Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges:
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I’m scheduled to teach six classes this term.
Me: Six?! While you’re the chair?!!
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can’t find enough part-timers to teach all the sections.
Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself?
CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can’t not teach them.
Me: Yikes!
CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the effect of some of the instructors who, erm, are driving the students away.
Me: Driving them away?
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah. Dry lectures, three hour blue-book exams, that sort of thing.
Me: In philosophy? What the hell?!
CC Dept. Chair: Exactly.
Me: Seriously, philosophy class is supposed to be the one that’s so engaging that it lures you away from what your parents want you to major in.
CC Dept. Chair: That’s my feeling on it.
Me: Have these three-hour-blue-book-exam folks forgotten that our business is corrupting the youth?
CC Dept. Chair: Apparently. Which is why I have six classes worth of youth to corrupt this term.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Disciplinary misconceptions (chemistry version).
Walking outside with a well-known local blogger:
WKLB: I never did take a chemistry course.
Me: Why not?
WKLB: I’m not good at memorizing stuff, and there’s that whole big periodic table …
Me: Hey, my memorization skills are pretty worthless, too. But in chemistry, you don’t need them as much as you do in a field like biology.
WKLB: Really? You don’t ever have to, like, write out the periodic table from memory?
Me: Hell no! The idea is to learn how to turn the periodic table into a device for predicting stuff about the different elements — like a secret decoder ring. They always give you a periodic table. There’s usually a big one hanging right there in the classroom.
WKLB: Oh.
Me: Seriously, my memory can only be trusted with Simpsons dialog and song lyrics.
WKLB: Hmm. I guess, then, that I could have learned chemistry.
Me: You totally could. In fact, there’s still time!
Famous chemist trivia.
Greetings from the BCCE! Well, actually from a cafe down the street from the BCCE, since the wireless accounts that were supposed to be set up for conference goers are not currently functional. (The lengths to which I’m willing to go to satisfy my readers!) The immediate result of this situation is it will take comments a bit longer to go up.
But, I have gathered (from the talks on how to convey the “nature of science” to students) some fun facts about famous chemists.
The Book Meme
Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests tagged me, and I loves me some books, so who am I to refuse to be mimetic?
Picking out patterns (or not): a few links.
Here are a few items that have been bouncing around in my head of late. Are they connected to each other? You be the judge.
- “In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks.” That is, hands down, my favorite sentence in K.C. Cole’s article in the May/June 2006 Columbia Journalism Review. The article tries to explain why editors (and their penchant for making things absolutely clear) can get in the way of good science journalism, but it has some interesting observations on the nature of science, too.
Diagnosis, please?
The name of the ice cream and coffee blended concoction Cappachillo makes me think immediately of some chimeraical combination of a chinchilla and a chupacabra (blended with coffee and ice cream, of course).
Do you suppose this is an indication of caffeine deficiency, heat exhaustion, or both?
Who’s grilling today?
It’s been warm in these parts lately. In weather like this, by evening the indoors is stiflingly hot, while the outdoors is just staring to cool down. So, it makes sense that we’d be driven outdoors. Perhaps it makes less sense that, after escaping the heat indoors, I’d build a blazing hot fire over which to cook.
Life is full of mysteries.
Anyway, while I’m working on the promised post about what non-scientists can do to improve commuications with scientists, I’m curious to find out who else runs to the grill, and how you do it. If you want to consider this a meme, you should also consider yourself tagged!
Comparisons to celebrities: probably a bad idea no matter what.
First I saw it at Feministe, and then at Pandagon, so I had to try the face recognition program that matches one’s face to the faces of celebrities. I used the picture of me in the sidebar. Here’s what I discovered.
I can’t stop laughing at this result.
Coming up on a long holiday weekend, you all are ready for another internet quiz, right?
I can’t help wondering whether the “Birth Order Predictor” quiz is not well-grounded in the sociological facts, or whether there really isn’t any such coherent set of sociological facts, or whether I’m just a weirdo.
Because it’s hard to imagine this result being any more off base:
My ethical style (according to an internet quiz).
Chad thinks it’s a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, “bossy” isn’t one of the possible results.)
What the quiz says about me after the jump.