Academics
pharyngula | August 19, 2006Surprise, surprise, surprise—private schools aren't better than public schools, and private schools run by conservative Christian organizations are the worst.
The federal Education Department reported Friday that, in reading and math, children attending public schools generally do as well as or better than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private-school children did better.
The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools in 2003, also found…
pharyngula | August 18, 2006Look at this chart: it purports to show the percentage of 'born-again' Christians who abandon their faith after attending various categories of colleges. My first thought was, "Good, now how can we get those numbers higher?"; I'm sure that most fundies feel what the author of the chart intended, absolute horror at the idea that sending kids to college is the equivalent of shipping them off to an eternity of hellfire.
But wait…the graph actually says nearly nothing at all about the state of secularism in our universities. It's missing too much information, and it's been selectively skewed.…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006
Less than two weeks until classes begin again, and it's time to juggle syllabi, attend meetings and workshops, and scoot the kids off to school. I'm making another airport run tomorrow to pick up Skatje, whose vacation is ending. Next week, I get to deposit Connlann back in Madison (I didn't do the traditional knife fight last year, but I like Bérubé's idea of just booting him out the car door during a rolling stop—could I catch up on tradition if I then throw a bunch of knives after him?) This week I've got a division meeting, various campus-wide events, and next week it's the faculty…
pharyngula | July 22, 2006Georgetown College in Kentucky has ended its affiliation with the Southern Baptists after the Baptists tried to dictate that a new hire be a biblical literalist. The Baptists wanted nonsense like this:
"You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed," Dr. York said.
They also refused to allow the college to hire more than 25% non-Baptist faculty, and what may have really been the deal-breaker is that the university's enrollment is less than half Baptist…so insisting on strict adherence to the principles of a…
pharyngula | June 26, 2006A reader sent along this tempting job offer.
Job Title
General Education: Biology
Date
6/1/2006
Location
NATIONWIDE,
Min Salary
$2,100.00
Max Salary
$3,500.00
Job Type
Contract Part-Time
Job Description
BIOLOGY
Faculty compatible with a young-earth creationist philosophy to teach general education Biology courses.
It's from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, of course. Doesn't it make you want to jump up, drop whatever you're doing, and enter the exciting world of academia?
Aside from the demand that you teach biology as if the world were 6000 years old and with complete neglect…
pharyngula | June 18, 2006This is the very last time I'll be haranguing you about the scienceblogs fundraiser for schools—I've reached my goal of $2000 and doubled it! Reaching that goal was not enough to fund all of the projects, though, and there are four remaining that could use additional donations.
How can you resist this title? Evolution Is Science (fund this one) is a project looking to purchase replica hominid skulls for teaching low income kids in Chicago about evolution.
Here's another one I like: Real Specimens for Marine Science (fund this one). A Brooklyn school is looking to purchase aquaria and…
pharyngula | June 17, 2006Via Coturnix, here's an extremely depressing resignation letter from a public school teacher. I've seen this kind of thing a few times now: our problem is that the public schools are being treated as little factories, where you push kindergarten kids in at one end, and a dozen years later an adult with an education pops out. A high school diploma is regarded as an entitlement rather than an earned acknowledgment of ability, and what that means is that administrators tend to lower their standards and be extremely lenient about the behavior and skills of both students and faculty. Even where…
pharyngula | June 17, 2006I'm a bit stunned, people. I set up my DonorsChoose challenge to raise money for teachers with a goal of $2000, and we gave ourselves two weeks to raise that much. It's the second day of the fundraiser, and my readers have contributed $3,967.80, and fully funded 7 of the 12 proposals. Seriously, I'm feeling a bit like Dr Evil; I put my pinkie finger to the corner of my mouth, asked for the huge sum of two thousand dollars, and laughed maniacally at my arrogance…and you people shrugged your shoulders and just came through with the cash. I am impressed.
Thank you all very much.
If anyone else…
pharyngula | June 16, 2006We have received most excellent news from Seed: notice that challenge bar to the left, where I (and many other science bloggers) are asking you to donate to public education? We're doing great—my challenge has gathered over a thousand dollars so far, all to help out teachers and schoolkids—but now Seed has announced that they will match the total donations, up to $10,000. Double your money!
