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:
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
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?
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: Did I mention fabulous prizes?
You already know that we’re working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve (and who, owing to dismal state and local budgets, need our help more than ever). You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them).
Of course, helping public school teachers deliver the education their students deserve is it’s own reward, but that doesn’t mean you might not want a little something to recognize your donation. So, as I did last year, I’m going sweeten the deal by offering some incentive to everyone who donates to my challenge.
Because money seems to be tight for almost everyone, I’ve knocked down the level of some of the donations needed to get particular thank-you swag, and I’ve added a “crafty” new incentive this time around. Here’s what you can get if you donate to my challenge:
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: raising our own classroom stimulus funds.
Around this corner of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public’s scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children is are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding.
In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.
During the month of October, a bunch of us ScienceBlogs bloggers will be participating in the annual DonorsChoose “philanthropic throwdown for public schools”, which this year they’re calling the 2009 Social Media Challenge. (You may recognize it as the Blogger Challenge of yore.)
Friday Sprog Blogging: Here Comes Science!
The Free-Ride family got its copy of the new CD/DVD set Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants this week. The sprogs, who have been listening and watching, offer something kind of like a review.
Great moments in parent-teacher relations: back to school edition.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half went to the Free-Ride offspring’s school for Back to School Night earlier this week. (I stayed at home with the sprogs to oversee dinner and baths.)
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half reported back that the younger Free-Ride offspring’s third grade teacher “doesn’t believe in too much homework”. (“She doesn’t believe it’s possible to assign too much homework?” I asked cautiously. “No, she doesn’t believe an excess of homework is a good thing,” my better half replied.)
And, she supported her stance with a page she distributed to parents summarizing recent educational research on the question of homework and student achievement.
I think we’re going to like this teacher.
Great moments in scientific reasoning.
In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning. (At the very least, Semmelweis is discussed in no fewer than three of the readings, by three separate authors, assigned for the course.)
But this raises the question: what else belongs on the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning?
Friday Sprog Blogging: school supplies.
The Free-Ride offspring just kicked off a new school year. The start of school in these parts means a long list of supplies to find — stuff you’d expect, like crayons, pencils, binders and binder paper, scissors, and glue sticks, plus stuff for general classroom use like tissues, had sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, paper towel, and copier paper. The tighter the school’s budget, the more items get added to the “voluntary donations” list. (And we’ve heard tell that the donations aren’t always voluntary. If you don’t get crayons, your kid goes through the school year without crayons. This makes some of those color-by-numbers arithmetic assignments pretty hard to do.)
Anyway, one consequence of the abysmal state budget for the Free-Ride offspring’s school is that there are no longer designated science teachers (there used to be two). Now, each classroom teacher has to figure out how to work through the grade level science curriculum his or her self.
You figure some of those science lessons will require materials that didn’t appear on the school supplies lists that went out right before the start of school.
Today, the sprogs offer the school supplies list that they imagine they would request if they were teaching science this year:
Twelve reasons to finish writing your dissertation.
The other day, it occurred to me that I have a goodly number of friends who have been in Ph.D. programs (and may still be “in” the program in some more or less official way), and who have more or less finished their graduate research, but who haven’t managed to get their dissertations written. (I’m not going to name names; you know who you are.)
In this post, I want to offer these friends (and others in this situation) encouragement to get that dissertation written!
Yes, I know, you have your reasons for not finishing. Yes, I know writing a dissertation can feel like the hardest thing ever — I wrote two of them, so I have a bit of experience here. Believe me, I know that the writing of a dissertation often takes place against the backdrop of intense psychological obstacles and insane demands on your time; I wrote my first one while experiencing a major crisis about what I wanted to be when I grew up, while the second only had to compete with the care of an infant, a full teaching load, and an exhausting daily commute.
You don’t need me to give you reasons not to write that dissertation, else it would be written. So, from the other side of that dark tunnel, let me give you some reasons to do it:
Newspaper’s editor exposes intern’s plagiarism.
The Colorado Springs Gazette discovered that a summer intern in their newsroom published articles with plagiarized passages. The editor of the paper, Jeff Thomas, deemed this plagiarism a breach of the paper’s trust with the public:
[R]eporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the [New York] Times, as is required when quoting the work of some other publication.
Here are selected excerpts from the four Gazette stories, paired with links to the Times news stories from which material was inappropriately borrowed. …