- Staple any papers held together by paperclips, folded corners, or sheer force of will.
- Print out papers turned in by email, stapling if necessary.
- Alphabetize papers by students’ surname.
- Divide papers into sets of ten and paperclip together.
- Create a grading rubric.
- Create a spreadsheet in which to record the grades.
- Find a supply of appropriately colored grading pens.
- Try to locate your drawing board.
- Double-check that the state and county correctional facilities will not, in fact, correct papers, not even those from state university courses.
- Leave papers, grading pens, and rubric on kitchen table overnight to see if elves will come to grade the papers.
- Write a blog post about ways to put off actually getting started on grading those papers.
Passing thoughts from Casa Free-Ride in Exile.
This week has been (and I daresay will be) sort of discombobulating.
Late last fall we discovered that we had hardwood floors hiding under the ratty wall-to-wall carpeting in Casa Free-Ride. We also found out from our friend who refinishes hardwood floors that if we were to refinish ours in February, we could get a deal on it. February, being part of our rainy season (to the extent that we have anything describable as “seasons” in the Bay Area), is part of the slow season for floor refinishing.
Given that we have held the carpeting in contempt for some time (did I mention that it was ratty?), it sounded like a great idea to us, even though it would mean completely clearing all the rooms in which carpeting would be pulled up and floors would be sanded and finished. Yeah, it meant boxing a lot of stuff and moving a lot of furniture, but we’d have time to get on that …
After the holidays.
And after the kids went back to school.
And after ScienceOnline.
And after my semester got going.
Yesterday was the day of reckoning. The rooms were not quite cleared by 7:30 AM, but we had the last one emptied by 11:00 AM. By the end, we pretty much abandoned organizational principles in favor of getting it done, which means some of these boxes will be … interesting to unpack.
We are lucky enough to have a place to stay within a couple miles of Casa Free-Ride (which is especially convenient given that the rabbit is still holding court in her backyard run, and demands regular water, kibble, carrots, and watercress stems as tribute).
I keep hearing how going carpetless leads to a remarkable decline in airborne allergens. I expect I’m likely to experience our return to Casa Free-Ride this way whether or not it’s true; the place we’re staying for the duration has enough residual cat in it (possible in time-release form) that my eyes have been scratchy and my throat itchy for the 30-odd hours we’ve been in residence. When I get that stack of papers today that will need grading, maybe I’ll take them to the cat-free cafe. However, the cafe has wifi, which our current lodgings do not, which might make the grading harder.
In any event, I’m hopeful that the sock-skating we’ll be able to do when the floors are finished will make the trouble of being dislocated totally worth it.
GRE scores and other tools to evaluate people for lab positions.
In the last 24 hours there has been an interesting conversation on the Twitters (with contributions from @drugmonkeyblog, @CackleofRad, @mbeisen, @Namnezia, @dr_leigh, @doc_becca, @GertyZ, @superkash, @chemjobber, @DoctorZen, and a bunch of other folks) on the value of standardized tests (like the GRE) in evaluating candidates for a lab position.
The central question at issue seems to be whether GRE scores are meaningful or meaningless in identifying some quality in the candidate that is essential for (or maybe reliably predictive of) success in the environment of an academic lab. And, it’s worth noting that the conversation has not been framed in terms of using GRE scores as the only piece of evidence one has about applicants. Rather, it’s been about the reliability of GRE scores as a predictor compared to college transcripts, letters of recommendation, personal essays, and the like.
I have thoughts about this issue, thoughts which are informed by:
- my teaching experiences
- my own experiences with the SAT and the GRE (I aced them)
- my own experiences doing research in four different lab settings (three of them while I was an undergraduate)
- my experiences teaching test preparation courses (for SAT I, SAT II, and MCAT)
- my experiences as the graduate student representative on a graduate admissions committee (albeit not for a science department)
- my experiences on hiring committees (where GRE scores weren’t an issue but things like letters of recommendation, grades, and personal statements were)
- broader ongoing conversations with colleagues about the challenges of finding reliable proxies with which to assess the success of our educational efforts.
What I have observed from these:
- There are extremely smart, capable people with severe test-anxiety. I’m talking puking-at-the-very-thought-of-sitting-fot-the-test anxiety. The people I’ve known with this manifest it most strongly when faced with standardized tests; generally they’ve found ways to deal with the other kinds of exams that are part of their schooling. I doubt that GRE scores would be reliable indicators of the fitness of such people for a position in an academic lab, unless that position involved taking standardized tests on a regular basis.
