Swans on Tea

STUDENT DEBT vs. AVERAGE INCOME
I graduated with about $10k in debt from college, much of which was deferred while in the navy and again in graduate school. I paid off the last of it more than 15 years after graduation. I incurred no debt for grad school — teaching and research assistantships paid [...]

Illuminating physics for students by David Griffiths
Physics teachers are fortunate (I am among friends, so I can speak frankly): ours is a subject the relevance and importance of which are beyond question, and which is intrinsically fascinating to anyone whose mind has not been corrupted by bad teaching or poisoned by dogma and superstition. I [...]

The US isn’t the only country having trouble teaching high-school physics. Australia has similar issues.
Physics teachers not up to scratch: study
One quote caught my eye:
“The person that’s teaching them might have some competence in science but just can’t grab that ‘aha’ moment.”
Not that I’m endorsing under-qualified high-school physics teachers, but I suspect that the [...]

Pew Science Knowledge Quiz
To test your knowledge of scientific concepts and recent scientific findings and events, we invite you to take this 12-question science knowledge quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,005 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions. You’ll also be able to compare your Science IQ with the average [...]

I noticed a very important lesson in Rhett’s post July 4th and an example of work-energy: checking the answer.
Let me make some checks here. Will the acceleration be positive? Yes. The first term will always be positive and greater than g because (d+h)/d is greater than 1. What if a jumper jumps from a [...]

Dean Dad asks
Why do so many states require only two years of math in high school?
[…]
We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don’t. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why [...]

100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists

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 [...]

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 [...]

How to Teach a Child to Argue
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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]