I've set a goal of raising $2000 for teachers, but I've got a dozen projects listed, and they're going to need more than that if all are to be fully funded. If I hit the goal, don't stop—you can keep…
pharyngula | June 15, 2006The scienceblogs crew is pushing a new charity for the next few weeks: an outfit called DonorsChoose, which collects funding requests from teachers and tries to match them up with people willing to pass along a few dollars. They have a long, long list of teachers looking for help in their classrooms; what we sciencebloggers have done is picked a subset of the requests that each of us like and grouped them into a challenge. My challenge contains a dozen science-related requests, and now my job is to beg you, the readers of Pharyngula, to take a look at them and if you can, kick in a few…
pharyngula | June 13, 2006…knowing that I've got Michael Bérubé defending academic freedom. I would dearly love to see him face-to-face with Horowitz, I think.
pharyngula | June 3, 2006Here's another sad story of hysteria used to water down science teaching. David Lapp does a simple and dramatic exercise, the ballistic pendulum experiment: fire a bullet into a block of wood, and from the masses of the two objects and the movement of wood, calculate the velocity of the bullet. That sounds pretty cool to me, and seems like a clever and dramatic way to get students to see the utility of simple math. Now, though, people are practically shrieking penal codes at the poor guy and whining about the terrible example he is setting, putting those poor school kids in danger.
"It's just…
pharyngula | May 24, 2006This story bugs me. It's a heartwarming tale of an inspiring teacher in an inner city school, who gets young kids motivated to learn science. Or does he?
These are elementary school kids, so they're young and maybe the most important thing is that some enthusiasm for the subject is instilled…but I also see a lot of simplistic thinking, a reliance on rote memorization of trivialities, and stuff that is just plain wrong. I have to disagree with the article: the kids are learning discipline, but they sure aren't learning science.
"Name one main kind of organism on Earth," White is saying to two…
pharyngula | May 20, 2006I have never had a student this stupid.
I'm not a Democrat! I don't think I should have to listen to this stuff!
pharyngula | May 20, 2006Right-wing crank Mark Steyn plagiarizes his way through another exercise in formulaic hackery. Alas, he will not have died a painful and horrible death by page 2.
I'd flunk him, too, and I'd also report him to the academic integrity committee. He'd probably complain that I'm out to get him, though.
pharyngula | May 14, 2006Here's a controversial topic to discuss, especially for a science blogger.
Science is overrated. This is my contention.
Last night in chat I evidently hit a nerve by (perhaps not so) casually suggesting that maybe it's not the end of the world that fewer and fewer American students are going into the sciences.
I read that first bit, and you may be shocked to learn that I'm willing to agree. There are some really good arguments to support the position. Science is hard, and it's true that the majority of people aren't going to be able to grasp it. We're oversubscribed and overextended right…
pharyngula | May 12, 2006For my students, at least—now I just have to buckle down and do a lot of grading over the next few days.
I made my poor Human Physiology1 students suffer through a long comprehensive exam. For a lark, my son Connlann2 took the final, and I have to publicly shame him. I don't normally publicize exam scores, but he got a mere 12.5%3 right! And he answered most of the questions that demanded a short answer with limericks. This is disgraceful; what do they teach students in those Wisconsin schools?4
1This is an upper level biology elective, packed full of pre-meds.
2Who is a freshman English/…
pharyngula | May 11, 2006His book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, apparently only contains 100 professors. While some might argue that this is an indicator of his sloppiness, I prefer to think of it as his offering of hope: those of us aren't in the book can now dream that we were supposed to be in there, and it was just an oversight that we were left out.
Repeat after me: I am the 101st Professor!
pharyngula | May 7, 2006If you've been wondering where I am today, I'm dyin' here, man. I've been grading freshman essays and quizzes all day long—my eyes are fiery red orbs and my brain is liquefying, but I've only gotten about halfway through the massive pile. This is going to be an agonizing week, I can tell…and it doesn't help that I'm going to have to pack up in the middle and zoom down to Madison to bring my son home for the summer break (maybe I should make him grade some of these papers…).
It also doesn't help that I put a trick question on the last quiz, one that was trivial to answer if the students had…