Much of LiveJournal has been sunk in a sea of suck for the last couple of weeks, but there’s a really interesting discussion of science education over at “Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat.” The first post has to do with the idea of “gatekeeping”: In my class today, a very brief discussion… Continue reading Gatekeeping vs. Bad Teaching
Category: Education
Editing and its Discontents
FemaleScienceProfessor posted a few days ago about “intense” editing of scholarly writing, and the different reactions students have to the experience: Although an individual student’s response to being intensely edited can vary with time and mood, there tend to be typical responses from each student. These typical responses are no doubt related to very deep… Continue reading Editing and its Discontents
Science Is What Makes Us Human
In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to “restore science to its rightful place.” Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science. Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said… Continue reading Science Is What Makes Us Human
Eating Without Pain in Grad School
Over at Neurotopia, the Evil Monkey is offering advice on how to earn extra money in graduate school: The key to more than mere culinary survival in graduate school is to volunteer for research studies. I took part in more projects than I could count. Some don’t pay squat. I once spent 2 hours a… Continue reading Eating Without Pain in Grad School
Course Report: General Relativity and Black-Body Radiation
The last course report covered the first six classes of the relativity unit. This week, we had the final two relativity lectures, and today was the start of quantum mechanics.
Falling Into Atomville
The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she’s worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and… Continue reading Falling Into Atomville
Academic Poll Results: Classroom Atmosphere
Here are the results of yesterday’s poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable: You can also see the results… Continue reading Academic Poll Results: Classroom Atmosphere
Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it’s a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics– Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field… Continue reading Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
Course Report: Modern Physics
Back in the “Uncomfortable Questions” thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I’m teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend’s bout with norovirus kind of got in the way… I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on… Continue reading Course Report: Modern Physics
Closed Notebook Science
Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him: My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica’s notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important “working” details of my day are recorded on… Continue reading Closed Notebook Science