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“Next January, Bard’s science and math faculty – along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions — will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500 of the college’s freshmen, and ungraded, Botstein hopes it will become similarly entrenched as a landmark of students’ first year at Bard.
“We’ll give young people in their first year of college a real understanding of what science does, what it’s about,” he says, “rather than waiting for the senior year for students to fulfill a requirement.””
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“I had a good discussion last week with a well-meaning professor who wanted to know why the minimum enrollment to run a section is higher than the break-even cost of paying an adjunct.
Her position was that another section doesn’t add much marginal cost, and as long as you’ve paid the adjunct, what’s the problem?
It was one of those “where you stand depends on where you sit” moments. I’ll make it a multiple choice.”
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“Authors, I understand you have pressure to promote. I know you want to sell a million copies. I know you wake up every day with anxiety: Am I going to sell through? What if I get a bad review? Am I not doing enough? But often, in these times of panic, you end up over-promoting and becoming a nuisance and, in the end, lose potential readers.”
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“There’s a question that frequently gets asked on my posts here, and it’s: “Where should I start with [that writer you just mentioned]?” I’ve answered it more than once for some writers when I’ve written about a lot of their books. It seems that it might be worth listing good places to start. I’m going to do a series of posts covering this in alphabetical order, and I’d like you to add authors I don’t mention, with good places to start, but only as I reach the right letter, to keep it easy for people to find in future. Oh, and as always feel free to argue if you disagree with me.”
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“One of the best kept secrets of science is that scientists are in fact mere mortals. They have their faults, and deficiencies just like the rest of us. You don’t need anything special to do science, all you need is a sense of curiosity and wonder, and the resolve to spend some time working at it. The more time you work at it, the better you get.”