Shut up and listen to your students
Are conventional lectures the best method of teaching scientific concepts? After all, we’ve been using the same lecture model for hundreds of years —...
Category: Education
Writing Concisely, for Dummies
Write like this.
Making Darwin UnComfortable
Evangelical minister Ray Comfort recently put out a “150th Anniversary Edition” of On the Origin of Species, with a Special Introduction attacking D...
The Insanity
You can tell there’s something wrong with our system of keeping GPAs based on class average — i.e. out of 100 instead of out of the 4-point scale &#...
Textbooks suck
Today I was looking through my introductory calculus textbook* for no particular reason. Well, I say introductory, but I think that’s a particularly bad c...
Bored Students: Unite
I’ve often blogged (click the words to see my previous posts) about education in the past. As I am a high school student, it’s a topic that’s ...
Going Gradeless
I’ve talked to quite a few people who agree that high school students focus too much on grades and too little on the actual learning — that students...
Literary Analysis: Metaphysics?
Science is limited by what scientists are capable of measuring. Our understanding of reality can only reach as far as our best experiments. If you were to ask a...
P2P Learning
I think education needs to take a hint from the Internet. Peer-to-peer communication, using protocols like BitTorrent, forms a significant share of all of the t...
Why People Believe Weird Things, Redux
Michael Shermer wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, which I own and have read se...