Because we’re all geeks and nerds.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Because we’re all geeks and nerds.
This story strikes a little close to home, because I’ve faced exactly the same kinds of complaints from some of my students — except that these are Religious Studies students. They are very upset because they consider one of the questions on a standard exam to be “unfair”. Here’s the question:
Question four on Islam, worth 20 marks, gave candidates a quotation referring to the Qur’an and the prophet Muhammad. Then it asked candidates: “With reference to the quotation, analyse the role played by the revelation through the Prophet in the life of Muslims.”
It sounds reasonable to me. They’re students of religion — I’m sure they’ve discussed the idea of revelation often enough, they’re supposed to be able to interpret texts, they’ve been given a quote, now all they have to do is spin out a nice line of blather, which again, is almost certainly a skill students of religion are expected to know.
But no. These students make some familiar complaints.
One student identified only as Clare said: “When we reached section three I think most students in the state had a communal heart attack as we discovered obscure and obtuse questions which were from absolutely no part of the otherwise very straightforward syllabus.
“I just lost 20 marks from a paper I studied very hard for.”
As a number of schools called for an explanation, Newington College student Nick Grogin said he was stunned by one question.
“I had never seen anything like that in the syllabus,” he said. “Nothing about it related to what I had studied and been taught.”
There was nothing about Islam in their studies? That would be deplorable. Or there was nothing about revelation, or about interpretation in their studies? That would be even more shocking.
These are students who don’t get it. I’ve had a few of them in biology classes, too. Some students think that if the answer to a question wasn’t plainly spelled out in lecture or in their texts so that they can just “study” (a verb that in some vocabularies means “memorize”) and spit back that very same answer, the question is unfair. Wrong.
Clare and Nick, you fail. And you deserve to fail. And not just because you’re wasting your time in Religion Studies.
A good test also examines a student’s ability to think, to come up with good answers to brand new problems. When a student is so limited in their intellectual ability that they are incapable of generalizing from principles they learned in the context of Christianity to Islam (or, as I’ve sometimes discovered, when they are flummoxed by a problem in Mendelian genetics in zebrafish rather than flies), they’ve flunked the thinking part of the exam.
One flaw with a small school in a remote location is that we only occasionally get great speakers to come all the way out here to give lectures. Now look here: Rutgers has Alan Leshner coming out to speak on Evolution’s Impact on Science and Society, while Princeton has Sean Carroll speaking on Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species.
On the same day and time.
This is no fair. I want them to release one of them and ship them out to Morris, Minnesota. I promise, there won’t be much competition.
Hooray for us! We got a nice plug in the Minneapolis Star Tribune for my campus’s conservation efforts, and for the opportunities to major in environmental studies here. Come on, students and parents of students, trust me, this is a good place for the environmentally conscious.
The state of Texas is considering striking the name of Neil Armstrong from the social studies standard. I hate to be the voice of restraint here, but I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. The reasoning given is completely bogus (because Armstrong wasn’t a scientist? Give me a break), but the action is not unreasonable. The state should not be in the position of dictating the niggling details of instruction — they should be laying down the law on the broad picture of what is taught, but not how it was taught.
So what the curriculum should do is say that the social studies classes for that grade level should do is discuss the space program, its goals and its effects on American society. It shouldn’t be saying that the teacher has to do this by asking students to memorize the names of famous astronauts — that’s a pedagogical decision that should be made by the teacher. I would hope that most teachers would see that talking about the people in the space program is a great way to humanize the topic, but I wouldn’t want the BOE to be meddling to that degree in the classroom.
Similarly, I think it is fair for a state curriculum to insist that biology classes cover the principles of evolution…but it would be inappropriate to demand that it be done by teaching about Darwin. You can do a fine job of discussing evolution without mentioning ol’ Charles even once.
I suppose it’s only a surprise that it took them this long, but Liberty University has shut down the college Democrats. They were able to put up with the existence of a few very conservative Democrats for a whole 6 months before pulling the plug.
Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.
“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.
Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.
According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.
Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.
“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”
Yeah, right.
Well, I’m at a secular university, where our traditional values are built on the Enlightenment, open-mindedness, free inquiry, reason, and secular humanism. I guess I need to go down to the administration building on Tuesday and point out that we have a few organizations — the Young Republicans, Campus Crusade for Christ, etc. — that do not support our mission, and have them shut down.
