Students and schools behaving badly

This is an ugly story, and it’s ugly on both sides. First, rude students make a nasty, mocking video of one of their teachers and post it to YouTube, which is bad enough; these are kids who definitely need some discipline. But then the school district suspends the students for 40 days in punishment. Forty days is almost a quarter of the school year. They deserved a harsh response, but kicking them out of school just deprives them of the education they need, and they’re probably going to regard it as a vacation.

I must confess, though, that what first caught my eye about the story is that it’s from Kent, Washington — where I grew up. I read it wondering if it was my alma mater, Kent-Meridian High School, that was going to be the scene of the crime…and no, it wasn’t. It was Kentridge, our hated cross-town rivals, the school that was even more despised than Auburn. I felt relief.

It’s funny how those silly scholastic enmities can come back to you after 30 years…

A man after my own heart at Iowa State

Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.

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Also, how can you do social networking without beer?

I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I’m all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I’ve gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I’m still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you other scientists out there to sign up, some comprehension will begin to gel for me.

Attila Csordas has a nice writeup of the whole magilla which helps. I’m giving it a shot, anyway.

I already notice it lacks those bosomy young ladies in skimpy clothing that always greet me on MySpace, and the contributors all seem to know how to write plain English, so it’s different on those scores.

Woo hoo IV!

I just finished grading all the genetics final exams, and submitted final grades to the registrar!

I’ve just got two independent study papers that need to be turned in and graded, and then I will be completely done.

Alas, poor Guillermo Gonzalez

Les Lane has a summary of Gonzalez’s unfortunate tenure situation. To nudge your memory, Guillermo Gonzalez is the Discovery Institute fellow who was working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University; he was recently denied tenure there and is protesting the decision.

It’s an awkward position, but very common — academia isn’t an easy career to break into. It also doesn’t help that Gonzalez fails to understand the process.

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Woo hoo III!

Knocked another one down — I finished the grades for the last exam in my genetics course (there is still an optional final next Friday). This was an important one, because I promised myself that if I could get them all done this afternoon, I would let myself go to the local theater to watch Spiderman 3 tonight. Those little internal incentives help a lot!

Woo hoo II!

My next Seed column was just sent off to the overlords. I love this time of year! Everything is coming to tidy conclusions, so I can focus on one thing at once instead of 10, get it done, and unlike the usual Lernaean Hydra-like state of affairs, it doesn’t bloom into two new tasks.

Then, tomorrow … no classes, so I’m going to be able to just rip through all my grading without interruption. And then Friday and this weekend I’ll be free to tear through a major administrative chore that’s been dogging me for the last few months.

Freedom!

Woo-hoo!

I just gave the last exam of my last class of this semester. No more lecture prep, no more lectures, just a stack of grading that I have to finish by Friday (I do have one final exam to give, but it’s optional—the score they get on it replaces the lowest exam score of the term—and I expect only about a quarter of the class will bother to take it). I’m sure the students are even more relieved than I am at this point.

The end is in sight!

What is a diploma worth?

Larry Moran thinks we need more rigorous admission requirements, and Donald Kennedy is not very happy with the state of creationist textbooks.

Kennedy is currently serving as an expert witness for the University of California Regents, who are being sued by a group of Christian schools, students and parents for refusing to allow high school courses taught with creationist textbooks to fulfill the laboratory science requirement for UC admission. After reading several creationist biology texts, Kennedy said he found “few instances in which students are being introduced to science as a process—that is, the way in which scientists work or carry out experiments, or the way in which they analyze and interpret the results of their investigations.”

Kennedy said that the textbooks use “ridicule and inappropriately drawn metaphors” concerning evolution to discourage students from formulating independent opinions. “Even with respect to the hypothesis that dominates them—namely, that biological complexity and organic diversity are the result of special creation—critical thinking is absent,” he added.

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Mazur, then Dawkins, with much driving between

I’m back! I had a long, busy day at a teaching conference, and got persuaded about a few things — I’m designing a new course for freshmen biology majors for the fall term (“Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development”, or FunGenEvoDevo for short), and I’ve been following the pedagogical ideas of Eric Mazur for a while, and this was my chance to go hear him. He said what I wanted to hear about getting basic concepts across to students, which is going to help a great deal in my summer project.

I got back too late to catch Dawkins on the O’Lielly show, though. My wife saw it, said it was good but short and without much of substance. Fortunately, One Good Move was quick on the draw. O’Reilly started right off with idiocy. He doesn’t know how tides work, so he’s got to believe in God. There was the usual weird right-wing history lesson — Hitler was an atheist, the Founding Fathers wanted a god-worshipping nation; of course, O’Reilly’s explanation for why they wanted a Christian nation was that it would pacify the people. Is it good framing to argue for religion because it is the opiate of the masses?

I thought Dawkins was calm, relaxed, and treated the bozo lightly and with good humor. O’Reilly threw out that softball inanity right at the beginning, and you can almost see Dawkins crack up at the clown.

Tomorrow is my day at home before I make my Boston blitz — I might be able to squeeze in a few posts here, along with getting a pile of other work done.