Category Archives: Teaching and learning

Advice for academic job seekers: do some homework on your prospective students.

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A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:

One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was “Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?” This is not what he was expecting to hear!

As someone who had a whole passel of interviews with departments at schools very different from the university where I completed my graduate degree — and as someone who has interviewed job candidates for my current department — I have a few words of advice to the job candidate.

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Follow-up: why did the cheating poll for frosh engineering students have those answers?

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In an earlier post, I shared the responses freshman engineering students had made (via electronic clickers) to a few questions I asked them during an ethics lecture I was giving them.
My commenters are pretty sure I left out options in the multiple choice that should have been included.
In this post, I consider some of those other options, and I try to explain my thinking in formulating the questions and the possible responses the way I did.
(Also, I’ll include the questions themselves, since the Quimble polls I used to present them in the original post seem not to be working at the moment.)

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What freshman engineering students think about cheating.

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In the freshman introduction to engineering class, where I am teaching the ethics module, the students have electronic clickers with which to respond in real time to (multiple choice) questions posed to them in lecture. I took advantage of this handy technology to get their responses to a few questions on cheating. I’m presenting the questions here in poll form so you can play along at home:

var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}

var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}

var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}

(In the event that Quimble is down and the poll is thus inaccessible, you can view the questions in this follow-up post.)
What do you suppose the students said?

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Temptations that might become irresistable

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… as a result of the incessant drive to make learning too darn safe.
Not that this is a terribly new development (I wrote about this sort of thing here and here), but it appears that anxieties about terrorists and meth-labs are sucking all the chemically goodness out of chemistry sets:

Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today’s sets cover perfume mixing and creation of luminol (the ‘CSI effect’ I suppose).

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Getting involved with more than your wallet: strategies for supporting science and math education.

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With just over 10 hours left in our ScienceBlogs/Donors Choose Blogger Challenge 2007, it’s time to think about what happens next. Supporting classroom teachers with your funds is a noble gesture, but it’s just a start.
To really get math and science literacy (and enthusiasm) to the levels we’d like to see, your time and personal involvement can do an awful lot. In this post you’ll find ideas from ScienceBloggers about how to turn your good intentions into action.

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Fifty years after Sputnik.

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Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite. I don’t remember it (because I wouldn’t be born for another decade), but the “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” heard ’round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents’ generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.

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Raising money for classroom projects to create a more scientifically literate society (DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2007)

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Maybe you remember that fund-raiser we did for DonorsChoose last June. We’re kicking off another today. But this time, it’s not just ScienceBlogs bloggers — partners like Google, Yahoo!, Six Apart, and Federated Media are watching the efforts across the whole blogosphere to see which blog has the most generous and engaged readers.
But before we get to the frenzy of competition, let’s start with what matters: the school kids yearning to learn.
As I wrote last year:

Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you’re reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school — teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids.
DonorsChoose.org gives us a way to help teachers get the job done. A bunch of us at ScienceBlogs have set up Blogger Challenges which will let us (and that includes you) contribute to worthy school projects in need of financial assistance. We’ll be able to track our progress right on the DonorsChoose site. And — because we like a little friendly competition — we’ll be updating you periodically as to which blogger’s readers are getting his or her challenge closest to its goal.
You don’t need to give a barrel of money to help the kids — as little as $10 can help. You’re joining forces with a bunch of other people, and all together, your small contributions can make a big difference.

This year, the challenge runs for the entire month of October. A number of ScienceBloggers have already put together challenges, but I suspect a few more may arrive fashionably late. Here’s who’s in so far:
A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
Adventures in Ethics and Science (challenge here)
Aetiology (challenge here)
Cognitive Daily (challenge here)
Deep Sea News (challenge here)
Evolgen (challenge here)
Gene Expression (challenge here)
Omni Brain (challenge here)
On Being a Scientist and a Woman (challenge here)
The Questionable Authority (challenge here)
Retrospectacle (challenge here)
The Scientific Activist (challenge here)
Stranger Fruit (challenge here)
Terra Sigillata (challenge here)
Thoughts From Kansas (challenge here)
Thus Spake Zuska (challenge here)
Uncertain Principles (challenge here)
How It Works:

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Do you self-report lab mishaps?

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This is a question that occurred to me earlier this month when I had occasion to observe an undergraduate laboratory course: If something goes wrong in the lab, do you tell the lab instructor? The “something wrong” could range from breaking a piece of glassware, to getting a stick with a syringe (of non-biohazardous material), to getting a stick with a syringe (of biohazardous or radioactive material), to spilling a nasty reagent. Of course, it could include other mishaps not enumerated here.
I’m not as interested in hearing when students should tell the lab instructor about a mishap, but rather in the conditions in which you would bring the lab instructor into the information loop.

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