My friend Shae linked me to this article at Inside Higher Ed about a professor, Steven D. Aird, who was fired for failing too many students. At first glance, that looks about reasonable. A Professor failing 90% of his students might be a little harsh. But read on — you find a duplicitous administration that ignores the results of its own policies, and a professor who wants to hold his students to *gasp* standards. Thank God for professors like Dr. Aird, who are willing to do what is necessary and proper to insure that a college degree still means something. As for me, if I see a diploma from Norfolk State University come across my desk for a job or summer internship, I think I might just have to keep sliding it along…

Posted: May 14th, 2008 under Education.
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Last time, I told you about how to talk to a graduate student, the questions to avoid asking and why. Now, we talk about the world through the eyes of a graduate student. Grad students are not normal people in the strictest sense; the ones in the sciences and engineering gave up lucrative careers in a variety of fields to live just above the poverty line, and the ones in the humanities made a long string of poor life decisions that string back to high school when they decided a philosophy degree would be kinda neat.

So how exactly does a graduate student view the world? Typically what must be remembered is that graduate students are very similar to East Asian mystics that would go into seclusion on a mountain to meditate about the deepest meanings of existence. If you go to them, don’t expect conversation about current events or some sort of help with your taxes. The graduate student has no time for this. He is too busy exploring the subtle, dark niches of the intellectual universe, and really his taxes are pretty easy to do because he doesn’t make shit. Read more »

Posted: February 27th, 2008 under Education.
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    The Supreme Court recently handed down two rulings [1] [2] [3]regarding using racial quotas to determine school enrollment. The court ruled 5-4 with a conservative majority that the use of race to determine where students are enrolled in a school district is unconstitutional. Despite the fact that it may be an unpopular ruling, I am definitely in favor of it. Read more »

Posted: June 28th, 2007 under Education, Politics.
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A few years back, University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill created a national controversy for calling the victims of the 9/11 attacks “little Eichmanns”, referencing the Nazi SS officer who organized the logistics of evacuating the ghettos and setting up the extermination camps of World War II. Now, his research methods have come under scrutiny and he may have his tenure revoked and lose his position as department chair. Read more »

Posted: June 19th, 2007 under Education, Politics.
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    Today I was waiting for some of my friends to go grab lunch, when I heard some undergrads talking just outside their calculus class. I was mostly not caring what they had to say, but then I overheard that they were discussing the curve in their class. They were going over various scenarios that would lead to an A, or a B, or what have you, and then one remarked

I guess if you’re failing half your class you have to do something.

This comment struck me as a rather strange attitude to have. Why is it the responsibility of the professor to insure that a certain fraction of his class reached a certain minimum grade? Read more »

Posted: June 7th, 2007 under Education.
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If you want to be a physicist, you have to go through graduate school. There’s the enormous application process, flanked by months of preparation for standardized tests beforehand and then trying to decide what community of physicists you would want to spend the next four, five, or six years living with based on a whirlwind three days afterwards. Everyone you see who holds a tenure track position at a research university has the abbreviation “PhD” or the British/European equivalent after their name.

But why do we put our lives on hold for half a decade while everyone else is busy getting a “real job”, getting paid, and getting married? Why do we need another five years of education to learn things that we can’t learn “on the job”? Accountants, real estate agents, and a variety of other professions require maybe another year of certification. Lawyers and medical doctors spend just three, but they can tell you exactly what year, month, and day they will be done the moment they enroll. So why the uncertainty? What are we here for? Read more »

Posted: June 5th, 2007 under Education.
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   As yet another semester comes to a close, the inevitable explosion of students who realize only too late that their grades aren’t as high as they would like is coming in. Mercifully, there have only been a few e-mails, and I have made myself scarce over the past week to avoid too many run-ins. I can only imagine the similar troubles of the professors teaching the course I’m a TA for.

It’s a disconcerting trend that I thought happened only recently with students I graduated from high school with: the presumptuous belief that if a student doesn’t like his or her grade, he can just go negotiate with the teacher to get the grades higher. An article I found as a freshman in college revealed to me that this trend is far older than I suspected. Read more »

Posted: May 13th, 2007 under Education.
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A recent scandal at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business leads me to discuss a distressing statistic: according to the article, 56 per cent of MBA students report cheating, while the overall graduate student population sees 47 per cent of students claiming to have cheated. This leads to an interesting question, though. What exactly constitutes cheating?

Most universities have the same general guidelines for what constitutes Academic Misconduct: plagiarism is always at the top, theft of exams from professors (i.e. grabbing a discarded printing error out of the recycling next to the department copy machine) is there with it, conspiring to share information on an examination is there as well. All of this is very clear-cut, and designed to keep a student or group of students from gaining an advantage over the others based on something other than their aptitude at a subject. Read more »

Posted: May 2nd, 2007 under Education.
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Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article by Hara Marano in Psychology Today entitled “A Nation of Wimps?“. The essential gist of this article is that hovering parents create children who cannot cope with the stresses of the real world. I have seen other articles to this effect before; one college administrator in another article referred to parents who must know about their child’s every action after they moved off to college as “helicopter parents”. This particular article gives a great deal of specific examples of how we have “softened” childhood for the coming generation.

Playgrounds are no longer a place for children to play together. Instead of allowing the child to figure out “how to play”, there is constantly a parent hovering around to make sure little Jimmy doesn’t fall and hurt himself. Parent-teacher conferences are more about making sure that the child has high grades, and what the teacher isn’t doing if the student doesn’t. I’m particularly fond of the 13-year old who has difficulty with “Gestault thinking”. Read more »

Posted: April 19th, 2007 under Education, Politics.
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In an effort to get a better understanding of classical electrodynamics, I’ve begun writing up some notes on the subject from a rather “backwards” point of view. You’ll see what I mean when you start reading them. You can download the notes as a .pdf here. Read more »

Posted: February 24th, 2007 under Education, Physics, Personal.
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