Category Archives: Education

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 — since before books were invented. We have professors concoct their own explanations of scientific concepts, deliver them by lecture, create their own diagrams on the chalkboard, and answer student questions. Surely …

February 16, 2012 – 8:52 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education, Science | Comments (4)

Writing Concisely, for Dummies

Write like this.

December 17, 2009 – 12:42 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education, Fun Stuff | Comments (0)

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 Darwin, the theory of evolution, and atheism. Yeah, big deal. It’s been all over the Internet lately. Well, as an assignment for one of my university courses, I wrote a nice report on …

December 3, 2009 – 7:21 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education, Religion, Science | Tagged | Comments (7)

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 — when I get annoyed that I have a 96 in a class. Stupid system.

January 26, 2009 – 10:07 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education | Tagged , | Comments (0)

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 choice of word. You see, it was clearly intended to be an introductory text, but it failed at that rather miserably. I’ll give an example. Here’s how the textbook introduces the …

November 19, 2008 – 8:35 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education, Math | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

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 rather close to my heart. I recently came across a like-minded blog post that spurred me into action. I’m a student: I can easily talk to dozens of …

August 18, 2008 – 8:45 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

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 aim to improve their numbers, not their understanding. A good example would be the high school students who take vast numbers of college-level classes not because they …

May 6, 2008 – 12:11 am | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education | Comments (6)

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 any physicist, they’d tell you that physics stops at what we can measure: beyond that, we reach metaphysics, the land of unfounded speculation about why physics works. …

April 15, 2008 – 8:04 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education | Tagged , | Comments (5)

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 traffic on the Internet. No longer is the Internet a simple client-server model — content can be shared from user to user. How does that relate to education? Well, teaching …

April 10, 2008 – 11:22 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education | Comments (2)

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 several times. I always find it fascinating, but recently I’ve been thinking about Shermer’s main point: why, in fact, people do believe weird things. Shermer’s point can be summed up …

March 27, 2008 – 11:30 pm | By Cap'n Refsmmat | Posted in Education, Science | Tagged , , | Comments (4)