Ahem.
Beach ball here! Kids, I’m not going to march myself into the stadium!
That’s better. Thanks dude!
Category Archives: Personal
After this Saturday, it’s all gravy!
This post brought to you by my intense desire to avoid grading any more papers.
More than a dozen years ago, when I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, I made what many at the time viewed as a financially reckless decision and purchased academic regalia rather than just renting it.
Lowered expectations.
I used to think what I really needed this time of semester was elves.
Science fairs rock!
I hope you’ve noticed that Seed has sent a team to blog the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair currently raging in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I love science fairs. I’ve judged them (and recruited others to judge them). At our county fair, I’m always sucked right into the science-fair-type exhibits entered by kids in the Young California exhibit hall.
And of course, as a kid, I did projects for our school science fair.
Let’s see your mug.
Dave at The World’s Fair is collecting field data on coffee mugs. Or maybe he’s trying to create a meme.
Anyway, he poses a bunch of questions which I seem to be unable to resist answering:
- Can you show us your coffee cup?
- Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
- Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
- Can you try to get others to comment on it?
My answers will be restricted to the coffee delivery vessels (all three of them) I use at work, thus excluding the travel mug I use in the car on weekday mornings and the mugs I use at home on weekends. Also, since I have the necessary materials and apparatus in my office to make tea, but not coffee, these mugs might more properly be counted as “tea mugs” (or “coffee and tea mugs”).
A few questions about final exams.
Someone forgot to tell our department photocopier that finals started today; rather than being a vengeful photocopier toying with the pitiful mortals in its thrall, it was a happy photocopier that photocopied my final exams beautifully. And since I wasn’t clearing any cryptic paper jams, my mind wandered into the question of how others approach final exams:
- Multiple choice, essay, something in between, or a combination of question formats?
- Scantron forms? Blue books? (If so, do the students have to buy them or does the prof provide them?)
- In-class or take-home?
- Open book or closed book?
- Clever cheating-deterent procedures?
- Plenty of time to finish or barely enough time to finish?
- Pedagogically useful or a necessary evil?
My answers below the fold.
An odd (but pleasant) milestone.
Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it’s looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between “is” and “ought”, are we not? Some semesters, I’ve had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get adequate sleep, and kick ass on your finals.
Mother’s Day appreciation (part II): Mom goes to grad school.
In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor.
Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program:
Mother’s Day appreciation (part I): Why Mom went back to school.
In honor of Mother’s Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters’ lives can be.
When we’re young, we don’t always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role models. Part of this, I think, is that a kid’s world is smaller in some important ways. What you know of the world you know through school, through friends, through cartoons, and through your family. Lots of aspects of the wider world don’t really pop up in your consciousness until you have to confront them as an adult yourself.
I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fully grasp it when I was a kid, when she went back to school in her mid-30s my mother opened up my understanding of the world of higher education and of science, and offered me a vision of a woman’s work that the society at large did not. Given all the ways that her journey helped me to navigate – and even to imagine – my own educational and career path, I asked her if I could interview her for a set of posts here. I’m very grateful that she agreed.
Part I: What drives a suburban mother of four back to school?
What would it be like to be an engineer?
It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I’m jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it’s worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a good job pitching the material to the audience.
I have some experience teaching to frosh. But it occurs to me that I’m a little fuzzy in understanding just what makes an engineer an engineer.