Some commenters wondered if the Ken Poppe mentioned in the previous story was the same Ken Poppe who wrote a creationist book, Reclaiming Science
from Darwinism. Yes, it is. He’s at Trail Ridge Middle School, a public school in Longmont, CO, and is listed as teaching 6th grade science. He freely admits to teaching creationist crap to his class, and says that the book grew out of his lessons.
Here’s a newspaper article about a classroom debate on global warming. Class debates are good, I think — they get the students thinking about the evidence and working over how to present it persuasively, although I also think it’s up to the instructor to provide some guidance. Realistically, sixth graders aren’t going to have a good handle on either the facts or the theory, and it’s up to the teacher to give them the battery of data they’re going to use to make their arguments. And sometimes it can go wrong.
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.
The spring of 2003 must have been a good time to start a blog — that’s when I started, and beating me by a couple of months was archy. Congratulations on your persistence!
The next Tangled Bank will be at Balancing Life; send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.
Minnesotans are going to be apologizing for this for a good long while (Why? Because we’re so darn nice and we hate to see pain inflicted on others). Cheri Yecke is clawing her way to greater responsibility in the Florida educational system.
On the other side of the equation, state K-12 chancellor Cheri Yecke has announced that she will seek the commissioner’s chair.
Yecke, who has led the education departments in Virginia and Minnesota, came to Florida two years ago, abandoning a run for Congress in Minnesota.
“The whole battle about standards and accountability was fought and won here a long time ago,” Yecke told Times. “Folks in Florida are moving forward in a very positive way. To me, that is just so refreshing. I would like to stay here.”
Yecke was head of our state education department for a time. She’s a creationist sympathizer with a sneaky, conniving way of weaseling the intelligent design agenda into the school curriculum. Floridans, you don’t want her running your education system. You might want to think instead about passing a law not allowing Yecke to approach within 30 yards of any school.
Here’s a picture to make you feel relatively fortunate, from the April 2007 issue of Natural History:
Naked mole rats are odd little mammals in which only the queen of the colony gets to breed. The point of this picture is that even when not near the end of their term of pregnancy, they are recognizably distinct from other rats in the colony — they tend to be much longer. The reason is that the hormones during pregnancy, and probably also the physical stresses on their body, induces the lumbar vertebrae to actually grow longer. Humans, fortunately, do not grow a couple of inches vertically with each child.
I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:
While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.
Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”
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.)
