Adam Digests: Thoughts About Teaching and Learning

explore-blog: Whenever the subject of women in science comes...

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:19:43 -0400

Whenever the subject of women in science comes up, there are people fiercely committed to the idea that sexism does not exist. They will point to everything and anything else to explain differences while becoming angry and condescending if you even suggest that discrimination could be a factor. But these people are wrong. This data shows they are wrong.

Despite what Einstein may have advised a girl looking to go into science, a new study demonstrates the persistent gender bias amongst science faculty, thwarting a truly equal opportunity.

As Scientific American’s Ilana Yurkiewicz puts it, “This is really important. This is really important.” Read it.

Everyone may have read this already, but here it is in case you haven’t: Gender Bias in Science. The above graphs show significant results for bias amongst scientists based on the gender of an applicant for a lab manager position who also intends to pursue a graduate degree.

(via Reframing the dialog about STEM education to put girls...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:07:35 -0400

(via Reframing the dialog about STEM education to put girls back in the equation - UMaine Today Magazine)

UMaine Today asked four University of Maine researchers to share their perspectives on why girls and women continue to be absent from this nation’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics equation. All four are involved in STEM-related initiatives on campus, and their work informs state and national dialog.

explore-blog: Mathemusician Vi Hart is back with anti-parabola...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:47:41 -0400

explore-blog:

Mathemusician Vi Hart is back with anti-parabola propaganda and some musing on math class, cardioids, connect the dots, envelopes of lines, even a bit of origami. Also see Hart’s Fibonacci numbers explained in stop-motion vegetables, the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip, and the science of sound, frequency, and pitch in stop-motion doodles.

"Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make."

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 11:49:06 -0400

“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”

-
10 rules for students, teachers and life by John Cage, who passed away 20 years ago today. (via explore-blog)

At a conference on campus earlier this summer, Eugenia Etkina outlined for the audience her orientation towards learning and urged the rest of us to do the same for ourselves. I’ve been thinking about this on and off since then and this quote addresses one aspect of my personal orientation.

"There is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective."

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 17:54:48 -0400

“There is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.”

- Jon Stewart contrasts college with the real world in his William & Mary commencement address, a fine addition to some of history’s most memorable commencement addresses. (via explore-blog)

2012swingstates: thedailyfeed: Confidence in U.S. public...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:43:29 -0400

2012swingstates:

thedailyfeed:

Confidence in U.S. public schools plunged to a scary new all-time low — just 29 percent! And schools aren’t alone. Across the board, it looks like Americans are losing faith in institutions.

Other record lows were recorded for the church or organized religion, 44 percent; banks, 21 percent; and television news, 21 percent.

Congress ranked last — as it has for the last three years — at 13 percent.

— ICYMI

Victorian Synth (by Adam Kaczynski) My favorite concert venue...

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:27:16 -0400

Victorian Synth (by Adam Kaczynski)

My favorite concert venue recently started hosting some homemade electronics workshops run by a noise/electronic musician. They created contact mics in the last workshop, but today they were making Victorian synthesizers. I couldn’t go, but I did do a little reading and figured out how to make my own. The original premise behind John Bowers’ Victorian synth was to create something that would have many of the same abilities as a modern synthesizer, but only using Victorian age technology. The simplest version requires only a speaker, a battery smaller than 9V, and some conducting materials.

I’m not particularly familiar with the technology from the Victorian age. I’m also not up on how speakers work exactly (I do know that there are electromagnets involved), so I’m going to have to take the original creator’s word when he says that the voltage control will have to be electro-mechanical rather than electronic. The key then is to use the speaker’s own movement as part of the input, completing the circuit or breaking it to apply a voltage across the speaker at a (hopefully) controllable frequency. I tried to show at least some variation in the pitch in the video by changing how hard I pushed back against the speaker, but it’s definitely not easy. It was fun, though, and really simple to build. And it’s such a weird application, I have to wonder how students might react to working with it (and how plausible it might be to build an electronics course around noise music).

For anyone that’s interested, the creator’s page for his Victorian Synthesizer is here (http://www.jmbowers.net/works/victorian.html). His setup is a bit more complicated, and sounds at least slightly more pleasing.

