teaching
jane | August 18, 2008I have had two experiences in quick succession that have made me seriously wonder what kind of reading education kids these days are getting.
(Jeez, did I just go over into old geezer territory? I think that's the first time I've used the phrase "kids these days" in a blog post. Next I'll be telling people to get off my lawn...)
(Note: for simplicity in telling the stories, I'm just going to go with "him"/"he" to avoid the whole him/her s/he awkwardness.)
In the first case, a student is helping me get materials ready for one of my classes. This involves setting up a particular piece of…
jane | August 13, 2008Typically, when I want to use a student's work that s/he handed in as an assignment for one of my classes in another context, I email the student to ask for his/her permission. For instance, sometimes I want to use a student's assignment as an example of a particularly well-done assignment, or to illustrate a particular point in lecture, or even just to provide some debugging practice to students. I tend to do this as a courtesy, for sure, but also because frankly, I have no idea what the "rules" are concerning the ownership of student assignments for a course taught by me.
I'm currently…
sporte | August 11, 2008The first lab mouse I touched had soft white fur and a light pink tail. It looked cute enough to snuggle and take home as a pet and I was smitten. I slipped my hand into the cage, thinking the mouse would respond like my pet gerbils or my brother's pet rat. As my hand closed around its belly, that sweet little mouse sunk its teeth deep in my thumb. I screamed and shook my hand, smashing the mouse on the cement floor and killing it in an instant.
It's been many years now since I've been doing anything with mice or rats. There's much more oversight these days, as DrugMonkey has been…
sciencewoman | August 7, 2008
Dear ScienceWoman,
I am starting a career as a teacher and would very much like to enroll in a masters specializing in teaching high school science. I am wondering if you could help direct me to some grants or incentives that are geared towards encouraging women to pursue graduate teaching degrees in these areas. Any help you could give me would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Future Teacher
P.S. I'd also like to stay in Texas if possible.
Dear Future,
That's fabulous that you want to be a high school science teacher. We need lots more enthusiastic and knowledgable science…
sporte | August 6, 2008This the third part of case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this last part, we use the results from an automated comparison program to determine if the students cloned any genes at all and, if so, which genes were cloned. (You can also read part I and part II.)
Did they clone or not clone? That is the question.
But first, we have to answer a different question about which parts of their reads are usable and which parts are not. (A read is the sequence of bases obtained from a chromatogram file.)
How does our data get…
sporte | August 5, 2008start all over again.
MDRNA Inc., a Puget Sound area company formerly known as Nastech, announced on Monday that they'd be laying off 23 people including their president and chief business officer. This might not sound like a lot, but according to Joseph Tartakoff, from the Seattle PI, this brings the total number of layoffs up to 145 since November.
These events present a challenge to those of us who teach in biotech programs or biotech-related fields. Nastech, the predecessor to MDRNA had been around for over 20 years. Who would expect a 20+ year company to shed three quarters of it's…
jane | August 4, 2008I'm teaching an intermediate-level class in the fall that I've taught a few times before with varying levels of success. I've taught it enough times that it's time to do some tweaking, and I find that I'm faced with a very interesting dilemma. In a nutshell, the dilemma is this: which thing, or things, do I cut to make room for Potentially Very Cool But Untested Module, or should I even incorporate Untested Module in the first place?
For pseudonymity's sake, let's say the course is Ice Cream Construction. The course covers the building blocks of ice cream, the ice cream making process,…
pontiff | August 4, 2008Michael Nielsen has a nice essay up explaining Why the world needs quantum mechanics:
Conventional wisdom holds that quantum mechanics is hard to learn. This is more or less correct, although often overstated. However, the necessity of abandoning conventional ways of thinking about the world, and finding a radically new way - quantum mechanics - can be understood by any intelligent person willing to spend some time concentrating hard. Conveying that understanding is the purpose of this essay.
For a good explanation of Bell inequalities, jump to Michael's essay.
At the end of the article,…
sciencewoman | July 29, 2008Even though fall classes won't start for a few more weeks, we are already being asked to submit our spring schedules. I'll be teaching two classes, each with labs, that I will have previously taught. It's a little daunting to think about so many hours in the classroom, but the reward will be a lighter load the following fall. (And I know that some of you routinely teach four classes, so that helps keep it in perspective.)
But, oh experienced teachers and schedule gurus, how shall I arrange my classes?
