academia
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Have you ever noticed how certain words or certain phenomena seem never to be on your radar, you may even be completely oblivious to them, only to show up repeatedly over a very short time span? I remember a few years back coming across the word sinister, not exactly a word frequently used in daily
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I have been thinking recently about what we, as professors, owe the department and the university where we work in terms of service. Let me start by stating that I understand we all have to do service, and that doing very little is extremely uncollegial. With teaching, it is clear that we have a duty
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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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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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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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