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Meet Erica Goldson, the 2010 valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens High School: The full transcript of her speech is here. Your Thoughts?
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
High School Valedictorian Lambasts The Priorities Of US Educational System
August 7th, 2010 
Daniel Fincke Qualia Soup On Skewed Views Of Science
July 15th, 2010 Daniel Fincke An old Qualia Soup video I missed in the past. Thanks to Critical Thinker for the heads up. Your Thoughts?
Changing Minds
June 12th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television. (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the [...]
Those Who Can’t Do, Create Knights
June 2nd, 2010 Daniel Fincke Newly knighted, Sir Patrick Stewart explains his debt to a teacher: When asked what had sparked his interest in acting, Sir Patrick replied: ”When I leave here I will be going to a luncheon that has been arranged and sitting on my right will be a man called Cecil Dormand who was my English teacher [...]
Jon Stewart’s 2004 Commencement Speech At William And Mary
May 28th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Listen here to Jon Stewart’s 2004 commencement speech, delivered at his alma mater The College of William and Mary. I heard it several years ago and I’ve thought of it often since. In both his humor and his substance, Dr. Stewart really, really gets it right and gives the graduands the most relevant advice. Click [...]
Posted in Comedy, Education, Hilarious 
Tags: 9/11, Commencement Speeches, Jon Stewart, The College of William and Mary 
No Comments »Daily Hilarity: Grading Rubric
May 22nd, 2010 Daniel Fincke This is really, really what it’s like to grade: Your Thoughts?
A Statement Of My Teaching Philosophy
November 9th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I believe that the best teachers are both rigorous and kind. In terms of rigor, my syllabi are usually demanding in terms of the quantity of philosophers and major topics they cover and the quality of readings that they assign. I give comprehensive exams, demand their writing shows signs of philosophical talent for an A, [...]
Simon Blackburn On Philosophy’s Contributions
November 6th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In the UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills intends to assess “the benefits of postgraduate study for all relevant stakeholders” and “the evidence about the needs of employers for postgraduates.” Philosopher Simon Blackburn answered a request for faculty comments with a letter worth reading in full. A couple highlights: (1) Our postgraduate philosophy [...]
Posted in Academic Disciplines, Education, Philosophy Tags: David Hume, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simon Blackburn No Comments »Non-Tenured Faculty’s Freedom Of Speech
October 12th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Bing posts an interview with AAUP president Cary Nelson about academic freedom concerns of contingent faculty: Being “contingent faculty” myself, I must first say I appreciate at least that Nelson is concerned about us and how we are doing. But I do not think I heard in what he had to say any concrete information [...]
Learning To Love The Bomb (And Other Advice To Live By From Stephen Colbert)
October 6th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I identify with Colbert so much in these paragraphs: “The first director I had at Second City said, ‘You have to learn to love the bomb,’ and I didn’t know what he meant for a very long time,” Colbert says. “But there’s something nice about getting to the point where you enjoy the feeling that [...]
Posted in Education Tags: Challenge, Failure, Happiness, Risk, Stephen Colbert, The Word No Comments »Lights, Camera, Ethics!
September 28th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The ethics lectures of Harvard’s Michael J. Sandel are getting high quality video presentation and dissemination: it is the first time that public broadcasters can remember a regular college course’s being presented on television. What’s more, it is also a highly produced multimedia event, with high-definition video, interactive Webcasts, podcasts, a new book and a [...]
Posted in Education, Ethics, News Tags: Birth Order, Harvard University, Itunes, John Rawls, Merit, Michael Sandel, Mr. Burns, PBS, Philosophers In Public Eye, Philosophy News, Sanders Theater, The Simpsons No Comments »Zombie Cockroaches! (And Other Dissertation Haikus)
September 22nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke When you spend years writing away at a dissertation you learn how to do at least one thing exceedingly well—and that’s to describe your dissertation distinctly and succinctly. And sometimes succinctly means boiling it down to just a paragraph or a couple sentences or even one sentence. Or a haiku. Like these people have done: [...]
Are We In The Midst Of A Literacy Revolution Unseen Since The Greeks?
September 21st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Clive Thompson reports that Stanford’s Andrea Lunsford thinks so: It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school [...]
