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!
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.
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.
Here are some useful, general suggestions for giving an academic talk. Most of them are fairly obvious and I already know them, but as usual, the hard part is actually following them.
(via Entertaining Research)
The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill that would impose new rules on state colleges to “protect diversity” that includes this most interesting clause:
Nigeria is experiencing an unimaginable horror for this academic: widespread sexual harassment of women students. It’s injust, it’s a corruption of the student-teacher relationship, and it harms their country, that half their potential leaders are abused and blocked from progress.
For years, sexual harassment has been rampant in Nigeria’s universities, but until recently very little was done about it. From Associated Press interviews with officials and 12 female college students, a pattern emerges of women being held back and denied passing grades for rebuffing teachers’ advances, and of being advised by other teachers to give in quietly.
Crippling a young person’s potential and denying them access to knowledge ought to be regarded as a serious crime—these ‘teachers’ are really just felons and rapists.
(via Salon)
That’s the salary for the University of Minnesota’s new basketball coach. I want to meet that guy sometime — I really have to shake the hand of a fellow worth more than 30 of me, or most of the faculty here.
Should I feel jealous or not? My students never write letters like this. And if they did, I’m at such a small school I’d never be able to post them.
(via Bitch Ph.D.)
The indecency in public schools is out of control:
“…during school hours in a classroom with an experienced teacher present, two sixth graders completed the act of intercourse…at least ten students were witnesses. No disciplinary actions were taken against the teacher… All teachers were told to keep quiet.”
The class that incited these students to publicly engage in illicit sex acts? Shop. Those mortise and tenon joints sure are provocative, and I guess the shop teacher wasn’t named Mr Adler.
(Yes, I know this is a serious issue, but I think the school was right to avoid addressing it — although they certainly should discourage and stop such inappropriate distractions — and what they should have done, and I hope they did, was to inform the parents and let them deal with the behavior.)
Sometimes I think that what public education in this country really needs is a good general requirement for a course in comparative religion. I’ve thought that one obstacle, though, would be finding teachers who wouldn’t warp it to proselytize for their favorite cult. It turns out that there’s another major problem: parents will sue teachers who make their kids think about that which must be believed dogmatically.
