K-12 education
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I saw “Whiplash“. It’s awesome. This is what its IMDB blurb says: “A promising young drummer enrolls at a cutthroat music conservatory where his dreams of greatness are mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student’s potential.” This movie got me thinking, again, about talent vs hard work, external pressure vs internal drive.
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Zinemin has a great post on understanding physics (and math) in high school. I started writing a comment, then it got so long-winded that I decided (for once) to not hog other people’s comment threads with my verbosity, but to put it all in a post. Here’s what the comment would have been (Zinemin is a physicist,
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In science, a potential answer to a problem is either right or wrong. But when it comes to teaching and learning, and especially grading student exams, there is wrong and then there is WROOONG. Here’s an example. Let’s say you need to compute a certain distance that has to do with the behavior of electrons in a nanostructure. Correct answer:
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A few weeks ago I posted on my disorienting foray into the Twilight Zone world of high-school athletics at Eldest’s new school. It’s all very macho. The swim team recently went on a dads-and-boys daylong canoeing trip; some dads went, but DH didn’t go. (By the way, it’s not even clear that the kid will make the team
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— I am an associate editor of a specialized disciplinary journal. I try my best to include junior researchers (postdocs, young profs or nonacademic scientists, even some senior graduate students) as reviewers when I know they do good work based on what I have heard or seen them present at conferences. It turns out, a surprisingly high number of people
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My eldest is starting high school in the fall and I can already tell it will be tough. Not for him — for me. A stereotypical high school athlete is very competitive and usually participates in more than one sport. Eldest has some very stereotypically athletic friends, but is not one himself. However, he has swum for many
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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 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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The semester started last week. I am again teaching a junior/senior elective for majors and it looks like it might be a rough semester. The course I am teaching follows a basic, required course in the major. I find the students are poorly prepared, more poorly than the class I had last semester. The students are
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