Hey, University of Missouri-Columbia readers: Elliot Sober is coming your way. At 4:00 on the 20th (this week!), Elliot Sober will be speaking on Evolution versus Intelligent Design. It should be fun; somebody report back to me, OK?
Closer to my home, Steve Pinker will be speaking at the Minneapolis Public Library at 7:00 on the same day on ‘The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.’ I might be able to make it to that one.
I expected that my students would get a little trial by fire in the furious life of the public intellectual, and the commenters here certainly provided that. Maybe a little too much of that. Dial the ferocity back a notch, OK? Constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated, but the nasty stuff is not. I suppose it’s useful in the sense that it’s going to toughen up the students, but it doesn’t reflect well on you. One thing I’ll be doing in class next week is making up some lists and handing them out in class: a list of the jerks (“You can ignore these commenters, they’re wasting your time”) and a list of the good people (“These commenters say useful stuff, pay attention to them”). That’s right, we’ll be talking smack about you.
Here are some other clarifications and concerns.
Orac has a discussion that might be of interest to the young ‘uns: what kind of debt is hanging around your neck after med school? I can’t even imagine getting out of school with a bank expecting me to pay off a few hundred thousand dollars.
I went to college in the late 1970s, when we still had reasonable support for college students. I was on my own — my parents still had 5 other kids at home — but I could actually get through four years of college by holding down two part-time minimum wage jobs and with a fair number of scholarships and low-interest or no-interest loans. I graduated with perhaps a few thousand dollars of debt that I paid off easily — I’d get these quarterly bills for something like $30. Since these were loans at negligible interest, I almost felt a little regret at paying it off.
Unlike Orac, I took the grad school track. They pay you to go to grad school in biology. It’s a pittance, and you get to live in cramped apartments for a few years on macaroni and cheese (mmmm…free government cheese…) and the refreshments at departmental seminars, but you don’t come out of it poorer than when you went in. You also don’t come out of it with great job prospects and the employment is all for a low salary, but that’s another issue…
I’ll tell you more later.
It’s later now. I’m teaching a course in neurobiology, and one of the things I’m doing is having the students blog, to recount their experiences with neurobiology outside the classroom. In past years, I’ve set up a separate blog space for them to use, but I had a conversation with Beth Noveck of the Cairns blog at Sci Foo, and she recommended just throwing the students into the hurly-burly of the wider conversation. And after thinking about it for a while, I think she’s right — toss ’em into the shark tank, and let’s see how well they do. So beginning later this week, my six students will begin putting up roughly one article a week here on Pharyngula.
I still feel a little protective, though, so a few words of warning. The students had the option of posting under a pseudonym, and most have taken one. Please don’t try to invade their privacy. Another important factor to take into account is that all these students have in common is that they’re smart enough to be UMM upperclassmen and they are interested in neuroscience — do not assume that they share my political and religious views and jump on them as proxies for me. I don’t even know what their political and religious views are. For all I know, it’s a class full of devout Reaganites … and I don’t care. They can even use this space to publicly disagree with me on something, and it won’t hurt their grades.
Most important of all, be nice. This is an experiment, and they’re the guinea pigs, and give them time to find their space and their voice. I am reserving the right to pull the plug if the obnoxiousness exceeds the productive discussion, and I will police comments to their articles a little bit more ruthlessly than the comments on my own.
Did anyone catch the reference to Donors Choose in Doonesbury? This is an organization that a bunch of us sciencebloggers campaigned for last year: teachers submit projects and requests for funding, and then we promote it and try to get people to make donations to support the projects.
We aren’t going to be pushing it just yet — wait until October — but this is the time for teachers to be writing up short requests and sending them in. Janet has all the details, but the rough summary is that if you’re a teacher, and you’ve got a great little idea that all you need is a few hundred dollars to make real in your classroom, you ought to write a proposal and send it in right now.
The University of Minnesota, Morris is hiring! We need someone to teach an undergraduate course in classical transmission genetics for the spring semester — I know, it’s short notice, and this is only a temporary position, but it would be ideal for someone who wants to pick up some teaching experience at a highly regarded liberal arts university while applying for permanent positions.
This is the course I teach in alternate years (2008 is not my year!), and I will be available to help whoever takes the job — at least, I’ll share my syllabi and exams and lab notes. It’s also an opportunity to work with a group of smart and motivated students; one of those intangible benefits here is the quality of the students who will be taking the course.
The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks to fill a part-time, one-semester position in genetics beginning January 22, 2008. Duties include: teaching undergraduate genetics course with labs. Minimum qualifications: Master’s degree in genetics or a related field and one year of teaching experience (graduate TA experience acceptable) required. Send letter of application, resume, transcripts, teaching statement, and names of three references to: Genetics Search Committee Chair, Division of Science and Math, University of Minnesota, Morris, MN 56267-2128. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins August 1, 2007. The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
A more thorough description of the position is below the fold.
Apparently, they also frequent the professoriate.
I got some email today with lots of constructive suggestions (See? Not all my email is evil!) for how we ought to change the education of biology students — such as by giving them a foundation in the history and philosophy of our science, using creationist arguments as bad examples so the students can see the errors for themselves, etc. — and it was absolutely brilliant, even the parts where he disagreed with some things I’d written before. Best email ever!
Of course, what helped is that I spent my summer “vacation” putting together a new freshman first semester course for biology majors that I’m teaching for the first time right now, and it’s exactly the course he described. It was eerie, like one of my future students had invented a time machine and come back into the past to tell me what to do. A lot of the course content is locked up behind a password-protected firewall, I’m afraid, but just to show you what I’m talking about, I’ll put the course schedule below the fold.
We had our very first meeting of UMM Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists tonight. About two dozen people had expressed interest before, so we expected, optimistically, about 20 people to show up. We got there a little early, and people were waiting for us … and then our 20 were there, and then more, and then more, and then more. I had to keep going up to the counter to tell them we were going to have to order a few more pizzas.
Final tally: 60 students showed up. We basically took over the whole restaurant.
I have survived the first week of classes (my schedule leaves Fridays free of lecturing), as have my students — one down, sixteen to go. I’ve got a fairly heavy load this term, with a brand new introductory biology course (with 84 freshman students!) and a neurobiology course for more advanced students, so it’s going to be a long hard slog, I can tell. Pity those poor students, though — thrown right into the lion’s den. Ask Billy Graham, he knows.
Q. I’m headed for college in a few weeks, and as a Christian I’m wondering what to expect. Some people say that my faith will be attacked there, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Do you have any advice for me?