- My own success on standardized tests is mostly a measure of how well I understood the structure of those standardized tests. This is a lesson that was reinforced by my experience teaching others how to do better on standardized tests. I did not make my test prep students smarter about much of anything except strategies for taking the standardized tests. (In a few instances, my work with them may have helped them identify conceptual issues or problem solving skills that they needed to sharpen before test day, but again, I take it the “help” they got was primarily a matter of knowing what material and skills the test was going to assess.) Is understanding the structure of the GRE, or developing a good strategy for taking it, a crucial component of success in an academic lab? Probably not. Is it a reliable proxy for something that is? Maybe, but it would be nice to see an explanation of what that is rather than just putting our faith in the test to tell us about something that matters.
- Plenty of people with awesome test scores are hopeless in the lab. Plenty of people with non-awesome test scores are really successful in the lab. What’s the level of correlation? I don’t know, and you probably don’t either. Maybe someone should do an empirical study so we know.
- One place that standardized tests seem to be of use (or so I’ve heard repeatedly over the years from lots of admissions committee folks) is in “calibrating” grades, especially of schools with which one might have less familiarity. What does an A at Podunk U. mean compared to an A at Well-Known Tech? Presumably the GRE scores of the candidates give us some information (so, if they’re really low from the Podunk U. student, maybe Podunk U.’s As aren’t requiring the same level of mastery as Well-Known Tech’s As). But, there’s always the possibility that Well-Known Tech has a better developed organization from the point of view of getting its students into grad school, and that part of this might include in-house test prep. Also, what if the lone Podunk U. student who is applying to your program has test-anxiety?
- GRE scores are often thought of as an objective counterbalance to letters of recommendation because, as the common wisdom has it, letter writers lie. Or maybe they just put the best possible spin on the candidate’s talents. Or maybe they’re actually just overestimating the candidate’s potential. Or maybe they don’t write good enough letters for the students who are not like them in certain relevant respects (including scientific style, socioeconomic background, gender, race, sexuality, etc.). Surely, in many cases there is something like a positive bias in letters of recommendation (and some faculty will advise students to ask someone else for a letter if they themselves are unable to write a glowing recommendation). And, there are instances in which a letter writer will undervalue the talents and potential of students (although one hopes that the other letter writers in such cases will compensate). Still, the letters at least present a space in which actual concrete examples of the student’s awesomeness (or shortcomings) can be discussed. Some of these examples may touch on situations or challenges directly relevant to what the applicants may have to face in the academic lab in which they are seeking a position. Plus, at least in fields that are not totally enormous, there is (or could be) a professional cost to lying to a colleague in the profession, even in a letter of recommendation for a student.
- If I had to rely on just one proxy, it would be the applicant’s personal statement. Again, it strikes me that this is an instrument that creates a space where an applicant can describe past experiences and current interests, challenges overcome and lessons learned from them that might be applied to future challenges. A personal statement can give you a glimpse into what the applicant cares about and why. It can also give you a sense of whether the applicant can think and communicate clearly. However, this is probably another area where someone should do some empirical work to see what kind of correlation there actually is between the quality of the personal statement and the success of the applicant in the position for which the personal statement was part of the application package.
- Every single proxy we might look at to select among applicants can fail. It’s not clear to me that it could be otherwise, especially given that we’re using the proxies to try to predict future success, which you can’t do with perfect accuracy unless you have a machine for seeing into the future (and even then …).
- It strikes me that active thinking-on-your-feet interview questions might provide more relevant information. It used to be that you couldn’t really use these for things like grad school admission because you couldn’t afford to fly all your applicants out to campus. (By the time you saw prospective grad students, they were admits trying to choose between the programs that had accepted them.) But maybe now with tools like Skype those looking to make sensible choices among applicants should do some video interviewing?
- Then again, if video interview questions for lab positions become a thing, someone will probably set up a video interview preparation company.
Yeah, I’d say to take GRE scores with a grain of salt. But, I think that’s the right attitude to take to all the bits of evidence an applicant presents. Honestly, my attitude toward test scores probably has a lot to do with my knowledge about how easy it can be to do well on them (at least compared to the other pieces of one’s application package). It probably also has to do with at least a few gatekeepers who treated GRE scores as definitely more reliable simply because they were quantitative, rather than qualitative.
If you have an applicant-screening item that has never led you astray, please share it in the comments.