GRADING PAPERS

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:35:03 -0400

whatshouldwecallgradschool:

credit: Peebs

I mostly like this blog. Humor and common experiences usually make for something enjoyable. But every time that something is posted about undergraduate students, they have a tone of frustration or shaming. As a teacher and education researcher this makes me incredibly disappointed. It’s part of my attitude toward teaching and learning that most of the time instructors deserve as much or more of the blame for poor student performance as the students themselves. I may have driven my officemates a bit crazy by countering every utterance of “my students don’t seem to have learned (blank)” with “maybe we haven’t really been teaching them (blank) well then”. It took me a while to start being comfortable with a shift of blame that puts me as the point of failure, but it’s one that pushes me to always do better.

"I do not know much about writing rap lyrics, but I’m guessing that most rappers do not meet with..."

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:01:41 -0400

“I do not know much about writing rap lyrics, but I’m guessing that most rappers do not meet with physicists and cosmologists from MIT and Cornell before sitting down to write. But that’s exactly what Wu-Tang Clan founding member GZA did during the creation of his new album, Dark Matter — a project the rapper hopes will turn his audience on to science.”

- GZA and Neil deGrasse Tyson team up on a hip-hop record about science (via poptech)

"Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:06:15 -0400

“

Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

”

-
A Liberal Decalogue – Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments of teaching, a timeless micro-manifesto for educators and critical thinkers alike. (via explore-blog)

This seems like a pretty good list of commandments to me.

impostorsyndrome: Pretty. Low res LCD ribbon at North Caroline...

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:05:43 -0400

impostorsyndrome:

Pretty. Low res LCD ribbon at North Caroline Museum of Natural Science.

I don’t recall ever seeing LCD at this scale, which makes it quite amazing.

jtotheizzoe: jessbennett: In a room of 25 engineers, only...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:00:05 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

jessbennett:

In a room of 25 engineers, only three will be women. Tumblrs aiming to curb the STEM divide:

* IAmScience

* This is What a Scientist Looks Like

* Big Black Glasses

* Malibu Einstein

* It’s OK To Be Smart

Who am I missing?? (h/t ashdryden)

Thanks to Jess for picking this up! Let’s add to this list. Who ya got?

explore-blog: Adam Savage on how simple ideas can lead to big...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:59:32 -0400

explore-blog:

Adam Savage on how simple ideas can lead to big scientific discoveries, Eratosthenes’ calculation of the Earth’s circumference around 200 BC to Hippolyte Fizeau’s measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

I was running errands only and hour or so ago and somehow became curious about what was done to determine that light actually has a speed (and why, as a physicist, did I not know this already). And then I ran across this video, completely coincidentally.

Previews of some upcoming posts

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:43:53 -0500

I’ve had two posts that I’ve been meaning to make for a while. The first one will be about what I think made the intro physics lab that I taught last semester an enjoyable experience for me and many of the students. The other was originally going to be a short tale about how I ended up in the field of physics education research, but it will now be a little bit bigger thanks to the following tweet:

Students in the hall: “This is BS. I have no idea why anyone would choose to be a physics major.”
— Brian Frank (@brianwfrank) March 2, 2012

The reason I want to write about how I started in PER is because I can look back and say that I didn’t have the best reasons for doing it. The same is true when I think back to why I started my undergraduate career as a physics major, graduated as one, and started grad school. Yet, I somehow managed to end up doing something that I enjoy, and that helps me see how my experiences with classroom physics may have led me to those ill-informed choices. I think I’m ready to try to pull this all together and talk about how it relates to my interests in both research and instruction.

lookslikescience: Dear Science, When I started my undergrad in...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:29:54 -0500

lookslikescience:

Dear Science,

When I started my undergrad in 2005 I thought I was doing it because I wanted to know things about the world. But the more I learned, the more aware I became of the limits of my knowledge, and it seemed I could never ever keep up. Then the internet introduced you and I properly in 2007, during a lonely Easter holiday studying in a foreign country, and you taught me what I wanted all along wasn’twhat to know, it was how to know.

And now that I have those tools, not knowing isn’t such a scary thing, because I’ve discovered that the process of finding out is most of the fun anyway.

Science, I owe you a lot, and so I offer you my love (and some sanity too, as a PhD student).

