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Is it just me, or is everyone’s spring semester more difficult than the fall? Every so often, and for some reason the spring occurrences seem more memorable, I fall into this relentless work vortex. And it’s hard to tell what it is that I do that’s so much more ominous or voluminous than usual. Just……
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Career women face a double bind: the more competent and assertive they are, the less liked they are (these traits are positively correlated with likability for men, negatively for women), and reduced likability makes women less effective as leaders . If they are not very assertive, they may be well-liked but they are not perceived as…
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There is a small programming assignment I like to give my beginning grad students or upper-level undergrads who want to do research in my group. The assignment is a reasonably simple but quite accurate simulation of a system they all encountered during undergraduate studies. Most students never really ask themselves what the approximations are that…
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I don’t really like winter. Actually, most of the time I really really hate it; I can’t wait for the spring, and I am grumpy and whiny on account of weather for months on end. If you meet me in real life, and the topic of weather comes up as it invariably does, I am…
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This semester I am again teaching a class with zero girls (as I wrote before, I feel silly calling 19 or 20-year old girls women; based on the fact that I didn’t consider myself a woman well until after kid No 2 and past the age of 30, I am sticking to calling them girls).…
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I talked with a senior colleague a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that grade distributions have become increasingly bimodal. There are kids who have high scores and kids with very low scores, and very few students in between. The colleague said it didn’t use to be like that, that the students 20-30 years…
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If you are a professor on the semester system, you have probably just finished administering your first midterm for the spring, or are about to. I used to go for long evening midterms and a long final (2 hrs each), and decided these were a nightmare to schedule and a nightmare to grade. After every…
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I had a really, really long day. I spent 12 hours at work, and much of it on face time. I prepped a class, then taught the class, then spent the next 7 hours meeting with a total of 14 different students: 2 for office hours, 3 who are my research students about various points…
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By way of Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings, I find that the flipped classroom is no more; a new “paradigm-shifting” educational fad is in town, and it is called the scrambled classroom. While we are waiting for the breakfast meat initiative to complete the Grand Slam of education, here are a few options for those who don’t like…
xykademiqz 