On The Symbolism Of Book Destruction
September 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Over the past few days we’ve been discussing creationists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron’s plan to freely disseminate 50,000 copies of a new version of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species which they are putting out and which contains a deceptive, creationist introduction filled with bad science and false history. RichardDawkins.net and Pharyngula have encouraged people not only to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Civil Liberties, Creationism, Cultural Secularism, Education, Featured, Free Speech, Intelligent Design, Political Secularism, Politics, PZ Myers, Secularism Tags: Barack Obama, Book Burning, Book Mutilation, Censorship, Joe Wilson, Kirk Cameron, Ray Comfort, Ray Comfort's Version of Origin of Species, RichardDawkins.net, Symbolism No Comments »Top 10 Favorite Atheist/Rationalist YouTube Channels
September 12th, 2009 Daniel Fincke This last three months I’ve spent blogging, I’ve learned my away around the atheist internet and been delighted by how many wonderful resources there are, between websites, blogs, videos, discussion forums, etc. And not only the videos but some of the video channels run by extraordinarily creative or at least patiently argumentative creators of original [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Comedy, Creationism, Cultural Secularism, Education, Hilarious, Mr. Deity, News Discussion, Parody, Pat Condell, Political Secularism, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Satire, Secularism, Videos Tags: 10 Ten Rationalist Video Channels, Derren Brown, Edward Current, GoGreen18, Laci Green, Non Stamp Collector, Qualia Soup, Richard Dawkins, RichardDawkins.net, The Atheist Experience, Thunderf00t, Top 10 Atheist Video Channels, Top 10 Lists, Top 10 YouTube Videos, Youtube, ZJemptv 19 Comments »Judge This: Derren Brown False Lesson In Mathematics For Britain
September 12th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I was really irritated last night by Derren Brown’s choice to use his lottery trick on national TV in Britain to propagate fundamentally bogus mathematical thinking and to convince a group of people that their belief in their abilities to reach into the subconscious was able to generate knowledge of winning lottery ticket numbers. It’s [...]
Philosophy Degree Surprisingly Lucrative
September 11th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Not for me yet but apparently on average it’s a first step to more lucrative careers than more than half of the rest of the majors on this interesting ranking. Your Thoughts?
Posted in Education, Philosophy Tags: College Degrees, Philosophy Degree, Philosophy Majors No Comments »Harvard And Yale Lose Billions
September 10th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Rather mind-boggling numbers: Harvard’s endowment tumbled 27.3 percent in its latest fiscal year, largely because of problems with its private equity and hedge fund portfolios, lopping off $10 billion and shrinking its portfolio to $26 billion. Meanwhile, Yale University suffered about a 30 percent loss in its portfolio, to $16 billion, the university’s president disclosed in [...]
Religious Professors Mocking Students’ Loss Of Faith
September 8th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The Peaceful Atheist, a Wheaton graduate who lost her faith early in her time at the Evangelical college describes being alienated by Wheaton professors using anecdotes of their former students who’d left the faith as “cautionary tales”: While I was at Wheaton I only came out to 2 professors, and it took both an extremely [...]
They Might Be Paleontologists
September 3rd, 2009 Daniel Fincke They Might Be Giants have a new DVD, Here Comes Science, which promotes science to kids. PZ Myers got the chance to preview it and is tickled. Here is their cute kiddie video, I Am A Paleontologist: Your Thoughts?
Posted in Comedy, Education, Evolution, Music Videos, PZ Myers, Science, Videos Tags: Kids Stuff, Kids Videos, Paleontology, They Might Be Giants No Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In a previous post, I discussed how theist Rod Dreher was led to some introspection and cultural criticism based on reading he was doing about the pervasiveness of distortive rationalizations in our thinking. In that context, he tried to compare religious and atheistic rationalizations as similar in kind, as both kinds of faiths. In that [...]
Unemployment Or Grad School?
August 25th, 2009 Daniel Fincke When I started grad school in 2000, my stipend was almost half that average. But it’s hard to complain when you’re being paid to learn what you love, cultivate your mind, and prepare for (hopeful) entrance into an elite profession with eventual bullet proof job security and the possibility of working well into your later [...]
Does Being A Theologian Require Being A Religious Believer?
August 23rd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Earlier today Deane Gilbraith discussed Kurt Noll’s distinctions between theology and philosophers of religion from The Chronicle of Higher Education (which we linked to three weeks ago without much comment.) Gilbraith’s commentator Roland objected to Noll in the following way: On another line – ‘theologians practice and defend religion’. In short, theology is apologetics, a [...]
Posted in Academic Disciplines, Featured Tags: Philosophy of Religion, Special Revelation, Theology 6 Comments »A Trove Of Experimental Philosophy Papers
August 22nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke For those unfamiliar with the growing “experimental philosophy” movement, there are some philosophers in tandem with psychologists doing interesting work that has tried to study questions posed by contemporary moral philosophers by employing experimental means. They are trying to uncover what our moral intuitions really are like and how they actually function. Of course moral [...]
Posted in Academic Disciplines, Education, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Psychology Tags: Experimental Philosophy No Comments »Nietzsche Source And Nietzsche Grid
August 22nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Carlos Ruiz is working on an internet source that organizes references to Nietzsche on various topics to make his work more searchable. I take it is something of an e-concordance he wants to design. He’s calling it a “Nietzsche Grid” and is taking input on the project here. And, far more importantly, there is the [...]
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