Teaching and Learning

There are two features of science that I think a lot of people (myself included) find attractive. One is that scientific representations of the world (theories and other theory-like things) give you powerful ways to organize lots of diverse phenomena and to find what unifies them. They get you explanatory principles that you can apply to different situations, set-ups, or critters. The other is the empirical basis of much of our knowledge: by pointing your sense organs (and your mind) at a particular piece of the world, you can learn something about how that bit behaves, or about how it's…
My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University's lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we're going back in. First, here's the update, with thanks to my email correspondent: End of December: they approved our protocols and…
News from Inside Higher Ed: Apparently there's a movement afoot in U.S. colleges and universities to add math requirements and add "quantitative reasoning" content to non-mathematics courses. You might guess, from my post on the "who needs algebra" column, that I view this as a good thing. And you'd be right. From the IHE article: One of the first things students have to do upon setting foot on campus at Wellesley College is to take a quantitative reasoning assessment. Some questions, judging from past exams, are basic algebra, while others test a student's ability to apply numerical…
Chad says all the online academics are obligated to respond, somehow, to this New York Times piece on emails from students to professors. So, I shall. But, rather than digging into the details of the article itself, or worrying about the sample size upon which it is based, or the assertions by at least one of the professors interviewed that she was misrepresented, I'll just share some advice. This is based entirely on my email likes and dislikes, so take it with a grain of sodium chloride. Before emailing an urgent question to your professor, spend a moment or two making sure you are not…
I'm a little late to the party on the Richard Cohen "who needs algebra anyway?" column in the Washington Post. As others have pointed out, the column itself is fairly lame. Piling on at this point would be a little mean. Instead of piling on, I would like to follow the admirable example set at Science, Shrimp, and Grits by trying to think a little about the root causes behind this algebra-hating, and the situation of the particular student who inspired Cohen's column. I don't have a complete diagnosis of the problem, but there are some questions that need to be asked here. 1. Why can't…
I haven't been posting as much here this week as I'd like because I've been grading papers. You academic types know how much fun that is. But, the batch of papers I just finished with was reasonably enjoyable -- clear, persuasive, and containing some impressive insights. The question on the table was whether, by dint of society's investment in the training of scientists, people so trained might have an obligation to do scientific research. This is an especially relevant question for my students: many of them are, as we speak, being educated as scientists with public monies, and all of them…