Gwehydd

It was the “what to know” that attracted me, but it is the “how to know” that got me to stay.

Science: It's Really, Really Hard, And That's Something To Celebrate : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:26:35 -0500

Science: It's Really, Really Hard, And That's Something To Celebrate : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR:

The premise of this article is that science is hard, but that there is good reason for that to be the case, that discovering the Truth* should not be easy. I won’t disagree that professional science is hard. I’ve experienced that and have had my fair share of struggles with learning and doing science, but I feel that saying that all science is difficult is deceptive. It devalues the sorts of science that people do in their everyday lives. Calculated guesses are made about what might be the quickest route to a place and results are found. Changes in diet and exercise are compared to changes in body weight. The amount of ground coffee that goes into the coffee machine can vary until you figure out what gives you the perfect cup. These examples certainly aren’t part of the search for the Truth, but they illustrate something different: people are already doing science. They may not be applying the same rigor that we expect from a professional scientist, but they are seeing results and coming to conclusions just the same. Rather than celebrate the difficulty of science, I want to celebrate the accessibility of science. And from there, we can help show the value of professional science, so that someone is able to say “Yes, this is the best cup of coffee. And here is how I know”.

*This was the article’s capitalization, not mine.

jtotheizzoe: This Is What A Scientist Looks Like A new Tumblr...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:15:05 -0500

jtotheizzoe:

This Is What A Scientist Looks Like

A new Tumblr that is setting out to change the perception of what the world sees when they think “scientist”. I’ll have to submit something here.

Love, love, love this idea. Previously: 7th graders draw scientists, nerdy stereotypes ensue.

Scientist friends, submit your own!!

There was a series on PBS or NPR that was doing something similar with videos, but I love the idea.

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool : NPR

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:28:06 -0500

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool : NPR:

From the article:

Maryland’s Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads, but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them — lecturing isn’t enough anymore.

“With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it,” Redish says. “Get ‘em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”

"We would be wise to remember that we writers are first makers. That we can make paper, any size we..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:09:00 -0500

“

We would be wise to remember that we writers are first makers. That we can make paper, any size we like, not just the 8.5” x 11” American default of the “letter size,” out of wood pulp. That we can hand mix our inks. That we can physically letterpress those inks into that paper and feel the physical impression. That we can hand-bind and stitch. That we can photocopy. Cut the pages how we like. Handprint on whatever part of the book we like. That we can do whatever we want with design. That we aren’t stuck with the default margins, the double-spacing, the Times New Roman, the Lulu or iUniverse presets. The standard English. The standard syntax. The realist, prose-transparent third-person stories featuring timely epiphanies. The autocapitalized first letters of sentences, or lines. The autocorrected grammar. The sort of narrative or lyric in style at the time.

These defaults, these shortcuts are useful. They save time. They reduce the number of variables. They speak to certain readerships, certain genres. They are required by some standard book formats, convenient technologies of printing and binding and distribution. We are after all in a world of near-paralyzing capability thanks to technology. But if every shortcut goes unexamined, if we think our only job as writers is to write nice sentences and hand them off to someone else, we risk not knowing what makes our sentences nice or how to pry apart nice into the risky energy of new. We risk obsolescence or, at the least, irrelevance.

Are we providing content? Or are we writing books?

If we expect readers to participate with our texts, our sentences, our lines, our books (or our ebooks), we must participate more fully in the making of our books. We must make space for them to participate in the physical artifact of the book, to think about its form, the pacing of the page turning, the leading between lines, the smell of paper, to understand why this book, this object, is the best form to experience and participate in the story we’re telling.

”

- Ander Monson :: Oh It’s an Advent Calendar 2011

It just so happens that this year one of my favorite authors has decided to put together an online advent calendar. This excerpt comes from an essay that he posted on December 2 titled “Finallyfast.com and Playing the Book”. As I read it, I couldn’t help but draw connections between his thoughts about writing and my thoughts about teaching.

physicsphysics: Let’s be real… You know its true! Statements...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:20:05 -0500

physicsphysics:

Let’s be real… You know its true!

Statements like this are exactly why I care about people’s attitudes and expectations towards science. (Even the reasonable people at NPR reblogged this in solidarity with the statement, so you know it’s serious.)