Friend of the blog LO alerted me to The Great Turtle Race, wherein a passel of leatherback sea turtles “race” from Playa Grande in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. The linked website it tracking the turtles via satellite, so you can watch their progress and root for your favorite. (I’m pulling for Stephanie Colburtle, “an intensely patriotic turtle who can fly through the water like an eagle”.) There is also information there about leatherback sea turtle populations and ways you can help protect them.
Reeling from today’s news.
Today was fully scheduled for me. Prepping for class, participating in a phone interview, teaching, midday meeting with my department chair and a dean to discuss developing an ethics module for an intro class in another department, more teaching, power-photocopying for this week’s Socrates Cafe, then a dash to the car to get the sprogs in time for elder offspring’s soccer practice.
It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into my drive home that I heard the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech.
Friday Sprog Blogging: five second rule
Overheard at the Free-Ride dinner table on the occasion of the elder Free-Ride offspring dropping a piece of broccoli:
Younger offspring: Pick it up! 1-2-3-4– that was close!
Elder offspring: (having retrieved the piece of broccoli from the floor) You’re counting your seconds too fast. You should say, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, …”
Younger offspring: But I wanted to be sure you got it before it was too late and you couldn’t eat it any more.
Dr. Free-Ride: I think you guys are taking the five second rule a little too seriously.
Elder offspring: You’re the one who always calls it.
Dr. Free-Ride: Then I’m the one who should lead the critical examination of it.
What exactly are grades supposed to mean?
I’m just back from a committee meeting at which the subject of grades and grade distributions came up, and it became clear to me that academics (even at the same institution, even in the same field) have wildly different philosophies about just what grades ought to mean.
Is solving the absenteeism/attendance issue really a matter of framing?
After I posted on the issue twice and Julie posted on it once (although she might blog further on it), I got a brainwave about what’s at the core of our frustration with our students who ditch lots of classes.
At bottom, it’s our feeling that we are not succeeding in our attempts to communicate with them — about why being in class can help them succeed in a course, about the value that course could have beyond filling a necessary requirement for graduation, about the larger value a college education could have in their lives. We’re trying to get all this across, but sometimes we wonder whether we’re the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown special; to the kids, what we’re saying might as well be “WAH-WAH WAH WAH WAH” (as played by a trombone).
And perhaps the reason our attempts at communicating with our students are failing is that we are not framing these attempts as well as we could.
A few more words on the class-attendance issue.
The reponses to my earlier post on an admittedly nutty idea to get students to come to class seem, so far, to hold that the choice of whether or not to attend class ought to rest solely with the college student, and that he or she ought to live with the consequences of that choice. (Also, there was a fair bit of reminiscing about pointless class meetings that had been attended and about classes aced despite chronic absenteeism.)
I don’t disagree that cultivating a sense of personal responsibility is a good thing (nor that poorly planned or poorly delivered lectures are bad). But how to cultivate that sense of responsibility is the head-scratcher, especially when one’s students seem to have a very different motivation structure than one remembers having when one was a student.
Incentivizing class attendance.
Over sushi last night, Julie and I had one of those “kids today!” discussions so common among people teaching college students. The locus of our old-fart incomprehension was the reluctance of a significant number of students to actually attend class meetings, even when not attending class meetings has disasterous (and entirely predictable) consequences. (For example, some significant number of Julie’s students are now at the point where it is numerically impossible for them to pass the course, and this is strongly correlated with their absenteeism — not their writing skills.)
We didn’t ditch our classes when we were undergraduates. Wasn’t that where the learning was going to happen? Wasn’t there a reason we weren’t just buying textbooks and trying to teach ourselves? (And what would our professors have thought of us if we had cut more classes than we attended? Who would want to carry around that kind of shame?)
Clearly, our students are making decisions differently than we used to. Just as clearly, they seem to miss — to their detriment — that class meetings are frequently essential to their academic success. What could we possibly do to help them get themselves to class?
2007 Science Spring Showdown: Kuhn vs. Theory coverage!
PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Janet: Welcome to team coverage of the much anticipated Chair Bracket match between Kuhn and Theory!
Ben: Yes, I think we can agree on our assumptions that this will be quite a battle.
Janet: I certainly hope so, Ben. Otherwise, we’re going to spend the whole game talking past each other!
Friday Sprog Blogging: rabbits
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s kindergarten class has been discussing rabbits for the last week or so. I can only hope the high school kids have been discussing the molecular structure of theobromine (the main alkaloid in chocolate) and working out the phase of matter of the interior of Peeps.
Hierarchy, meritocracy, the blogosphere, and the real world.
Those who follow the political blogs more closely than I do were probably aware eons ago that some of the A-list political bloggers significantly trimmed their blogrolls (while dubbing it, strangely enough, a blogroll “amnesty”). Others, like Terrance at the Republic of T (who is as close to the Platonic form of Serious and Engaging Blogger as any blogger of whom I’m aware), took note of this just recently, with a thougtful post about the interactions of the various “tiers” of the blogosphere and the ways hierarchies get entrenched. Chris Clarke and Pam Spaulding also wrote insightfully about this (and I find it reassuring that these smart and informed people are just now examining an issue which a lot of people might deem “so yesterday”).
Anyway, the reason I want to weigh in on the great blogroll purge is that I see a connection to issues that Zuska raised recently about the community — and hierarchies — within the scientific world.