#scio12 traces in real life: sketch notes from my department meeting.
One of the highlights of ScienceOnline 2012 for me was getting to meet Perrin Ireland, a graphic facilitator who specializes in science communication, and to see her in action. Before the conference, Perrin had emailed to ask if she could “live scribe” the citizen science session Amy Freitag and I would be co-moderating, creating a visual record of the content of our discussion with markers on foam core boards as the session unfolded.
Of course, we accepted the offer, because how could we not? (Stills of Perrin’s work from our session and others can be seen in this post.)
Perrin also offered a Science Scribe 2.0 Workshop (which I missed, because one can only be so many places in a time), in which she taught participants how to create these visual records (“sketch notes”) and then turned them loose to practice these skills in other conference sessions. Here’s a slideshow with examples of their work.
Michele Arduengo participated in this workshop and gave a vivid (and illustrated) account of it on her blog. This was enough to embolden me, the Tuesday after the conference, to take sketch notes of our start-of-the-semester department meeting.
They are not nearly as visually arresting as the sketch notes that Perrin’s apprentices created at ScienceOnline. However, I did observe that being alert to how I could make my notes (of pretty mundane academic and administrative stuff) more visual seems to have gotten me to pay more attention to the meeting as it was happening — to look for unifying themes or recurring motifs, for example. And, it left me with a set of notes that, more than a week later, makes the big issues and small details easy to remember … which means that, potentially, my notes will actually be useful in a few months, too.
Friday Sprog Blogging: You call this living?
As I mentioned on the Twitters, when, upon my return from ScienceOnline 2012, my family members hit me with the question, “What did you get me?” they were thrilled that the answer included science-y watercolors by Michele Banks (who, by the way, has a show ongoing).
My favorite is this cute phage, not least because it prompted a conversation between the Free-Ride offspring.
Dr. Free-Ride: Isn’t this cool?
Younger offspring: It looks like a bug with a balloon on its butt.
Elder offspring: No, it’s a phage.
Younger offspring: What’s a phage?
Elder offspring: It’s a virus that eats bacteria.
Younger offspring: Aren’t viruses and bacteria the same thing? Don’t they both make you sick?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, viruses and bacteria both fit in the category of “germs”.
Younger offspring: Don’t they both make you sick? Isn’t bacteria the same level of bad as viruses? And why would a virus eat a bacteria? Wouldn’t that make the virus sick?
Dr. Free-Ride: There are some bacteria that are totally benign that are probably living in your intestine right now, without which you would have a hard time getting all the vitamins you need, for example. So, there are some bacteria that actually do good work for you.
Younger offspring: Oh.
Dr. Free-Ride: But there are definitely other bacteria that can make you sick.
Elder offspring: Like E. coli for bladder infections.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah.
Younger offspring: TMI.*
Dr. Free-Ride: To be fair, some of the bacteria that are in you, doing fine without making your life miserable, are E. coli. It’s particular strains of E. coli that can make you sick.
Younger offspring: Isn’t it bacterium?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, bacterium is the singular, bacteria is the plural. So … what’s the difference between a bacterium and a virus?
Elder offspring: A virus isn’t really living. The only thing that it does that is similar to living things is reproduce, and it doesn’t do that by itself — it needs a bacterium to reproduce.
Dr. Free-Ride: Say more about that. Is it like a photocopier, which reproduces but needs someone to push the button?
Younger offspring: Wait, if bacteria can help viruses reproduce, isn’t that another way for bacteria to hurt us?
Elder offspring: It’s not like the bacteria are doing it by choice!
Dr. Free-Ride: They are sort of being commandeered by the viruses, aren’t they?
Elder offspring: Yeah. The viruses just attach on and then insert their genetic material.
Dr. Free-Ride: And say, “Hey, bacterium …”
Elder offspring: “… do THIS instead of your normal life functions!”
Dr. Free-Ride: So, instead of your normal life functions, make more of the stuff that I’ve shot into you, which is basically virus-stuff?
Elder offspring: Yeah. And then when the bacterium gets too full of viruses? It goes BOOM! and all the viruses go find new homes.
Dr. Free-Ride: It explodes like an overheated spaghetti squash.**
Younger offspring: That wasn’t really needed.
