We had a colloquium talk yesterday from the very energetic Jessica Clark of the American Physical Society’s outreach office who talked about the many things that the APS does to bring positive physics experiences to a wide audience. It was a terrific talk, and brought to my attention a couple of programs I hadn’t heard… Continue reading Quest for Physics
Category: Education
NYC Trip: American Museum of Natural History
Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won’t be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus,… Continue reading NYC Trip: American Museum of Natural History
Interdisciplinarity
Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. “Interdisciplinary” is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn’t have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines,… Continue reading Interdisciplinarity
Familiarity and Lies-to-Children
One of the interesting things to come out of the switch to Matter & Interactions for our intro classes has been some discussion among my colleagues of how the books treat specific topics. A couple of people have raised concerns that the coverage of certain topics is different from the traditional presentation, in a way… Continue reading Familiarity and Lies-to-Children
Scientists Don’t Have to Do Everything Themselves
The Mad Biologist, like 80% of ScienceBlogs, is mad at Chris Mooney: Here’s the problem: you keep coming to evolutionary biologists with a problem (the perception of evolutionary biology), and you don’t have a solution. Do you think there’s a single evolutionary biologist who is happy with public opinion regarding evolution and creationism? But you’re… Continue reading Scientists Don’t Have to Do Everything Themselves
Physics to Finance
We had a talk yesterday at lunchtime from an alumnus who graduated with a physics degree, got a Ph.D. in Physics, did a couple of post-docs, and then decided to give academia a miss, and went to Wall Street where he’s been a financial analyst for the last 12 years. He talked, mostly for the… Continue reading Physics to Finance
Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood
Today’s episode of “Thrilling Tales of Physics Pedagogy” is brought to you through a comment by CCPhysicst who picks up on the implications of last week’s schedule post: You are ripping right along in that course. You do E and then B and only later get around to circuits? Yes and no. We are ripping… Continue reading Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood
Abstraction, Compartmentalization, and Education
Given the amount of time I’ve spent writing about academic issues this week, it’s only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work in the New York Times. Here’s Ed’s introduction: Except they don’t really work. A new… Continue reading Abstraction, Compartmentalization, and Education
The Japanese Directions Theory of Pedagogy
We had a great time on our visit to Japan last summer, but we had one incredibly frustrating experience, on our first day in Yokohama. We couldn’t bring three full weeks’ worth of clothing with us, so we brought a bit more than one week’s worth, and planned to get things cleaned there. The hotel… Continue reading The Japanese Directions Theory of Pedagogy
Loan Forgiveness for Public Service
As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School’s loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil… Continue reading Loan Forgiveness for Public Service