Academics
pharyngula | July 27, 2007High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I'd hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how much will it help her in biology, chemistry, and physics? We'd expect that it should help the student perform better in college physics — she has a head start, after all — but one might naively hope that better mastery of a foundational science like physics would also help with chemistry and…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.
"He's a perfectly normal person," he said. "He's not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests with firearms."
Not a crazy guy?
The New Haven Register reported Tuesday on its Web site that the weapons seized from Light's residence included a .50-caliber rifle, AR-15 assault weapon, a Russian M-91 infantry rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, various pistols and bomb-making materials, including a large…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007As a major fan of Natalie Angier, I was well-disposed to favor The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — and overall, my opinion of the book is favorable. I'm afraid, though, that it's filling a very narrow niche and most of my readers here won't be interested in it…but some of you may find it just right.
As you might guess from the title, the premise of the book is a reaction to a peculiar snobbery of many of the educated elite. Science is mechanics; it's engineering; it's greasy hands and strange smells; it's a place of childish enthusiasms. It…
pharyngula | July 11, 2007They've got another article from some fuddy-duddy prof who doesn't like the 21st century. It seems to be nothing but a long whine about modern teaching technologies — it's rather pathetic, actually, but the Chronicle seems to have a fondness for running occasional articles from defensive, confused Luddites. Here's an example:
Besides using the computer more in my classroom, the experts tell me that another way to transform my teaching persona is to put more of my course materials online. I can create a course that's more user-friendly and appealing to today's students by incorporating more…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007The Nevada System of Higher Education wants to arm their faculty. That's insane. We have rare instances of students going on a shooting spree; I don't see how turning the classroom into a firefight is going to stop that, and I also have a suspicion that any homicidal maniacs will henceforth simply put "shoot the professor" first on their to-do list. The other concern: how often has this happened at your university?
Dishevelled, out-of-breath student bursts into the room in the middle of class — he overslept.
Angry student storms into your office, red in the face and furious about his exam.…
pharyngula | June 28, 2007Academia is a strange little world—we're happy about this news!
The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.
We're an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!
pharyngula | June 23, 2007The situation isn't at all funny—a female volleyball coach was made miserable and discriminated against because of her sexual preferences, and there seems to have been (and probably still is) a nasty culture of male privilege in Fresno State athletics—but this piece of testimony against the associate AD, Randy Welniak, was just icing on the cake.
The one that sticks out was when Randy took me behind closed doors and said he had just learned of a situation where he just found out why Lindy was such a bitch. That he just learned she not only was a lesbian. She was an atheist.
Uh-oh. Multiple…
pharyngula | June 18, 2007Apparently, you shouldn't name your daughter "Barbie" unless you want her to grow up to be an airhead. A study, reported in the Guardian, claims that names have a powerful influence on social expectations — they report a significant effect in lowering exam scores based on whether the student's name is classifiable as coming from a distinct ethnic/socioeconomic class, and further claim that the femininity of a name has a negative correlation with performance in math and science.
It's somewhat odd. For one thing, they calculated a femininity score for various names based on letter and sound…
pharyngula | June 14, 2007Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a new sociological study that shows a greater frequency of rejection of religion by young people who don't attend college. We college professors aren't responsible!
Percent of Young Adults Reporting Religious Declines, by Level of Education
Educational Attainment
Decline in Attending Services
Decline in Importance of Religion
Disaffiliation From Religion
Didn’t attend college
76.2%
23.7%
20.3%
Attended, but earned no degree
71.5%
16.3%
14.6%
Earned associate degree
60.3%
15.1%
14.4%
Earned at least a bachelor’s degree
59.2…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007Daniel Solove is going to be in big trouble at the next meeting of the secret teacher's cabal: he has revealed our favorite method of grading papers, and documented it with photos, no less.
pharyngula | June 5, 2007This is not fair. Writing a doctoral thesis on a blog? How about doing your masters thesis on a wiki? Don't these people know you're supposed to suffer when writing a thesis?
I remember mine. There were months of tapping it out on an Apple II computer, and occasionally printing it out on the clumsy old dot-matrix printer so my advisor could rip into it and rearrange everything. Then, finally, I'd hook the computer up to the daisy wheel printer the department owned, and print out the good "final" copy for my committee—this had to be done late at night, because it took about 6 hours to print…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007Oh, come on. This is no surprise. Public schools mostly take religion for granted—it's rife in athletics, in particular, but many of the ceremonies have prayers and ministers involved—so when a valedictorian speech damns her godless classmates to hell, it's just a reflection of the culture.
The valedictorian's speech was about Jesus Christ and suggested those who don't believe would go to hell.
"I want to tell you that Jesus Christ can give you eternal life in heaven," Spaulding said before the crowd. "If we die with that sin on our souls, we will immediately be pulled down to hell to pay…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007People keep keep interviewing me for articles on academic blogging. I'm always giving the same answers. I've got to start getting more creative—next time, I'm going to have to say something about cults, groupies, and pie.
pharyngula | May 28, 2007Did you know that nature is a nice place, a kind of untamed Cute Overload where nobody ever gets an owie, there are no diseases or parasites, and everyone eats tofu? That seems to be what one school administrator in Florida believes, anyway.
A class was studying reptiles and a student brought in his pet boa. Somehow it was suggested that anyone who was interested could watch the boa being fed its usual meal: a live rabbit. The teacher arranged for the feeding to be held after school hours and attendance was voluntary. No one had to be there who didn't want to be there. According to the story…
pharyngula | May 27, 2007This is an ugly story, and it's ugly on both sides. First, rude students make a nasty, mocking video of one of their teachers and post it to YouTube, which is bad enough; these are kids who definitely need some discipline. But then the school district suspends the students for 40 days in punishment. Forty days is almost a quarter of the school year. They deserved a harsh response, but kicking them out of school just deprives them of the education they need, and they're probably going to regard it as a vacation.
I must confess, though, that what first caught my eye about the story is that it's…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they're going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
Never mind that the two are in completely different departments, with very different standards. Never mind that the…
pharyngula | May 14, 2007I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I'm all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I've gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I'm still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you other scientists out there to sign up, some comprehension will begin to gel for me.
Attila Csordas has a nice writeup of the whole magilla which helps. I'm giving it a shot, anyway.
I already notice it lacks those bosomy young ladies in skimpy clothing that always greet me on MySpace, and the…
pharyngula | May 14, 2007I just finished grading all the genetics final exams, and submitted final grades to the registrar!
I've just got two independent study papers that need to be turned in and graded, and then I will be completely done.
sciencetolife | May 14, 2007 There is a need for nurses with higher degrees to serve as faculty and train the future generation of nurses. A study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) examined the availability of nursing faculty in North Carolina. It found that nurses are not pursuing advanced degrees in sufficient number to meet the demands for nurses in faculty and advanced practice roles. According to the paper schools of nursing cite a lack of qualified nursing faculty as a primary barrier to program expansion.
The study followed a total of over 8,000 nurse graduates from North…
pharyngula | May 14, 2007Les Lane has a summary of Gonzalez's unfortunate tenure situation. To nudge your memory, Guillermo Gonzalez is the Discovery Institute fellow who was working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University; he was recently denied tenure there and is protesting the decision.
It's an awkward position, but very common — academia isn't an easy career to break into. It also doesn't help that Gonzalez fails to understand the process.
"I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," he said.
It doesn't work that way. There aren't a series of merit badges or box top…