Part of this past weekend’s meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for “mini-grants” of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn’t be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI’s of the proposals we decided to fund will […]
Tag: education
The Unexpected Leaping Ability of Bovines
I’m spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I’m avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don’t want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here’s a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid’s continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon: How does a cow jump over the moon? The father […]
The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette
I finished Jennifer Ouellette’s new book a few weeks ago, shortly after my trip to Alabama, but it’s taken me a long time to get around to reviewing it due to a combination of too much work and being a Bad Person. There’s finally a tiny break in the storm of work, though, so here’s […]
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we’re getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I’ve got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. These are probably less comprehensible that some of my […]
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Over 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 […]
Teacher Self Management vs. Going to the Dark Side
The 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 […]
We Must Become Litigious Assholes or the Litigious Assholes Win
Via 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 […]
Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series
There’s been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times’s investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using “Value Added Modeling,” which basically looks at how much a student’s scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and […]
Academic Poll: On the First Day…
While I’m still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it’s beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss […]
How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?
Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only […]