Since Julie blogged about a call to her home from a student who wanted to add her class, I thought I’d add a story of my own, from waaaay back:
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
Disciplinary misconceptions (philosophy version).
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.
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!
Friday Sprog Blogging: pirates!
Because some people are on record as questioning my ability to turn any conversation into a conversation about science:
“What do pirates have to do with science?”
What don’t pirates have to do with science?
Day 2 of the BCCE: some notes.
I’m blogging again from the lovely Vienna Cafe in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the end of Day 2 of the BCCE. I gave my own talk this afternoon as part of symposium session on incorporating ethics in the chemistry curriculum (along with 5 other very interesting talks). I think it went well, but I always enjoy conferences more when I’ve finished my presenting and can be an undistracted audience for the other presentations.
Below the fold, some of the things I learned in todays various talks and events:
Watch what you say about my university!
The problem with having eyes and ears everywhere is that sometimes they deliver sensory data that make you want to rip them out of your head or stuff them with cotton, respectively.
An eagle-eyed reader pointed me toward some eyebrow-raising comments on another blog, which would not be of much interest except they purport to transmit information obtained from one of the fine science departments at my university. So, to uphold the honor of my university, I have to wade into this.
First, a representative sampling of the comments from the poster in question. He writes:
I will leave this site with a comment a chemistry professor made. It is simple but for this site it will speak volumes. Can 2 parrots mate and have a crow.
This is the premise of evolution, like it or not. This is it.
Using “Angels” to patch leaks in the pipeline.
Interesting news from Japan: Tohoku University has decided to launch an outreach effort to encourage more girls to pursue science. Rather than relying on secondary school science classes to whip up enthusiam for science, the university is recruiting its own women graduate students in the sciences to serve as role models and mentors.
From the Yomiuri Shimbun:
Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.
I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do.
My sense is that at least part of what’s going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it harder to get what those business types call “buy-in” from the scientists.
“Ethics, schmethics! Can’t I just think about science?”
There’s a nice commentary in the most recent issue of Cell about scientists’ apparent aversion to thinking about ethics, and the reasons they give for thinking about other things instead. You may not be able to get to the full article via the link (unless, say, you’re hooked up to a library with an institutional subscription to Cell), but BrightSurf has a brief description of it.
And, of course, I’m going to say a bit about it here.
We’re pro-truth.
It’s not just a science thing, it’s also an ethics thing. The truth is good. Departures from it, more often than not, get you into trouble.
A couple examples:
The Guarantee of Medical Accuracy in Sex Education Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wouldn’t you think that education would be premised on accurate information? What have we come to when it takes a law “to prohibit the federal government from providing assistance to any entity whose materials on human sexuality contain medically inaccurate information”?
Memo to the folks who are spinning this as an unwarranted attack on abstinence-only sex education: If abstinence-only education is not supported by medically accurate information, stop trying to sell it on the basis of medically inaccurate information. You can still try to sell it on the basis of its allignment with a moral standard, if that’s why you favor it, but don’t lie to sell it on the basis of advantages it doesn’t actually have.
Sheesh, if you have to use bad data to sell a view, can you really be certain it’s a good view? (And, even if you’re certain, should it surprise you that other people won’t be when they discover that some of the premises of your argument are false — and that you knew they were false as you repeated the argument?)
From the political to the personal, I want to pick up on a detail from First Year Teacher’s heart-breaking and angry-making letter of resignation (which I saw via A Blog Around the Clock).