Teaching and Learning
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006Uncle Fishy and RMD pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a last-minute extra assignment (due today) for students enrolled in "Critical Issues in Journalism" at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not an extra credit assignment, mind you -- an extra assignment they all get to do just to pass the course, on account of the fact that the 200+ students enrolled in the class apparently had some trouble handling the exam without cheating:
...a Web site, RadarOnline.com, posted an account, attributed to an unidentified source, that said the Columbia Graduate…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2006It started when someone asked Dr. B. for advice about starting a Ph.D. program with three kids in tow. Since then, the question has been bouncing around the academic blogosphere, with posts you should read at Academom and Geeky Mom. Although this is absolutely the worst time in the semester for me to fire on all cyliders with this one, regular readers know that I've shared my own experiences in this area, so I can't stay completely out of it.
A brief recap of the current conversation:
Dr. B. notes the many ways graduate programs set things up that are easier for the childless than the child…
jstemwedel | November 30, 2006On the heels of my post wondering where the science is in elementary school, I'm interested in your sense of how things stand now and what, if anything, you think we should do about the situation. Draw on your experience as a former (or current) student, a parent, an educator (including educating future teachers), a working scientist, or whatever.
The possibilities that have been raised so far seem to be:
There is not now, and will not be any time soon, anything like a coherent and inspiring elementary school science curriculum because people who go into elementary education lack the…
jstemwedel | November 28, 2006My better half has been a frequent classroom volunteer leading science lessons in younger offspring's kindergarten class. This has made it fairly apparent to us that there's very little of what either of us would identify as science in these lessons.
Most recently, the science lesson centered on nocturnal animals. However, the activity the kids did was primarily a matter of drawing and coloring and cutting and affixing paper with glue. There was a wee bit of classification in here (glue the nocturnal animals on one page and the diurnal animals on the other), but significantly less…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2006On the way home, I heard a story on NPR about a study done at UC Berkeley about the "performance gap" between black kids and white kids in the public schools. I can't say much about the details of the report -- it comes out tomorrow -- but one of the people interviewed for the story, Ross Wiener of The Education Trust, noted a finding in this general area of research that screams out for an explanation.
The finding: while white students tend to lose ground during summer vacation (at least with respect to the sorts of performance easily measured with standardized tests and similar assessment…
jstemwedel | November 10, 2006This is not a "cute" story. It's an infuriating story about a school climate gone mad. And, although I suspect an organizational psychologist could give a nuanced analysis of the situation, that's not my area of expertise, so I'm just going to tell the story.
Elder offspring was sent to the Vice Principal's office yesterday. When the office called Dr. Free-Ride's better half about the incident, the crime they reported was "saying the B-word".
I should say right now, if you're in earshot of an elementary or secondary school as you're reading this post, please don't read it out loud! I…
jstemwedel | October 26, 2006We're just past the midpoint of National Chemistry Week, so I thought I'd share a "classic" post (from last year's National Chemistry Week) about how studying chemistry can nourish one's human yearnings.
What's so great about chemistry? Of course, if you're a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic -- something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents' card table.) But I suspect it's real charm for students, at…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2006There is a bunch of interesting stuff to read on the subject of teaching, learning, and being part of an academic department right now. Here are a few links I think deserve your attention:
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study (PDF) whose results suggest that married grad students may do better than single grad students at completing their Ph.D.s, publishing while in school, and landing tenure-track jobs. Interestingly, the advantage is greater for married male graduate students than for married female graduate students, and domestic partnership seem to confer less advantage here than…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2006Adventures in Ethics and Science field operative RMD alerted me to a recent article in the New York Times (free registration required) about an ongoing debate on the use of online instruction for Advanced Placement science classes. The crux of the debate is not the value of online science classes per se, but whether such courses can accomplish the objectives of an AP science course if they don't include a traditional, hands-on laboratory component.
The debate is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gets to the question of what precisely an AP course is intended to do. Second, it…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2006Regular commenter Blair was kind enough to bring to my attention an article from The Globe and Mail, reporting research done at the University of British Columbia, that illustrates how what we think we know can have a real impact on what we can do:
Over three years, researchers gave 135 women tests similar to those used for graduate school entrance exams. Each woman was expected to perform a challenging math section, but not before reading an essay that dealt with gender difference in math.
