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!
Category: Education
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
Switching Into Research Mode: Priceless
By the numbers: Exams graded: 16 Mean exam grade: 64% Mean final grade for Physics 121: B- Papers assigned: 17 Papers received and graded: 16 Mean final grade for Physics 311: B+ Students receiving grades of Incomplete: 1 Large bottles of Scottish ale drunk while watching “Dr. Who”: 1 And another academic year is in… Continue reading Switching Into Research Mode: Priceless
How the Other Half Grades
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as… Continue reading How the Other Half Grades
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
A Day in the Life
Woke up, got out of bed Ran a comb across my head…
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
Uncertain Pop Quiz Results
We had 45 responses to yesterday’s poll/quiz question— thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count: How do you report your answer in a lab report? 0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s 3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s 18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s 21… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz Results