8, 2010The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment:
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers -- all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who…
drorzel | September 3, 2010Via Thoreau, a story at Free Range Kids about "zero tolerance" policy run amok, this time from someone who moved to the US as a kid and ran up against the modern school culture in a bad way:
Once again, I came from a culture where you were made fun of if you forgot your pocket knife on a school trip. Then I entered a post-Columbine/Zero Tolerance hell. I hadn't used or even removed my knife from my bag while in school, but I did use it to cut a twig on my way home from school one day, and was apparently seen by one of my classmates. The next day, I was called into the principal's office where…