Swans on Tea

The Cornell Note-taking Method
The Cornell method involves organizing your note-taking page into two regions, left and right. After writing the notes in the main, right-hand space, use the left-hand space to label each idea and detail with a key word or “cue.” When studying, use the cues to recall the material.

Stephanie did the research, and now has written an article about Why physics teachers should read blogs for The Physics Teacher, and here’s a link to the director’s cut in which she says a few nice things about me, and has several links, and links to links (but AFAICT no links to links about links, [...]

Cramming isn’t effective as a long-term learning method. Wow, you could knock me over with a big, fat history book.
Cramming: Not A Long-Term Study Strategy
So is cramming effective or not? A new study by UC–San Diego psychologists confirms what you may suspect deep down: The answer is no. Hurried memorization is a hopeless approach [...]

Interesting question over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings: How do you measure “quality” of education?
Part of it is the assumption that you get a better education at certain schools — the feedback loop of good schools having the ability to be selective in both the faculty and the students it accepts. And that’s probably [...]

Solving the H-1B Visa Issue
I think the solution to the problem is really simple. The US should grant permanent residency to anyone who graduates from a qualified four year university with a computer science degree. If you are concerned about people gaming the system, you can start out by limiting it to people [...]

Career Advice from Dr. Pion
Engineering and physics and programming are all hard work. Hard work can be fun, or it can be a drag. Money can make up for it being a drag, but many students who are just in it for the money will struggle with motivation when faced with the years of hard [...]

Corruption in textbook selection
A copy of the chapter in Richard Feyman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman in which he serves on a textbook selection committee, and some followup commentary.

Check out yesterday’s “PhD Comic” comparing the average salaries of University administrators, professors, grad students and football coaches.
Here’s a different graphic, focusing on the professors and coaches

(sort of my own mini cartoon-off, like between Randall Monroe and Farley Katz)

What Makes Science ‘Science’? (free registration may be required)
Apparently, they isn’t.
Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these [...]

Letting go of Newtonian mechanics
Conscientious physics teachers fear that without a thorough understanding of motion and forces, students will not be able to grasp subsequent topics in physics. This turns out to not be the case. Very little of the sky falls if you move on from mechanics before it’s fully fermented.

[I]f any physics teachers could tell me why *they* read blogs, that will help me write something to convince other physics teachers why this could be a good use of their precious time!
So if you teach physics, read physics blogs, but somehow don’t already read sciencegeekgirl, please go over and answer the question.
The two blogs [...]

Star Wars ABC