Oh, dang, I forgot! We’re also committed to free speech (FOR REALZ), so we have to allow our students to express even weird ideas that are the antithesis of rational thought. Rats. I guess I just need to encourage all of our students to speak out on their own personal views in public and private argument.
It’s been a very long and busy day here in Los Angeles — I’ve had a tour of USC, I ate a King Torta, I sat around for a long time in very warm black robes, I had a wonderful dinner with some of the faculty here, and oh, yeah, I gave a commencement speech. These events are always fun…I’m not a big fan of ceremony and ritual, but commencement is one of those events where the students can’t keep themselves from smiling, and families are all there whooping and cheering.
So, anyway, I’ve got to get some sleep, and then it’s an early morning off to the airport to fly back home, so I’m just putting my little speech below the fold.
Oh, Ben Stein, I shake my fist at you in rivalry. The infamous apologist for Republican criminality, idiotic economics, and creationist inanity got to present a commencement address to a famous university.
As it happens, I’m going to be out of town for a few days now — I’m off to deliver a commencement address myself. Yes, it’s another travel day for me, I’m afraid.
Should I be jealous? Stein got to speak at Liberty University. I’m speaking at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. I might be a teensy bit ahead. After all, this is what Richard Dawkins had to say:
“Many of the questioners announced themselves as either students or faculty from Liberty, rather than from Randolph Macon which was my host institution. One by one they tried to trip me up, and one by one their failure to do so was applauded by the audience. Finally, I said that my advice to all Liberty students was to resign immediately and apply to a proper university instead. That received thunderous applause, so that I almost began to feel slightly sorry for the Liberty people. Only almost and only slightly, however.”
That’s a difference between Stein and myself. I’m the one speaking at a proper university.
When I teach genetics, I like to pull a little trick on my students. About the time I teach them about analyzing pedigrees and about sex linkage, I show them this pedigree and ask them to figure out what kind of trait it is.
It’s a bit of a stumper. There’s the problem of variability in its expression, whatever it is, which makes interpretation a little fuzzy — that’s a good lesson in itself, that genetics isn’t always a matter of rigid absolutes. They usually think, though, that it must be some Y-linked trait, since only males (the squares in the diagram) have it at all, and no females (the circles) are ever affected.
Then I show them the labeled version, and there’s a moment of “Hey, wait a minute…” that ripples through the class. Keep in mind that even the science classes at my university contain typically 60% or more women.
It’s a truly horrible pedigree. Not only is it trying to reduce a very complex trait like “scientific ability” to a discrete character, but its assessment is entirely subjective — a point that is really brought home by pointing out that the pedigree was drawn by Francis Galton, who judged himself brilliant, and that he was evaluating his own family.
The silent tragedy here, though, is all those women judged as lacking in the characters of brilliance and scientific ability. They are rendered as nullities by the prejudices of the time — even if they had shown the spark of genius, they probably would not have been recognized by Galton — and by a culture that wouldn’t have trained or encouraged girls to do more than master needlework and laundry and household management, and would have brought them up to value the fruitfulness of their ovaries over the product of their minds.
Look at all those empty circles. I’m sure some of them had the capacity to be an entrepreneur like Josiah Wedgwood, or an eclectic philosopher like Erasmus Darwin, or a deep and meticulous scientist like Charles Darwin, or even just a successful doctor like Robert Darwin (II-4; not someone I would have characterized as brilliant, and also an indicator of the variety of abilities Galton was lumping together in his arbitrary judgments). Half the scientific potential in that pedigree was thrown away by restrictive social conventions.
That’s the kind of blind bias we have to end, and I think this Letters to our Daughters project is a wonderful idea. Stop pretending the circles are empty, and ask them to speak; color in those circles with talent. If you are a female scientist, or you know a female scientist, write in and set an example, and show the next generation of our daughters that they have a history, too.
You can read the first letter in the project now. I think it needs a few thousand more.
The horror…if you’re at all squeamish, you may not want to read this article by an editor at a textbook publisher on how public school textbooks are made. If you’re curious about why Texas has such an absurd weight in the world of textbooks, though, it will explain all.
It’s a system that needs to be fixed. The article has some interesting suggestions, too, although the plan — more modularity and flexibility in curriculum materials, and a move away from reliance the massive all-in-one tome — also has potential for abuse. (I’m picturing the creationists producing little, slim ‘supplemental’ pamphlets for the schoolroom, and getting them approved by school boards. We also need some standards on what is not acceptable in the class.)
(via Nic)
