Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture: The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players […]
Month: January 2012
Ask Me Stuff
I’m running a little short on blogging inspiration lately. This is partly just a function of being busy– most of my time is spent frantically working on class prep or child maintenance, and another piece is the result of an inconvenient policy change. But I do feel like I’ve gotten into a bit of a […]
Links for 2012-01-11
Confessions of a Community College Dean: What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads? The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads? How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? – NYTimes.com he new Colbert […]
How to Read a Scientific Paper
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to […]
Links for 2012-01-10
The Active Class » Blog Archive » Do they do the reading? Helping students prepa… It’s a common complaint: Students don’t read the book before class. It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences. Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real […]
In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
In comments to Friday’s snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but […]
Weekend Family Blogging
Lots of people ask how SteelyKid is taking to having a younger sibling. Well, judge for yourself: This is during the Giants-Falcons playoff game this afternoon, but it’s pretty typical. When both SteelyKid and The Pip are home, she’s always running over to give him kisses and hugs and chatter at him. She’s super excited […]
Shameless Innumeracy
On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were […]
Links for 2012-01-06
Frontier experiments: Tough science : Nature News & Comment As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging — and just as potentially transformative. These often unsung researchers are willing to spend […]
On the Helpfulness of Numbers
Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this […]