Here's my current thinking:
How would you arrange it? Will Wednesday just about kill me?…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2008tags: peeponaut, astropeep, marshmallow peeps, science, space travel, astronomy, Adler Planetarium
Astropeep strength training program, part of the selection process for identifying those marshmallow peeps who had "the right fluff". These special peeps would be recruited as peeponauts who would be sent into space on a weather balloon.
Image: Adler Planetarium [larger view].
Like most scientists, I am a big fan of marshmallow peeps, which are my favorite experimental animals. So I was thrilled when a friend sent me an absolutely adorable story about a peeponaut -- that special marshmallow…
jane | July 17, 2008Where is my summer?? I thought once July hit and the busyness of June subsided that I'd actually have time to, you know, maybe, relax a bit. Ha! This has been a particularly busy week. The good news is that after today, things do get easier and calmer.
(Of course, playing Guitar Hero for 3 hours last night certainly didn't help matters much either. Good for the soul, yes. Good for the work and sleep schedules, not so much.)
So what have I been up to this week that's keeping me so busy?
After a few weeks of not being able to get to the unreviewed article (ok, so maybe, just maybe, I was…
sciencewoman | July 15, 2008This week I'm attending a workshop on pedagogy and I'm hearing lots of interesting ideas from people teaching really exciting and innovative courses. They are incorporating service learning, multi-week projects, location-centric courses, and intro courses for particular audiences (say, business majors). They are doing cool case studies, fun field activities, integrating current events, and designing real world applications. It's inspiring, and honestly, a little overwhelming. (And this is only the second day!)
Right now I'm contemplating revising my intro course, but I'm not sure when I'll be…
jane | July 10, 2008I've been doing some on-and-off thinking lately about teaching (summer is a great time for that, away from the pressure of the school year). One of the things I've specifically been thinking about is the idea of "transparency". I'm curious to hear what you, faithful readers, think/do in terms of transparency when you teach.
So, here's today's discussion question, for those of you who teach: How "transparent" are you in your teaching? Do you spell everything out for the students up-front, or do you save the explanations for "why did we just do this" until after the fact, allowing for…
kcontreary | June 24, 2008This is a bit old, but in case you haven't seen it...
A few weeks ago, Jake wrote a post about the importance of teaching during grad school. I couldn't agree more--some of my best experiences in grad school to date have been in front of a classroom of keen undergrads, their young minds yearning to be filled with the minutiae of microeconomic theory (or so I have convinced myself). I find it absolutely true that having to teach a concept cements it in my mind, and it is my fervent hope that a few of my students will at least consider becoming economists.
There is also, of course, the…
purepedantry | June 12, 2008Grad student Joel Corbo has a guest post at Cosmic Variance where he laments the lack of emphasis on teaching in physics PhD programs:
My relatively rosy view of physics education was shaken up not long after starting grad school at UC Berkeley (By the way, I don't want to single out Berkeley as particularly flawed, as I'm sure its problems are shared by virtually every physics department in the US to one extent or another. However, I can only write about what I know and this is where I am). Back in the cocoon of the MIT undergrad experience, I came to believe that physics was awesome for two…
sporte | June 9, 2008What are you learning in school?
xkcd has the inside track on the really important stuff.
pontiff | June 9, 2008Today is the final exam for the course I've been teaching this summer. So I need some reading material for when I'm not watching the students take their exam. Here are two fun ones I just downloaded (one via Alea):
arXiv:0803.3913:
The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers
Authors: Kieran Kelly, Przemyslaw Repetowicz, Seosamh macReamoinn
Abstract:The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed while…
sporte | June 1, 2008In part I, I wrote about my first semester of teaching on-line and talked about our challenges with technology. Blackboard had a database corruption event during finals week and I had all kinds of struggles with the Windows version of Microsoft Excel. Mike wrote and asked if I thought students should be working more with non-Microsoft software and what I thought the challenges would be in doing so.
I can answer with a totally unqualified "it depends."
First, I think knowing how to use a spread-sheet program is an advantage in many different kinds of fields and even in real-life, outside of…
sporte | May 28, 2008On-line courses were a still a new phenomenon when I was teaching full-time. Our school was pretty gung-ho about on-line education but many instructors were skeptical, some were still lamenting having to learn how to use a computer and losing the services that used to be provided by departmental secretaries. Other instructors simply distrusted the entire idea, seeing distance learning as the equivalent of an educational scam, a kind of "get rich quick scheme" that would allow the school to collect more tuition dollars without paying instructors.
I never did teach an on-line course during…