Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It’s a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
Some might be surprised to hear that I’m actually in favor of this change in the British school standards:
Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.
In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has for the first time recommended that pupils be taught about atheism and creationism in RE classes.
The all-important qualifying phrase is “in their religious education classes“. It’s not science, so I’ll always oppose the inclusion of ID in the science curriculum, but I think that exposure to religious beliefs in a critical and secular context is a very good idea. That they’ll also discuss atheism is a significant bonus.
I also wouldn’t mind if the US schools included a comparative religion requirement — as long as a comparative perspective were actually enforced, and they weren’t used to indoctrinate kids into specific faiths.
Here’s a short summary of the new standards:
Pupils will be expected to understand terms such as creation, God as creator of the universe, intelligent design, the Big Bang theory, the sacred story and purposeful design, as well as words that are specific to a religion, such as Bible, Rig Veda, and Qur’an.
The new guidelines for key stage 3 (11 to 14-year-olds), published yesterday, say: “This unit focuses on creation and origins of the universe and human life and the relationship between religion and science. It aims to deepen pupils’ awareness of ultimate questions through argument, discussion, debate and reflection and enable them to learn from a variety of ideas of religious traditions and other world views.
“It explores Christianity, Hinduism and Islam and also considers the perspective of those who do not believe there is a god (atheists). It considers beliefs and concepts related to authority, religion and science as well as expressions of spirituality.”
There would be an epidemic of Head-Asplodey Syndrome if such a course were taught in US schools, I fear.
AND I’M NOT READY!
Can we have a couple more weeks of vacation, please?
Last day of classes: May 2nd. 30 lectures, 45 lab sections away.
I know some of my students read Pharyngula, so I’ll mention this here: if you’re taking Biology 3101, Genetics, the course web page and syllabus are online. Get the textbook and start reading chapter 1!
Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.
I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.
This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.
I am actually completely done with all of my grading, at last. Fall term 2006 is officially finished for me, and I got everything submitted a whole 9 hours before the deadline. Now I need to party.
Fortunately, my copy of The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Jennifer Ouellette arrived just now, so I think I’ll get wild with a book.
Check out this heartwarming tale of a Republican staffer who tried to retroactively get his GPA adjusted by hackers—he got caught, his pathetic attempts to cheat publicly aired, and now he has been fired.
The really sad thing is that GPAs aren’t that big a deal. They make a difference if you are trying to get into a post-bac academic program, but seriously…we all know you can be a dithering incompetent at school and get into business and government.
Oh, and the university this bozo wanted to hack? Texas Christian. Icing on the cake.
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I’ve already answered, so I thought I’d just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.
One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it’s a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn’t the kind of thing you’d pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end of the semester most of the students take that expensive reference work down to the bookstore buy-back and get rid of it (not me, though! I’ve still got my undergraduate developmental biology text on my bookshelf).
The other thing that goes on is that as textbooks age, they get denser and denser. Gilbert’s Developmental Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is probably the best book in the field, and I certainly love my copy, but it’s also been accreting great stuff for years with many new editions. That’s good for me, but I worry that it may be too much for undergraduate students, most of whom want a general introduction and aren’t necessarily planning to go on to do anything specific in development. That’s why I went with Wolpert’s Principles of Development(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—it’s good, but it’s also a little lighter and a little less intimidating than Gilbert’s.
The other thing I try to do is to toss in some supplemental reading: lighter fare with a narrower theme and, with any luck, a narrative and a more personal insight. That’s sometimes harder to find, but the advantage is that these are books you can imagine someone picking up at a bookstore and reading for enjoyment, so maybe even my students who go on to become doctors or dentists or lab techs or insurance salesmen might continue to browse the science shelf at the Barnes and Noble and keep up with the topic.
This year, I assigned Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) as the supplemental reading (in past years, I’ve used Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but two is about the limit of what we can handle with discussing a few chapters a week; it might come back in the future). I’ve always felt a little bit of trepidation about using At the Water’s Edge, just because my course is on development, and I could imagine some student complaining that there’s an awful lot of paleontology and physiology in there—but personally, I think a broader integrative view is important, too.
Anyway, I asked my students their general opinion of the books this week, and I also asked them to post a brief comparison to the web. You can read them all here:
I was greatly relieved to learn that my students like the more popular science supplements. Carl will be relieve to learn that his book was the unanimous favorite of everyone in the class. Carroll’s book is good and more tightly focused on the subject matter of the course, but I think great writing wins every time.
Now next Fall I’ll be teaching a general neuroscience course. I’m thinking the two extra books I’ll be using are Soul Made Flesh(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (Zimmer again! I’ll stick with a winner) and Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.
Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.
