A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you… Continue reading Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context
Category: Academia
Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of… Continue reading Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement”
A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau’s Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn’t Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can’t link to, basically taking the view that people are… Continue reading The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement”
Social Media Are Not Evenly Distributed
Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a “Social Media” section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop. I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly… Continue reading Social Media Are Not Evenly Distributed
Academic Poll: Pronoun Trouble
I’ve moved on to the second of three academic writing projects I wanted to work on this summer (yes, I know I’m rapidly running out of summer…), which is a sort of review article on which I will be the only author. This creates an awkward situation in the introductory material, because it just feels… Continue reading Academic Poll: Pronoun Trouble
What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?
Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It’s reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the… Continue reading What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?
The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC: It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society. It’s a nice line, but it doesn’t entirely make sense. When I hear the term “grass-roots movement,” I think of something that… Continue reading The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Academic Poll: Out of Cite
I’m sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don’t usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll: A… Continue reading Academic Poll: Out of Cite
Resources for Physics Teaching
I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn’t helping. By being very helpful– he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too. For the specific Matter… Continue reading Resources for Physics Teaching
Proposed New Rule
A well-known joke is “Rule 34” saying that anything that exists will have porn about it on the Internet. The introduction to this Inside Higher Ed piece about anti-law-school blogs reminds me that we probably need a higher-numbered rule stating that every field of human endeavor will also produce a bunch of blogs about how… Continue reading Proposed New Rule