Perusable blogaliciousness for your Friday morning:
The Hairy Museum of Natural History has put out a call for submissions to the Tangled Bank, with an early deadline. If you want a shot at maybe seeing your link with a custom illustration, send it in by Sunday evening. He’ll try to accept stuff up through Tuesday, but make life easy on the guy, OK?
I’ve been asked if this is a common occurrence at scientific conferences: at an Australian conference on climate change, the entertainment at a social dinner was a burlesque show. And the answer is…no. Every meeting dinner I’ve attended has had some white-maned elder statesperson of the discipline do the ‘entertainment’, which is usually thin on the bare flesh and the humor, thick with jargon and historical detail. It can be fun—I recall one talk by JZ Young that was full of squid and voltages that I really enjoyed—but I don’t think it would have been improved if he’d been up on the podium wearing nothing but balloons.
It’s an odd story. The cabaret was cut short after 10 minutes, so I think it’s clear that a significant number of attendees must have expressed their disapproval immediately, and that this was a bit beyond the pale, even for wild ol’ Australia. Some organizer somewhere made a very, very bad decision, I think.
It’s not every day that one of the Istari gets tenure.
Say, did anyone mention to his review committee that he’s an immortal? This is going to wreak havoc with the college’s finances once he has accumulated some more seniority.
Janet asks, “How should we professorial types be addressed by our students?” I’m introducing myself to a new crop of students in an hour, so this is something I also go through every year.
My answer: if the students don’t know the professor, the default should be “Dr” or “Professor.” Always. It’s the safe thing to do.
To my students, I always tell them I’d rather not be addressed so formally, and “Paul” or “PZ” are better choices. “Hey, Myers!” is a little too brash.
I think the appropriate way to answer the question is to turn it around: how do we professors address the students? If you insist on being called “Dr”, I think you should be expected to address all your students as “Mr” or “Ms.” We can set the level of formality to whatever we want, but it has to be reciprocal. Of course, I’m also at a small college where I get to know every student, and by name…I suppose another alternative at the bigger places is to insist on being called “Dr,” while addressing all your students as a nameless, faceless, tuition-paying mob.
The syllabus for Biol 4181, Developmental Biology is now online. Start reading! It looks like I’ll have you reading 50-100 pages of Wolpert and Carroll or Zimmer a week.
I want you all to know this is something of a miracle—I usually finish my syllabus the night before the class starts, so I’m very proud of myself for getting it done a whole four days ahead of time. Of course, the reason it’s early is that I’ve got a stack of extra-curricular writing that needs to be done in the next couple of days…
You can get a jump on the class—I’ve posted a list of the textbooks you’ll need on the class website.
Surprise, surprise, surprise—private schools aren’t better than public schools, and private schools run by conservative Christian organizations are the worst.
The federal Education Department reported Friday that, in reading and math, children attending public schools generally do as well as or better than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private-school children did better.
The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools in 2003, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools when it came to eighth-grade math.
The report separated private schools by type, and found that among private-school students, those in Lutheran schools did best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst. For example, in eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools did no better than comparable children in public schools.
In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools did significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.
I wouldn’t take this as an uncritical endorsement of the public school system, though—this report could also be interpreted as saying both public and private schools are doing just as poorly at educating kids, and all could use substantial improvement.
I am surprised a bit by the fact that more private schools weren’t getting better test scores for one specific reason: selective admission. Private schools do have one sneaky edge over public schools in that they have more power to reject problematic children, while the public schools are obligated to make an effort to educate everyone. Maybe what this shows is that if you try to use economic advantage as a filter, rich kids aren’t necessarily smarter than poor kids, and if you use ideology as your filter, Jesus-freaks aren’t smarter (and maybe dumber) than kids with a ho-hum attitude towards religion. It may also mean that private schools have a whole different set of problems than do the public schools.
Anyway, the key thing is that these data show that there is no gain to be had from privatizing education, or worse, moving to ‘faith-based’ education. We can be aware of problems in the public schools, but we have to realize that switching to vouchers or otherwise ripping more money from the schools to support private efforts won’t fix them.
(via Atheist Revolution)
Look at this chart: it purports to show the percentage of ‘born-again’ Christians who abandon their faith after attending various categories of colleges. My first thought was, “Good, now how can we get those numbers higher?”; I’m sure that most fundies feel what the author of the chart intended, absolute horror at the idea that sending kids to college is the equivalent of shipping them off to an eternity of hellfire.
Less than two weeks until classes begin again, and it’s time to juggle syllabi, attend meetings and workshops, and scoot the kids off to school. I’m making another airport run tomorrow to pick up Skatje, whose vacation is ending. Next week, I get to deposit Connlann back in Madison (I didn’t do the traditional knife fight last year, but I like Bérubé’s idea of just booting him out the car door during a rolling stop—could I catch up on tradition if I then throw a bunch of knives after him?) This week I’ve got a division meeting, various campus-wide events, and next week it’s the faculty retreat.
And then, classes. I’m teaching part of our introductory biology course again (syllabus is done, my lectures are all ready to go for that one, and developmental biology…which would be ready to go, except that I added a new supplemental book to the course this year, and need to work up how that’s going to be integrated into the lectures. It’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by the way—I think it’s going to fit in perfectly.
Georgetown College in Kentucky has ended its affiliation with the Southern Baptists after the Baptists tried to dictate that a new hire be a biblical literalist. The Baptists wanted nonsense like this:
“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,” Dr. York said.
They also refused to allow the college to hire more than 25% non-Baptist faculty, and what may have really been the deal-breaker is that the university’s enrollment is less than half Baptist…so insisting on strict adherence to the principles of a minority denomination was probably costing them students. I suspect money is more important than doctrine.
I was surprised and impressed by this comment:
David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,” Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.”
He’s almost there. Now we just have to work towards the day the word “religion” is substituted for the too narrow “fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form”.
(via Socratic Gadfly)