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, you know, sometimes it’s good to have a mental image. OK, back to your claims that viruses aren’t alive. Strictly speaking, we humans need other stuff in our environment to conduct our life functions. I’m always curious about how we decide where to draw the line between what counts as being a living thing and what doesn’t. And I’ll bet there are probably some people who think that viruses ought to be on the “living” side of the line rather than the “non-living” side. What’s the justification for keeping viruses out of the club?
Elder offspring: They can’t produce energy by themselves.
Dr. Free-Ride: Whereas you can? Didn’t you recently have a conversation with an organelle that pointed out your shortcomings in this area?
Elder offspring: They can’t produce energy by way of mitochondria or whatnot.
Dr. Free-Ride: Ohhh, so because we have mitochondria, we can lord it over the viruses? You think having mitochondria is a requirement for being alive?
Elder offspring: No, you just need to produce energy from something to be alive. Just reproducing yourself isn’t enough. I’m pretty sure viruses don’t get energy, they just reproduce.
Dr. Free-Ride: Wouldn’t that suggest that they’re even more advanced than us “living things” in that they don’t need energy? I mean, they don’t have to stop to eat. They’re very nose to the grindstone, achieving the task at hand of making more of them.
Younger offspring: Except that viruses don’t have noses.
Dr. Free-Ride: Think of how much more you could get done if you didn’t have to stop to eat.
Elder offspring: But then I’d miss all the prettiful flavors.***
Dr. Free-Ride: For that matter, think of how many more of you there could be running around if you displayed the virus’ seriousness of purpose about making more of you.
Elder offspring: Ewwww. No.
Dr. Free-Ride: No, not in one of those bizarre animal kingdom kind of reproduction methods. We’re talking about you harnessing bacteria to multiply your genetic material.
Elder offspring: Yeah … still no. One of me is enough.
Younger offspring: Yes it is.
Glaring ensued. As it does.
_____
*Let the record reflect that the younger Free-Ride offspring was objecting to the general information that bladders can be infected, not objecting to an overshare of personal information (and indeed, it was general, not personal, information the elder Free-Ride offspring was sharing here).
**We did this accidentally not too long ago. It blew the door of the microwave oven open in spectacular fashion. It was still pretty tasty, and no one was hurt.
***In case you were wondering, this is a discussion that happened at the dinner table during dinner.
Things my mother never told me about astronomical observations.
Or, maybe my mother did tell me about this particular reason to “clean up” images from deep space and I just wasn’t paying attention? (But how could that be?)
When Super Sally has a chance, I hope she’ll check in (in the comments) to explain to us the optical principles behind these artifacts.
Tuesday Sprog Blogging: #scio12 storytelling and critters not imagined by my offspring.
So, Friday was busy here. Spring semester classes started on Wednesday, people want add codes to add my courses, students are making sure they know where everything is in the online section of my “Ethics in Science” course — the usual. But, I was also dealing with a larger than usual portion of ScienceOnline in my bloodstream* (as in the past it’s been about a week earlier in the calendar than it was this year).
Anyway. As usual, the Free-Ride offspring met my return to Casa Free-Ride and normal life (such as it is) with a barrage of questions about the conference. What did you see? What did you do? What did you learn? Who was there? What did you bring us? (More on that last question in the next Sprog Blogging installment.)
Among other things, I told the sprogs about the storytelling event at the Friday banquet, organized by The Monti. The sprogs dig a good story; it’s probably part of what got them interested in science. And, I decided they might enjoy listening to the podcast of two of the stories that we heard at the banquet, Ben Lillie‘s and Bug Girl‘s.
I’ll admit, I recognized that maybe Bug Girl’s story was on the edge of age-appropriate for my offspring (currently 10.5 and 12.5 years of age). However, they have always had a healthy interest in entomology and in parasites of various sorts. So, I threw caution to the wind.
In the process, I discovered that even though my offspring are well aware that humans approaching adulthood grow hair in a number of places that are not the head — and even though they each have more than theoretical knowledge of the habits of Pediculus humanus capitis (thank you, afterschool program!) — neither one of my worldly children had ever imagined that there might exist a critter that would regard a not-on-the-head tract of follicles as a hospitable environment. Indeed, the looks of sheer horror on their faces when they learned that there is such a thing as “pubic lice” was worth the price of conference registration.
Ours is a universe of wonders. Some of those wonders are exotic (and maybe gross) enough that they are hard to anticipate, until some intrepid explorer brings back reports of them, changing our sense of where we are and what we might encounter — and, of how squicked out we might be in that encounter.
