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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…
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Lately, I have been reviewing proposals and playing a game with myself called “Guess how many grants the PI already has based solely on flipping through the proposal to see the formatting.” The correlation is quite pronounced: people who have a reader-friendly layout are universally better funded than those who don’t. When you start reading,…
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In a comment thread on someone else’s blog, I can’t remember whose, a commenter said that they never understood how or why teaching and research were related. The following is a truth universally acknowledged, but I am going to say it anyway: You have no idea how much you don’t know about something until it’s…
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Tenure is a major landmark in the life of an academic scientist. While its original purpose was to protect academic freedom and enable professors to teach what they felt appropriate, without fear of retribution, this is not a major concern for most academic scientists and engineers. For STEM folks, tenure means job security and is…
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Two of my big grants are expiring in 2015. The NSF one cannot really be renewed; I basically need to apply for a completely new grant. The other one is in principle a competitive renewal, but is a renewal nonetheless, and I have high expectations of funding as we are quite productive on that project…
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I live and work in the US and am an American citizen, but I am not US-born; I came here to go to grad school. I spent my formative years in a small European country and had the equivalent of K-12 and undergrad education in a system considerably different than the one in the US. As…
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