Category Archives: Education
Q and A
Over at Uncertain Principles there’s a link to topic that seems to have alighted on several vertices of the blogohedron. Deep, or at least deep-sounding, essay questions appear on the French baccalaureate exam (which is apparently their version of the US SAT/ACT) and the debate is whether this implies that our standards are lower because we do not ask such questions. Answers Matter More than Questions
And, not too surprisingly, Chad sticks the landing:
What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are any good. It’s very nice to ask students to write essays on the topic “Does language betray thought?,” but it’s really easy to imagine getting a whole slew of responses that strain to reach the level of dorm-room bull sessions.
The form of the questions may indicate, as most are supposing, that the French are really doing a better job of teaching their students to think deeply about things. Or, it may mean that they’re teaching their students to traffic in pompous bullshit. There’s no way to know from just the questions– you also need to know what constitutes an acceptable answer.
Precisely. And I can’t help but note that of the three linked blogs (Yglesias, Mother Jones, Tapped) there is only sentence that goes beyond a yes/no answer to the questions (can’t say whether this omission is an expression of irony, though). The important thing isn’t whether you can say yes or no, it’s making a convincing case for why you think that’s the correct answer. Or, as we in the science and engineering fields say, show your work.
A Lesson in the Scientific Method
This has it all. A scientist, working on his own, discovering something new (and useful) using proper scientific methodology … and he’s in high school. WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.
After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.
Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.
That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.
Oh, and yes, he won the top prize at the science fair.
Let's Teach Adults, Too
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
Teaching kids how to argue properly presumes that the parents know how to argue, which I don’t think is generally the case. But that’s a rant for another post.
SPF = x^2 + 2x – 3
Uncertain Principles: Algebra Is Like Sunscreen
My one-word piece of advice for students planning to study physics (or any other science, really, but mostly physics): Algebra.
Since we’re on the topic of math, let’s double the fun by visiting Cocktail PArty Physics: NEW VOICES: “math sucks”
“When I write, I can say whatever I want to say, but in math there’s just one right answer.”
She had a point there. I loved mathematics for its concreteness, its lack of ambiguity. It felt to me like a solid anchor in a hostile, subjective world. But the flip side of that is you can be definitely, unambiguously, totally wrong. You can’t plead “I was robbed,” like you can when the blind umpire calls you out or your sterling essay is marked with a D minus by a demented grader.
But … if the education is bland, and
[T]he core problem she faces, as she enters middle school “hating” math, is the math teaching itself, gender neutral, uninspiring for all.
There is the open question of why Austin (a boy) loves math.
I think an underlying issue is our desire to be able to point to a single problem to fix, when in reality there are multiple reasons why it’s tough to get kids to eat their vegetables learn their algebra.
Not-so-Great Expectations
Gendered expectations in teaching
[T]he expectations of how a male versus female instructor will behave are actually quite different. One of the papers I read discussed the fact that they interviewed students after they filled out evaluations (where a male versus a female teacher were rated and came out the same, quantitatively). It turns out that while the teachers were rated the same, the students have obvious differences in expectations. It came out that female instructors were available outside of class for more time than male instructors, but that they were still viewed as not being sufficiently accessible outside of class. In other words, students expected that female instructors should be willing to put in more time outside of class to help students in order to rate as well as male instructors who put in less time. If you think about the implications, it basically means that women will often have to do more work to get the same ratings.
The Wonder Years
Backreaction: The Best Years of Your Life
A summary of a motivational talk on grad school.
Worthless? Bah!
physics and physicists: “I’ll Never Use The Skills I Learned In Physics”
zapperz attacks this in a couple of ways, such as the idea that you (can) learn critical thinking skills
The “skills” that one learn out of a physics/science course goes BEYOND physics. It is a skill of thinking things through and systematically. It is the skill in knowing what KIND of evidence is required for something to be considered to be VALID. This is highly important no matter what you do. How do you know that something somebody utters on TV is valid? Most of the time, people are persuaded not based on valid evidence, but based on personality of the presenter and all the bells and whistles. Apply this to the world of politics, where phrases fly off into the air as if they are facts, or as if simply by saying it, it is true. The same can be said with regards to the battle between evolution and creationism. The inability of some members of the public to actually think through something THIS obvious clearly shows that the skill of analytical thinking isn’t there!
That and the other points are certainly important, but I’ll go a step or two lower and look at some actual physics applications. I don’t know precisely what is taught in Physics 140: How Things Work, but I’d guess a few basics involved would let you figure out that the truth about turning the heat down during the day if nobody’s home. “Conventional wisdom” says that it takes more energy to heat the house back up, but the actual physics confirms the conventional wisdom to be wrong. Or a simple analysis to verify that buying a long-life CFL will save you money over incandescent bulbs once you figure out actual energy use, despite the cost-per-bulb being higher. E = Pt is simple physics, but physics nonetheless.
A word of advice for Ms. McMillan: if someone asks you to invest in a device that creates energy, for which you will be able to charge money and make a profit, it may appear to be a sound investment from a financial perspective. But the physics you so casually dismiss guarantees that it is not.
(on a personal note, I’ve found that most of basic finance is pretty easy if you can do physics. Problems in financial literacy and science literacy do share a common problem: math literacy)
It's a Setup
When I taught I tried to instill the concept that you should be able to pass an exam without a single correct numerical answer, because the problem set-up was the most important part of the solution. Few of my students believed me, but I see that my experience was not unique. The First Excited State has Missing the Important Stuff, which sets up a response at Uncertain Principles, The Process Is as Important as the Answer
Chad points to the problem of giving a problem with only algebraic expressions
The problem with this method, of course, is that students hate it with the burning passion of a million white-hot suns. If you think they get unhappy when they don’t have the exact numerical answers to work toward, just wait until you see their reaction to no numbers at all.
The Place to Be
Success!
The rough headcount for the Open House was about 9,000 visitors. This was the first one I had worked (there hadn’t been one of these since 2001) and the expectation from the earlier events was that we could get “a few thousand” people, so I’d have to say that we exceeded expectations. The weather was absolutely gorgeous for early April — mid 60s and literally no clouds. There was some wind early in the afternoon, but even that minor annoyance died down.
We got a lot of traffic at the geocaching table. A fellow geocacher helped out (and a few others came to visit and nab the “puzzle” geocache located at the Observatory); we chatted with people and explained the activity to the adults. For the kids, it was more interactive — I handed them a GPS receiver and walked them through the cache finds: a fake rock and a film container, with log books in them. The areas open to the public weren’t conducive to larger caches, and there was no budget for trade items (or give-aways, in this case). But with the response we got from this event, maybe there will be an opportunity for a more elaborate activity next year.
I didn’t get a chance to check out the other presentations (though I had seen several of the posters; a network issue prevented several people from “seeing” our plotter, so they sent me files and had me print them) I know the lines were long for the “big” telescopes, and there were more than a dozen amateur astronomers who set up scopes (some more than one) for viewing. The sun (sans spots) during the day, and then whatever was up at night. I arrived at 1 for some setup work and left around 9, which is when they were going to close the gates, and there was still a considerable line of people waiting to get in. Not sure if they stayed open later than the planned 10 PM. It would have been disappointing to close down before everyone got a chance to look through a few telescopes, but security makes the call on things like that.
The best part about all of this was the kids. You could tell that some had been dragged there, but for the most part they were very engaged and enthusiastic. The ones who did the geocache finds were, and I heard some very positive, spontaneous comments from them in the area where the telescopes were set up. When I was returning some GPS receivers to Geoff, the PAO, the youngster stepping down from the telescope shouted out a very sincere, “I saw the MOON!” That’s worth the price of admission right there.
Here’s the view of the lawn where the small telescopes were set up.
Things got busier as it got dark, but flash photography tends to annoy people who want their eyes to be dark-adjusted, so I don’t have any pictures.