Stop Nodding!

Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod: I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, “do you understand that?”, it’s not a test. It’s not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it’s not the… Continue reading Stop Nodding!

Great Moments in Student Course Evaluations

One of my least favorite end-of-term rituals for faculty is the dreaded student course evaluations. These have two components: the numerical bubble-sheet evaluations, which provide the pseudo-quantitatvie evaluation used to compare courses, and written responses to a half-dozen very general questions. The latter are at least potentially more useful, particularly when the standard questions are… Continue reading Great Moments in Student Course Evaluations

The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks

A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes. The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from… Continue reading The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks

Class Implications of the Brain Drain

Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt: Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don’t totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and… Continue reading Class Implications of the Brain Drain

Step One: Change Disciplines

Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I’ll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows… Continue reading Step One: Change Disciplines

Lecture Notes Dump

Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff… Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement. Lecture 12: EPR “paradox,” introduction to Local Hidden Variables. Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell’s Theorem/ Bell’s Inequalities. Lecture 14: Bell’s Inequality experiments. Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump