Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted “Here’s what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call “good enough”. I don’t want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my […]
Month: July 2011
Being Educated Is All About Half Guessing
Keeping the week’s unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest “kids these days” study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base: I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample […]
Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of “merit pay” programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those […]
Links for 2011-07-20
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education “This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges’ strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has […]
An Incomplete List of Pop-Culture References in How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog
I’ve been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references– quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I’m sure I’ve missed a few– many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read […]
Grade Inflation? Blame the Baby Boomers
A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people’s attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years: Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain […]
Links for 2011-07-19
Views: Perspective in Math and Art – Inside Higher Ed “As a mathematician, I expect that people at parties will tell me that they’re no good at math. I’m used to my fellow professors confessing their ignorance of my subject. I understand that many of my students think math is hard and scary. That’s why […]
Negotiations Break Down Again; Administration Warns of Possible Depression
(A white house, Niskayuna, NY) Negotiations stalled for the 125th consecutive minute, dashing early hopes that a compromise might be reached in the tense talks that have gripped this otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood. As the crisis enters its third hour, both sides reiterated their long-standing positions. “It’s 8:45pm, MythBusters is over, it’s time to go […]
What This Panel Needs Is an Editor: “Book Inflation” at Readercon
This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the “Oh, please,” phase of their oscillation, […]
Quantitative Comparisons Between Disciplines
As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer: This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing […]