Category Archives: Education
Buy You a Drink?
Are you worried about global warming? Should you be worried about global warming? Understanding the dangers posed by climate change and evaluating policies toward it require some understanding of science. How do we know the Earth is warming? What will happen when the temperature increases? What can be done to mitigate or avoid the problems? These are essentially scientific questions.
What about bird flu? MRSA? AIDS? Pandemic disease is something that can only be understood and combatted through science. Are we all going to get wiped out by some disease? What steps should we take to avoid being wiped out by disease? These are essentially scientific questions.
If you have no interest in science and being informed, then you can only blame yourself when you get conned by someone peddling antiscience, or swept up by FUD.
No Pain, No Gain
We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list.
This is precisely why teachers assign homework problems for their students to work out. You get better at physics by applying it to unknown situations and figuring out the answer. Not by having someone work multiple problems for you.
My own method when someone explains some concept to me is to try and come up with a nontrivial example and give the result, trying to explain myself, and see if I have figured out the application of the concept.
I compare/contrast this with behavior of people who say they are trying to learn (level of sincerity unknown) and who just want to be spoon-fed the answer, without knowing the path to the answer. And who often complain that it should be easier.
[A] subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month.
Noted
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.
Asked and Answered
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, or links to links about lynx)
More From the Files of Doctor Obvious
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 for retaining information. But it’s not all bad news. The team offers a precise formula for better study habits, and it doesn’t necessarily entail dogged discipline and routine.
The Quality Factor
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 valid — if the quality of the faculty hired is based on how well they can educate. There are schools that have grad students teaching the classes, and professors who do research and view teaching as an annoyance.
But how to measure this is a different issue. Surveying faculty for where they got their education reinforces the notion that being in academia is “success.” And in a way somewhat related to Chad’s recent discussion on student-athletes, one has to recognize that, in a broader sense, education is not just what you learn in class.
H-1B or not H-1B? That is the Question.
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 that receive a post-graduate degree. Of course, you can easily extend this beyond computer science (e.g. physics, chemistry, etc.)
When I was an undergraduate at MIT, a meaningful percentage of the student body was from other countries. It never even occurred to me that these folks were “different” and didn’t “belong in our country.” Some of my best friends in college weren’t US citizens and I was baffled by the hoops they had to jump through even back then to work in the US. In the past eight years, this has gotten dramatically worse and it’s time we got in front of this.
As I implied in my previous bit on H-1B visas, I think this attacks a symptom — the shortage of tech workers — but does nothing to solve the underlying problem. What happens when foreign students can get good jobs back in their own countries, and don’t want to stick around? This does nothing to foster education of our own citizens, and by having a large supply of workers, it drives salaries down. Businesses love it, of course, because the talent pool is deeper and cheaper. I don’t think we should swing all the way to full-blown protectionism, but I also don’t think unrestricted handing-out of visas to all graduates is the answer.
This brings to mind another issue. The US does educate a lot of foreign students. As with the author, I was friends with a number of them when I was in school. I was also frustrated that some of the finite supply of student support money, coming from taxes, was doled out to foreign students and to the exclusion of US citizens — I knew a few people who went without support for a year in the hope of landing a TA or RA, while the foreign students were supported. There’s something about that that strikes me an inequitable.
Career Advice
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 work that must be put in before you get that first internship, let alone a job.
There’s a good example that goes with this (posed as an exchange between a student and advisor) of why salary should not be the primary reason you choose a career.
So my advice is to learn everything you can from your classes, find what you like, find what you are good at, and pursue a career that requires skills that you have and enjoy doing for 10 or so hours a day. All technical careers are hard work for the money, so you better like what you are doing.
A Textbook Example
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.