Teaching and Learning

The younger Free-Ride offspring's third grade class is involved in some independent research about animals. Each student chose an animal (with no duplicates, as far as I can tell) and set off to find a nonfiction book about that animal to gather information for a written report and an oral report. The students also need to make a "stuffed animal" version of their chosen animal. Here's the younger Free-Ride offspring's: The younger Free-Ride offspring, being a very independent-minded child, executed this stuffed swordfish with no help whatsoever. Which, you know, would be great ... except…
One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don't feel like typing. Another is described in this brief video.
At the end of one of my class meetings today, one of the students noted that her professor for another of her courses this term died about a week ago. Not that anyone said out loud that this semester is what killed him. Anyway, a few other students asked her what was happening with that course to finish out the term. She said that the home department for the course was giving the students the benefit of the doubt and giving them all A's. (I don't know if this is for the final exam/project/whatever in that course, or for the final course grade. I suppose it depends on whether the deceased…
It's the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester. And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials. I have always thought I preferred the semester system to the quarter system, as academic calendars go -- a longer calendar giving you a more reasonable amount of time…
Let's say you're a college student. You have a class meeting today at which a short essay (about 400 words) is due. The essay counts for about 5% of your grade for the course. At that class meeting, your instructor will be lecturing on the reading assignment upon which that short essay is focused. The material from the reading assignment will likely appear on the final exam, which is only a few weeks away. The thing is, you're not quite done with the essay (which needs to be handed in by the end of the class meeting), and class time is rapidly approaching. Do you: Skip the lecture in…
Steinn apparently knows how to get me riled about wrong-headed middle school fundraising initiatives, since he nearly derailed my efforts to push through my stack of grading with his recent post about one such initiative. He quotes from a Raleigh News & Observer story: Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro... will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation. Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a "B" to an "A" on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade. Rosewood's principal…
Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading. In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I've assigned. Basically, it's a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author's view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It's also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper…
Today is the one week mark in our month-long drive with DonorsChoose to raise funds for public school classroom projects, and it is no surprise that ScienceBlogs readers have been generous in their support. As I write this post, the ScienceBlogs leaderboard indicates: Thirteen challenges mounted by Sb blogs or coalitions of Sb blogs, including a newly-added challenge from Abel Pharmboy. In the lead for most money raised so far, with $1,807, the Uncertain Principles Challenge. In the lead for most donors so far, with 35, Dr. Isis's challenge. The challenge that got the most recent donation is…
Oh joy, it's time to grade more papers! At the moment, in fact, I have two batches of papers (approximately 400 words each, approximately 100 papers per batch) to grade, since I hadn't finished marking the earlier ones before the next ones came due. And of course, owing to the piles of smoking rubble that constitute our budget at the state universities right now, there are no funds at present for graders. I've blogged before about my strategies for grading fairly and consistently without taking a million years to finish the job. I'm still more or less using these strategies. But today, I'm…
You already know that we're working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve (and who, owing to dismal state and local budgets, need our help more than ever). You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them). Of course, helping public school teachers deliver the education their students deserve is it's own reward, but that doesn't mean you might not want a little…
Around this corner of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public's scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children is are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding. In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact. During the month of October, a bunch of us ScienceBlogs bloggers will be participating in the annual…
The Free-Ride family got its copy of the new CD/DVD set Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants this week. The sprogs, who have been listening and watching, offer something kind of like a review. The first thing to note is that, on the DVD, you have a choice of going through the whole set of songs as a "show" with John Flansburg and John Linnell (animated, of course) providing little introductions that are both informative and humorous, or of selecting individual songs (without the intros) from an "A-O" menu and a "P-Z" menu. We tend to gravitate toward the alphabetical song menus, but…
Dr. Free-Ride's better half went to the Free-Ride offspring's school for Back to School Night earlier this week. (I stayed at home with the sprogs to oversee dinner and baths.) Dr. Free-Ride's better half reported back that the younger Free-Ride offspring's third grade teacher "doesn't believe in too much homework". ("She doesn't believe it's possible to assign too much homework?" I asked cautiously. "No, she doesn't believe an excess of homework is a good thing," my better half replied.) And, she supported her stance with a page she distributed to parents summarizing recent educational…
In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning. (At the very least, Semmelweis is discussed in no fewer than three of the readings, by three separate authors, assigned for the course.) But this raises the question: what else belongs on the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning? Given…
The Free-Ride offspring just kicked off a new school year. The start of school in these parts means a long list of supplies to find -- stuff you'd expect, like crayons, pencils, binders and binder paper, scissors, and glue sticks, plus stuff for general classroom use like tissues, had sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, paper towel, and copier paper. The tighter the school's budget, the more items get added to the "voluntary donations" list. (And we've heard tell that the donations aren't always voluntary. If you don't get crayons, your kid goes through the school year without crayons. This…
The other day, it occurred to me that I have a goodly number of friends who have been in Ph.D. programs (and may still be "in" the program in some more or less official way), and who have more or less finished their graduate research, but who haven't managed to get their dissertations written. (I'm not going to name names; you know who you are.) In this post, I want to offer these friends (and others in this situation) encouragement to get that dissertation written! Yes, I know, you have your reasons for not finishing. Yes, I know writing a dissertation can feel like the hardest thing ever…
The Colorado Springs Gazette discovered that a summer intern in their newsroom published articles with plagiarized passages. The editor of the paper, Jeff Thomas, deemed this plagiarism a breach of the paper's trust with the public: [R]eporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the [New York] Times, as is required when…
This just came up in a plenary session I'm attending, looking at how best to convey the nature of science in K-12 science education (roughly ages 5-18). It's not really a question about the content of the instruction, which people here seem pretty comfortable saying should include stuff about scientific methodology and critical testing, analysis and interpretation of data, hypothesis and prediction, what kind of certainty science can achieve, and so forth. Rather, it's a question about how that content is organized and framed. It was proposed by one of the people in the room that an explicit…
Dr. Isis reports that faculty and staff at MRU will be taking unpaid "furlough" days to deal with a budget crisis: In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question... Cynically, I cannot help but think that the university…
In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics: When I was a graduate student, I studied the effects of many different chemicals on a particular cell type. I usually had anywhere from n=4 to n=9. I would look at the data set as a whole, and throw out the outlying points. For example, if I had 4 data points with the values 4.3, 4.2, 4.4, and 5.5, I would throw out the 5.5. Now that I am older, wiser, and more inclined to believe that I am fully capable of acquiring reproducible data, I am more reluctant to throw away the outlying data points. Unless…