Of the four essays, one argued there was no difference, one argued the difference was genetic and a…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2006Things have been busy here, but there are some interesting stories I've been watching that I thought I should mention (as well as the usual fodder for rants, and a cartoon series that might be funny, if it's not just seriously twisted):
A few atoms of element 118 have been created and detected by Russian scientists and scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Labs -- without any fabrication this time, which is good. However, the unofficial name of the new element (ununoctium, which is Latin for "one-one-eight"), needs some work. Yeah, the atoms of 118 lasted less than a microsecond, but…
jstemwedel | October 12, 2006It's no Puzzle Fantastica #1, but it's what I have at the moment.
In a comment on my post about what I think the point of a college education is (or is not), Caledonian left this tantalizing comment:
I've noticed a fascinating trend among those people who have responded to this post favorably. Hopefully additional responses will reveal whether this pattern is genuine or spurious.
Of course, Caledonian isn't going to bias the data by telling us what the pattern is (at least, not until the data is all in). But now I can't help poring over the comments to try to discern just what pattern (or…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2006I started out thinking I was writing this as an open letter to my students, but it turns out I'm talking to you all, too.
* * * * *
I have very strong feelings about what the point of a college education should be. Maybe you do, too. It's entirely possible that we would disagree about this issue, or that you are so happy with your own picture of the point of a college education that you really have no interests in anyone else's.
That's fine. But if you're my student, certain things I get worked up about may strike you as mysterious if you don't know what I think this whole thing is aiming…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2006Disclaimer: Plagiarism is bad. A quick search for "plagiarism" on this blog will demonstrate that I've taken a clear stand against plagiarism.
That said, if one were, hypothetically, planning a little online-copy-and-paste plagiarism, and if one's instructor has earned a Ph.D., in Philosophy, from Stanford, one might reconsider using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the source of several uncited sentences.
There is a better-than-average chance that the instructor is familiar with SEP -- indeed, even with the specific entry you (hypothetically) are tempted to plunder.
Even if she's…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2006It's Monday, it's cold and overcast, and I'm grading papers. As it turns out, these are perfect conditions to make me grumpy.
Rather than wallow in it, though, I've decided to be proactive about trying to head off future grumpiness. My philosophy of science classes are about to embark on some exercises about scientific theory choice, for which they will be considering Ptolemaic and Copernican accounts of planetary motions. Having done these kind of exercises for many semesters, I know that there's a good chance I'll end up with stacks of papers that may make me howl in despair if I don't…
jstemwedel | September 1, 2006Since Julie blogged about a call to her home from a student who wanted to add her class, I thought I'd add a story of my own, from waaaay back:
I was in the second year of my chemistry graduate program, TAing the thermodynamics course for chem majors. One of the students in the class had been a friend of mine for five years -- we taught together at math camp. That was a little weird (grading someone with whom I was a professional equal only two summers earlier), but not impossible.
Her boyfriend was also taking the class. And he got the bright idea, the night before one of the problem sets…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges:
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I'm scheduled to teach six classes this term.
Me: Six?! While you're the chair?!!
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can't find enough part-timers to teach all the sections.
Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself?
CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can't not teach them.
Me: Yikes!
CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006Walking outside with a well-known local blogger:
WKLB: I never did take a chemistry course.
Me: Why not?
WKLB: I'm not good at memorizing stuff, and there's that whole big periodic table ...
Me: Hey, my memorization skills are pretty worthless, too. But in chemistry, you don't need them as much as you do in a field like biology.
WKLB: Really? You don't ever have to, like, write out the periodic table from memory?
Me: Hell no! The idea is to learn how to turn the periodic table into a device for predicting stuff about the different elements -- like a secret decoder ring. They always…
jstemwedel | August 4, 2006Because some people are on record as questioning my ability to turn any conversation into a conversation about science:
"What do pirates have to do with science?"
What don't pirates have to do with science?
Pirates! by Giovanni Caviezel. Illustrated by Cristina Mesturini.
Here is a brief list of scientific issues the younger Free-Ride offspring and I discussed (in varying levels of detail) on our first reading of this board-book about pirates.
Why did pirates have to bring casks of drinking water with them when they were sailing on a sea of water? (And why is drinking salt water bad for…
jstemwedel | July 31, 2006I'm blogging again from the lovely Vienna Cafe in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the end of Day 2 of the BCCE. I gave my own talk this afternoon as part of symposium session on incorporating ethics in the chemistry curriculum (along with 5 other very interesting talks). I think it went well, but I always enjoy conferences more when I've finished my presenting and can be an undistracted audience for the other presentations.
Below the fold, some of the things I learned in today's various talks and events:
People who do their research in chemical education are often marginalized or ignored by…