{"id":9176,"date":"2014-02-28T08:36:31","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T13:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9176"},"modified":"2014-02-28T08:36:31","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T13:36:31","slug":"friday-miscellany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/02\/28\/friday-miscellany\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got book edits this week, gave an exam on Thursday, and pre-registration for our spring term classes is just beginning, so I have a parade of students begging to get into this course or that one to deal with. So I have no more time for detailed blogging, but will do a bit of tab-clearing to end the week.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/xykademiqz.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/21\/bimodal\/\">This piece about bimodal exams<\/a> resonated well with my experiences in intro classes. I see a lot of the same thing, though with less statistical power, given that our maximum class size is 18. But in general, the &#8220;well-prepared students are bored, poorly-prepared students hopelessly lost&#8221; thing is universal. The tricks mentioned for trying to deal with the issue are likewise very general&#8211; I try to throw a question or a sub-part of a question on exams that will stretch the good students. The trick is doing that without having it completely destroy the weak students. Maybe I should start marking the exam questions with levels of difficulty&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Adam &#8220;2footgiraffe&#8221; Taylor is getting evangelical about <a href=\"http:\/\/2footgiraffe.wordpress.com\/2013\/02\/01\/introducing-twitter-to-educators-and-scienctists\/\">Twitter<\/a>, and specifically <a href=\"http:\/\/2footgiraffe.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/27\/the-easiest-out-reach-you-will-ever-do\/\">his monthly student Twitter chat<\/a>. I kind of go back and forth about Twitter; on the one hand, it&#8217;s useful for connecting with scientists and educators I probably wouldn&#8217;t reach otherwise. On the other, the character limit makes it absolutely horrible for discussing anything requiring the slightest bit of nuance. And there&#8217;s a sort of middle-school social dynamic to a lot of Twitter communities that I waffle between kind of enjoying and finding deeply troubling. So, you know, Twitter. Yeah.<\/li>\n<li>This <a href=\"http:\/\/theconversation.com\/explainer-gravity-5256\">article about teaching general relativity to 11-year-olds<\/a> was interesting. Also, relevant to my interests (one of the many ideas I have kicking around but can&#8217;t do anything with yet is a picture book introducing quantum to little kids&#8230;). I&#8217;m not sure I entirely buy it as a realistic model for education, but it sounds like a cool outreach activity.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve had this <a href=\"http:\/\/gravityandlevity.wordpress.com\/2013\/04\/24\/the-lamb-shift\/\">no-math explanation of the Lamb shift<\/a> open in a tab for months, and keep saying &#8220;I should write about that,&#8221; but not having time. So here&#8217;s a link. Go read it, it&#8217;s good stuff.<\/li>\n<li>Likewise this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2013\/12\/fitting-and-overfitting-data.html\">3 Quarks Daily post on fitting and overfitting of data<\/a>. Excellent stuff that I never quite have time to discuss in detail.<\/li>\n<li>The TL;DR version of this <a href=\"http:\/\/tenureshewrote.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/27\/the-good-the-meh-and-the-ugly-of-pre-tenure-service\/\">post giving advice on doing &#8220;service&#8221; activity before tenure<\/a>: Unless you find it rewarding in some other way, don&#8217;t. Also applies post-tenure.<\/li>\n<li>This <a href=\"http:\/\/feministphilosophers.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/26\/a-few-thoughts-on-avoiding-avoidance\/\">post on harassment and compassion<\/a> was interesting. I don&#8217;t have anything particularly coherent to say about it, but it&#8217;s an angle I hadn&#8217;t heard discussed before.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that ought to be enough links to prove a point of some sort. So here&#8217;s a video of the kids being silly:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xOiBFA-Blfg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>We have not one, not two, but three little-kid birthday parties to go to this weekend, plus Kate is away Saturday night. Whee!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got book edits this week, gave an exam on Thursday, and pre-registration for our spring term classes is just beginning, so I have a parade of students begging to get into this course or that one to deal with. So I have no more time for detailed blogging, but will do a bit of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/02\/28\/friday-miscellany\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Friday Miscellany<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,21,2,7,28,37,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-links_dump","category-personal","category-physics","category-politics","category-pop_culture","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}