Category: Education

PowerPoint Is a Tool

The dark side of writing on the board. From QucikMeme.

Over at NPR, Adam Frank has an ode to the use of chalk for teaching science, including a bit of warm fuzzy nostalgia: I have powerful memories of tracking through derivations presented in class when I was a student. When done well, they pinned my attention down. The act of copying what was appearing on… Continue reading PowerPoint Is a Tool

Education Is Chaotic

While I’m quoting other people saying smart things, Timothy Burke has another great post on the failures of economic models of higher education There is a lot of information that you could acquire about courses or about colleges that you could reasonably use to assemble a decision matrix. What size is the class or the… Continue reading Education Is Chaotic

Admissions and Hiring: Faculty Are Students in a Funhouse Mirror

In one of those Information Supercollider moments, two very different articles crossed in my social media feeds, and suddenly seemed to be related. The first was this New York Post piece by a college essay consultant: Finally, after 15 or so years of parents managing every variable, there comes the time when a student is… Continue reading Admissions and Hiring: Faculty Are Students in a Funhouse Mirror

Physics Research Survey and Contest

One of my colleagues at Union is doing a physics education research project with a summer student, and is using an online survey to collect data. Obviously, the more people respond to the survey, the more scientific it becomes (subject to the limitations imposed by relying on self-selected Internet samples, of course), so I offered… Continue reading Physics Research Survey and Contest

On Mentoring

I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it’s something I’ve been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well, though, so… Continue reading On Mentoring

Photons Are Here to Stay, Deal With It

I spend a lot of time promoting Rhett Allain’s Dot Physics blog, enough that some people probably wonder if I get a cut of his royalties (I don’t). I’m going to take issue with his latest, though, because he’s decided to revive his quixotic campaign against photons, or at least teaching about photons early in… Continue reading Photons Are Here to Stay, Deal With It

Science Is Hard?: “A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout”

Screenshot of text from the paper discussed.

There was a brief flurry of discussion yesterday kicked off by Matt Yglesias posting People Don’t Major in Science—Because It’s Hard, which more or less says what the title would lead you to believe (either title, since he’s blogging for Slate where they like to give pages titles that don’t match the post titles…). This… Continue reading Science Is Hard?: “A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout”

Homework Is Evil?: “The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course”

Figure 1 from the arxiv preprint discussed in the text

One of the perennial problems of teaching intro physics is getting students to do their homework, so I was very interested to see Andy Rundquist on Twitter post a link to a paper on the arxiv titled “How different incentives affect homework completion in introductory physics courses.” When I shared this with the rest of… Continue reading Homework Is Evil?: “The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course”

Explaining, Education, and Outreach

A couple of days ago, Alom Shaha posted on the new Physics Focus blog (by the way, there’s a new Physics Focus blog…) about his dissatisfaction with some popular books: I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas… Continue reading Explaining, Education, and Outreach