I did mention to the Free-Ride offspring that I told one of the stories at the banquet. The younger Free-Ride offspring especially has been trying to get me to disclose details of the story I told. My answer has been, “When the podcast of it goes up, I’ll let you listen to it.”
I expect that after the sprogs listen to my story, there may be a discussion on which I’ll report here. Stay tuned.
______
*Also, as it turns out, in my hair shafts — not at all faded from ScienceOnline violet to almost normal beginning of the semester brown. One hopes my students won’t infer from my current hair color that I’m cooler than I actually am.
Friday Sprog Blogging: I hugged … hey, that’s not Bora!
An image from the elder Free-Ride offspring:
Hug a Tarantula. They Appreciate it Too.
So far at ScienceOnline 2012 I have not noticed any tarantulas, let alone sized them up for hugging. Should you encounter a tarantula in your immediate environment, use your own judgment on the hugs.
Things to read on my other blog: lab safety, open access, and lads’ mags.
For those of you who mostly follow my writing here on “Adventures in Ethics and Science,” I thought I should give you a pointer to some things I’ve posted so far this month (which is almost half-over already?!) on my other blog, “Doing Good Science”. Feel free to jump in to the discussions in the comments over there. Or, if you’re daunted by the need to register to comment at SciAm, go ahead and discuss them here.
Suit against UCLA in fatal lab fire raises question of who is responsible for safety. You should also read the posts on this case by Prof-like Substance and Chemjobber.
The Research Works Act: asking the public to pay twice for scientific knowledge.
Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1).
Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 2).
Dr. Hegarty is one of the authors of that paper we discussed here in December on the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality.
Friday Sprog Blogging: Interview with a Chloroplast.
Yes, it’s been a while. This week, I was able to have enough of a conversation with the elder Free-Ride offspring to discover a homework assignment that looked … a lot like a conversation about science.
In this case, it’s a conversation between the elder Free-Ride offspring (“Me”) and a chloroplast (“Chloroplast”). Big ups to my child’s science teacher for giving assignments that can generate content for this blog (and for letting kids type their homework so I can copy the file rather than having to transcribe).
Me: So, what exactly are you?
Chloroplast: I am an organelle found in the cytoplasm of plant cells and a few kinds of bacteria.
Me: How many of you are there per cell?
Chloroplast: It depends on the organism. There are about thirty to forty of me per leaf cell, but in a certain type of single-celled alga, there is only one of me.
Me: What do you do for the organisms you are a part of?
Chloroplast: I capture the energy of the sun and use that energy, along with some carbon dioxide and water, to make glucose for the cell.
Me: Wow, that’s amazing! Is that the process that plants use to make their own food?
Chloroplast: Yes, it is. That process is called photosynthesis.
Me: Is it anything like making a sandwich?
Chloroplast: What!? No! Of course not!!!
Me: Did I offend you? Or do you just not care for a nice, delicious BLT?
Chloroplast: Of COURSE you offended me! We chloroplasts don’t use other organisms to make food! And especially not organisms that contain other chloroplasts!
Me: Okay, I’m sorry. How do you cook up some glucose in place of a sandwich?
Chloroplast: It’s more like engineering than cooking, you know. First, I store energy from the sun and obtain six molecules each of carbon dioxide and water.
Me: How do you get the water?
Chloroplast: It’s carried up to the leaves, where I live with my fellow chloroplasts, by the roots. Now, as I was saying, once I get those compounds, I use the light energy to remove their bonds. Then, I rearrange the elements and make them into a glucose molecules and six O² molecules. The glucose is used by the cell for its daily functions, and the oxygen is expelled from the plant by the leaf’s stomata.
Me: Whoa! I didn’t know that plants did chemistry!
Chloroplast: Believe it. Bask in our autotrophic glory, you inferior heterotroph.
Me: By the way, you do know that cooking is just a form of chemistry-
Chloroplast: Shut up.
Me: Okay, another question. Are all organelles as rude as the chloroplasts, or is it a unique feature?
Chloroplast: It’s not at all unique. You should hear the nucleus sometime.
Me: Now then, I’ve been wondering about this. How do you absorb the light energy?
Chloroplast: I have a green pigment inside me called chlorophyll. It absorbs red and blue light. Chlorophyll is what turns plants a lovely shade of green, and not your ugly human skin tone.
Me: I have something else to do now. Thank you for your time.
Chloroplast: Wait! I’m not done gloating about my other superior features!
Me: Too bad. Good bye, you jerkwad of an organelle.