Perhaps you’ve already seen the new(ish) AAUP report Freedom in the Classroom, or Michael Bérubé’s commentary on it at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. The report is such a clear statement of what a professor’s freedom in the classroom amounts to and, more importantly, why that freedom is essential if we are to accomplish the task of educating college students, that everyone who cares at all about higher education ought to read it.
Some of the highlights, with my commentary:
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
Question of the day: Is extra credit fair?
We’re going to discuss this at a Socrates Café gathering next week, but I suspect there are current and former students and educators reading who have a view, so I’m opening it up:
Is extra credit fair?
Finding cash to make learning happen.
The school year just started again for my kids, and it’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that as public school teachers are being asked to do more, their resources are dwindling. During the summer, the school mailed out the (extensive) lists of basic school supplies needed by kids at each grade level — the basic stuff, like crayons and pencils and paper, that during the last millennium when I was in grade school were included in the classroom funding like desks and electricity.
It strikes me that as a society, we need to revisit our funding priorities. But in the meantime, there are legions of cash-strapped teachers trying to spark some excitement around learning. Even if their school districts are tapped out, there are folks who value education who can help.
High on that list is DonorsChoose, an organization that helps teachers with classroom projects and other student learning experiences get the funding they need from ordinary folks in cyberspace who chip in what they can. (You may remember that ScienceBlogs readers raised some serious cash for such projects last spring. It’s also worth noting that DonorsChoose underwent a recent expansion and is now accepting proposals from teachers in all 50 states in the US.)
If you’re a school teacher trying to spin straw into gold — or you know a school teacher with grand plans and scarce resources — I’m posting to encourage you to consider creating and submitting a student project proposal to DonorsChoose. You don’t need to be a professional grant writer to do it — just a teacher with a vision for making your students’ learning experience better (and a list of the resources you’d need to make that happen) who can describe your students and your plan in a one page essay.
That doesn’t sound too hard, does it?
Here are some more specifics:
Memo to whom it may concern.
The bullets are addressed to different people and organizations, and I doubt very much that some of them would recognize these were addressed to them even if they received an actual memo. (It’s been that kind of week.)
Be it known that:
C&E News on writing journal articles.
Since scientist-on-scientist communication is a longstanding topic of interest in these parts, I wanted to point out a recent (August 13, 2007) article in Chemical & Engineering News (behind a paywall, but definitely worth locating a library with a subscription) that offers tips for writing journal articles. It’s quite a substantial article, drawing on advice from “dozens of scientists and engineers around the world in academia, industry, and government” — which is to say, the people who read and write journal articles as part of their jobs.
It goes without saying that this crowd has some strong views.
Temptations for engineering students.
Since you all were so helpful in response to my query about how engineers are different from scientists, I hope you won’t mind if I pick your brains again.
Specifically, I’m after information about the sorts of engineering labs (or whatever the right engineering analog for “labs” would be — projects?) freshman engineering students typically encounter.
Why a Luddite like myself likes teaching an online course.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a Luddite who composes her posts on wax tablets before uploading them.* So it may seem curious that nearly every semester I teach at least one section of my Philosophy of Science course online.
What would possess me to do such a thing? The ability to make active student learning inescapable.
Audience participation: help me flag good posts for non-scientists trying to understand science.
A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:
Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of posts to get to posts related to these fundamental issues though (not that the other posts are not interesting!).
Brief remarks on ‘physics first’ and high school science.
Chad and Rob have already noted this piece of news about soon-to-be-published research indicating that the order in which high school students are taught physics, chemistry, and biology makes very little difference to their performance in science classes at the college level, while a rigorous math curriculum in high school gives their college science performance a significant boost.
I have a few things to say about this.
Book review: The Canon.
The average American’s lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it’s socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier’s new book The Canon seeks to provide an audience of adults with the central ideas in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, as well as a reasonable handle on the activity of science more generally. Angier is not presenting a textbook for a survey course, but rather a taste of how these different scientific disciplines understand various chunks of the world we live in. The audience she is trying to reach may fear science, or remember it as boring, or have no good story about how it connects with everyday life. Angier is relentless in identifying science as it crosses our paths, and it is clear that she is taken with the beauty in the scientists’ accounts of their phenomena. What is less clear is whether Angier’s rhapsody to science will really engage her intended audience.