Category Archives: Education

Chemistry Rising

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Physics & Parsimony: Chemistry with Rising 9th Graders

What surprised me was that almost all of these students knew how to balance chemical equations. Yet they had no idea what any of it meant. They could also tell me that burning alcohol was alcohol reacting with oxygen and the result was water and carbon dioxide (some wanted to add intermediate “fire atoms,” though). While they had been taught to balance a combustion equation and even knew quite a lot about combustion, they nonetheless (to a student) had no idea what was going on.

The Reach of Outreach

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Uncertain Principles: The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

People are generally in favor of outreach activities, of course, but in the same diffuse way that the general public is in favor of tax increases. If you ask them whether they’re in favor of outreach to the general public, they’ll say yes, but pressed to support it in a concrete way, they’ll find reasons not to.

The Bourne Discourse

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I think it’s unfortunate that the wackaloon celebrities get virtually all the airtime, so it’s refreshing for me to see an actor who can articulate a point and think on his feet. I’m sure (or at least hope) there are others out there, and we just don’t get to see them often enough.

His point about the “intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that” is spot-on. Just because some people do things for money doesn’t mean that’s what drives everyone.

That's Easy for You to Say, Astro Boy

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Uncertain Principles: How Much Outreach Do We Need? Depends on What You Mean by “We”

If you want to argue that we have plenty of outreach going on in astronomy and particle physics, that’s fine, but to say that astronomy and physics outreach is sufficient for science as a whole (or even just physics, which I’ve heard people say) is just insulting.

Astronomy and particle physics aren’t the whole of the physical sciences. Astronomers and particle physicists are significantly outnumbered by people doing other types of physics– condensed matter, atomic and molecular, materials science. Those topics don’t get anywhere near as much attention as things you can illustrate with a picture from the Hubble telescope.

“Yeah, but astronomy and particle physics touch on really big questions, that inspire people,” you say. “Oh, bite me,” I reply.

(If anyone is tempted to take this to the next level, I’ll remind you that we have lasers. Just sayin’)

If you give the narrow glimpse of physics as accelerators and telescopes, you make the same mistake as painting grad school as only a pathway to academia: you sin by omission.

In this Concave Space, Defined by Orthogonal Dividers, …

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Multiplication smackdown: Sal Khan vs Vi Hart—who’s got the ‘insight’?

As usual, Vi delivers a gigantic heaping of insight into what multiplication is, why these algorithms work, along with a handful of sarcasm and one of the most important critiques of math education and obsession with notation I’ve seen in the past month or so.

(New Vi Hart video in the link)

One has to acknowledge that there are different goals in mind for the two videos, but a shortcoming of “turn the crank” cookbook instruction is that you won’t know what to do if you ever encounter a new situation, which is why conveying the deeper understanding is a winner in the long run. Add some enthusiasm for the beauty of math, and that will help foster an interest.

Grad School Gloom and Doom, Part Whatever in a Neverending Series

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Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.
At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts.

I’m guessing that if you framed the statistics as doctors who end up working in hospitals you might have a dire employment rate to cite. A fake statistic, but a dramatic one to prove a point. And that’s the problem with most of these “graduate school is broken” articles — the idea that the only career for which you’d go to graduate school is to become a professor. If you aren’t smart enough to realize that a professor churning out more than a few students over the course of his/her career is unsustainable as a closed system, you probably shouldn’t go to grad school. But that’s based on intelligence, not the job market.

That’s not to say that the graduate education system isn’t broken, or at least exploitative, so don’t take away the message that I disagree with the whole article. But let’s be honest in terms of the state of affairs, employment prospects and the goals of graduate school. I think it weakens the argument when you distort the facts. So present some of the real problems, and acknowledge that we’re being misled at some level about what the role of grad school and research is: You can’t simultaneously have a shortage and a glut of scientifically qualified people, and you can’t simultaneously demand (as the article rightly points out) that academia do a lot of research and also not have a lot of grad students around — especially if being a professor requires you spend more time filling out grant applications than doing research. Someone is deceiving us about what’s going on.

Case in point regarding the employment prospects: In FY2009, more than 27,000 H-1B visas were granted to people holding doctorates (pdf alert; a summary exists, too) along with 85,000 Master’s degrees, out of a total of about 214,000 visas. This covers a wider spectrum of occupations than STEM subjects, and unfortunately there is no breakdown of education level correlated to occupation, but if the rough proportion holds then of the tens of thousands of STEM jobs on these visas, about half went to people with graduate degrees of some sort. That’s hard to reconcile with the notion that we have too many graduate students for the economy to absorb. One obvious possible answer is that the system is being abused and we’re importing cheap labor, and I think that’s going on; it’s simply a matter of determining the extent to which it is going on.

But the other issues raised in the article need to be investigated, as well as the solutions. It’s true that the large industrial labs have either evaporated or at least shed their role of basic research, and the government hasn’t stepped in to fill that void. The author also takes on issues of college-level education, which also need solving.

Science Literacy in the Age of Tornadoes

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A Twist on Climate Change, Risk, and Uncertainty

In this country, we teach kids that science is a collection of hard facts. We teach them that scientists come up with a hypothesis—an idea that might explain some aspect of how the world works. Scientists then test their hypotheses and find out whether it’s correct or not. If it’s correct, then it becomes something that children must memorize. That story is true. But it’s also vastly oversimplified. It gives people the impression that every scientific question can be answered with “yes” or “no.” And if it can’t, then the real answer is probably “no.”

That perspective might work okay when you’re sitting in a high school science lab, studying the digestive system of a fetal pig. But it doesn’t work as well in the real world. And it leaves people completely unprepared to understand something like climate change, and how we assess the risks associated with it.

I note that “That story is true” is correct, but we would be better off if it weren’t. That’s one of the common themes in any discussion in the blogohedron about scientific literacy and science education: reducing science to a list of facts misrepresents the essence of science and also tends to kill enthusiasm for learning science.

That’s not to say that facts aren’t a part of science and science literacy. I think you can distill literacy down to three components — facts, concepts and procedures. You can’t do much without remembering a few facts, and you need to have a basic grasp of some concepts in order to see how those facts fit together. That’s part and parcel of any discussion/vote on what the most important element of scientific literacy — everyone trots out their favorite “must know” tidbit.

Uncertainty is inescapable in science, and you have to account for its presence in interpreting any scientific result, which is a concept that needs to be included in the list of what comprises basic science literacy. We have to fight the attempts to turn it into a pejorative, since a common implication is that any uncertainty means that we know nothing — a world is portrayed that’s black and white, with no tolerance for shades of grey.

I Don't Care What You Did Last Summer

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What your teachers are doing

All of your public school teachers have a history. Almost all of them have masturbated. Many of them have smoked marijuana. Almost all of them have dated; most of them have danced. Some of them are gay. Some of them are heterosexual. Almost all of them have private kinks which you don’t know about, because they don’t practice them in public, let alone when they’re doing their jobs. Some of them have been sex workers.

And you know what? All of them can be fired or blacklisted by local prudes on school boards or the school administration. Teachers: you don’t get to be human. This outrages me.