At dinner last night, the younger Free-Ride offspring told us about a science lesson from earlier this week:
Dr. Free-Ride: You were going to tell me about a science activity you did, we think, on Tuesday in school?
Younger offspring: Mmm-hmm.
Dr. Free-Ride: Tell us what it’s called.
Younger offspring: “Best Bird Beak”.
Dr. Free-Ride: “Best Bird Beak”. And what was the activity?
Author Archives: admin
Why I’m not grading papers tonight.
After my last class today, I participated in a Future Faculty Seminar at Stanford. I was on a panel about negotiating faculty jobs, dealing with the two-body problem while on the academic job market, balancing work and life once you have a faculty job, and so forth. It was a fun panel, and lots of good questions were asked.
But then I had to race home through a bunch of really slow traffic so I could play the sprog zone and let my better half out of the house for a Thursday night class.
And, not surprisingly, the stress of trying to get home in time while traffic was stop and go done wore me out, leaving me with next to no will to plow through the ten to fifteen papers I had hoped to grade tonight.
My eldest offspring expressed skepticism about my fatigue thusly:
“Come on! How much energy does it take to work a steering wheel and yell?”
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: A big shout-out to HP!
About 5 hours ago, “HP from Palo Alto, California” just rocked our world (and helped a bunch of public school classrooms) by plunking down $50 on each of the 13 challenges mounted by ScienceBlogs bloggers in the DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge. That’s a total of $650!
I’m thinking there’s a good chance that the “HP” here is Hewlett-Packard, in which case “Yay!” for the historic high-tech firm finding the ScienceBlogs challenges and supporting them unprompted. But if “HP from Palo Alto, California” is an individual donor, here’s a big “Yay!” for that awesome act of individual generosity.
Either way, HP rocks (and should totally claim a chemical structure sampler from me if one is desired)!
UPDATE: HP seems to have donated $50 to every challenge in the whole drive — making this a huge total donation indeed! Go HP!
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: day 7 progress, and prizes!
Today is the one week mark in our month-long drive with DonorsChoose to raise funds for public school classroom projects, and it is no surprise that ScienceBlogs readers have been generous in their support. As I write this post, the ScienceBlogs leaderboard indicates:
The sprogs raise an important scientific question.
Actually, it might be a philosophical question.
Younger offspring: One of my classmates told me that you fart every second.
Bay Area Darwin fans: hear The Origin Cycle at Stanford this Thursday evening.
Thursday, October 8, at 8 pm, the Firebird Ensemble will be performing The Origin Cycle, eight selections from Charles Darwin’s work Origin of Species set to music. The performance will be at Stanford University’s Campbell Recital Hall, and tickets are free, but you’ll want to reserve your seats online ahead of the performance.
Here’s a bit of information on The Origin Cycle:
Science isn’t the only academic field with an overabundance of XYs.
Via Twitter, PalMD wondered if I’d seen this brief item on the New York Times Idea of the Day blog.
Writing in The Philosophers’ Magazine, Brooke Lewis says tallies of full-time faculty at top American and British colleges show women make up less than a fifth of philosophy departments in Britain and little more than that in the United States. This suggests “that gender representation is far less balanced in philosophy than it is in many other humanities subjects.”
Indeed, on quick examination, the gender balance among faculty in philosophy departments looks an awful lot like the gender balance among faculty in some typical science departments. This is not a new finding, and it’s certainly something those of us in academic philosophy have known about for some time.
The piece floats an idea for where this gender disparity might be coming from:
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: Day 4 update.
Here’s a quick update on how the ScienceBlogs contingent is doing in the DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge.
Since we kicked off the challenge on Thursday, three more blogs have mounted challenges:
A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
Christina’s LIS Rant (challenge here)
Thus Spake Zuska (challenge here)
And, as I type this, 61 ScienceBlogs readers have donated a grand total of $4,784, funding projects that will reach 1,329 students.
Of course, there are more students to be reached. If you’re the kind of person who likes to give a project the last chunk of change it needs, here are some projects that are within $100 of completion.
How many papers can (or should) I grade in a sitting?
Oh joy, it’s time to grade more papers!
At the moment, in fact, I have two batches of papers (approximately 400 words each, approximately 100 papers per batch) to grade, since I hadn’t finished marking the earlier ones before the next ones came due. And of course, owing to the piles of smoking rubble that constitute our budget at the state universities right now, there are no funds at present for graders.
I’ve blogged before about my strategies for grading fairly and consistently without taking a million years to finish the job. I’m still more or less using these strategies. But today, I’m trying to work out a more specific question:
What is the optimal number of papers for me to grade in a sitting?
Friday Sprog Blogging: the classroom snake gets fed.
A few weeks ago, the elder Free-Ride offspring was anxiously awaiting the feeding of Ziggy, the classroom ball python. Sadly, that feeding was delayed on account of the elder Free-Ride offspring’s teacher having jury duty.
Feeding the classroom snake, apparently, is not a task you leave to a substitute teacher.
In any event, since then, Ziggy has enjoyed a couple of feedings. Here, the elder Free-Ride offspring tells me about yesterday’s feeding.