I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke’s post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious: At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration… Continue reading The Uneasy Balance of Residential Academia
Category: Education
Scientific Commuting: Some Answers to “How Much Faster?”
So, the previous post poses a physics question based on some previous fooling around with modeling my commute: A car starts from rest at the beginning of a straight 1km course, accelerates up to some speed, cruises at constant speed for a while, then decelerates to a stop at the end of the course. A… Continue reading Scientific Commuting: Some Answers to “How Much Faster?”
Scientific Commuting: How Much Faster?
Back in the summer, I did a post mathematically comparing two routes to campus, one with a small number of traffic lights, the other with a larger number of stop signs, and looked at which would be faster. Later on, I did the experiment, too.) Having spent a bunch of time on this, I was… Continue reading Scientific Commuting: How Much Faster?
It’s Not Finished, It’s Just Done
There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time: A lack of confidence in one’s abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by… Continue reading It’s Not Finished, It’s Just Done
How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012
My timekeeping course this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar,” which means it’s supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt… Continue reading How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012
Final Notes on a Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
We’re in the home stretch of this term, and it has become clear that I won’t actually be using the toy model of the arrow of time I’ve talked about in the past in my timekeeping class this term. These things happen. Having spent a not-insignificant amount of time playing with the thing, though, I… Continue reading Final Notes on a Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
Most Difficult Course?
Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics: You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course at your university? Or even more broadly, how would one… Continue reading Most Difficult Course?
An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory
As I’ve said a bazillion times already this term, I’m teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up… Continue reading An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04
Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven’t actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I’ve really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class. In the approximately chronological ordering of the… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04
A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would’ve banged out very quickly. I’m not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly… Continue reading A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time