teaching

Over at Real Clear Politics, Michael Strong’s article "School Choice and Adolescence in America" talks about the public health consequences of our current school systems: Adolescent well-being cannot be developed using a character education curriculum taught by faculty who are cultural relativists. The faculty must believe in something, they must themselves be united by a Read more

Now this sounds like a goofy graduation requirement.  But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.  No grade inflation, no easy professors, no dodging the requirement, and you gotta do the homework.  There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Tip from the Education Wonks. Read more

Dubner and Leavitt, the Freakonomics guys, have a great article in the New York Times Magazine about Anders Ericsson and the Expert Performance Movement: Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly Read more

Inside Higher Ed has one of the perennial articles about the validity of teaching evaluations, with all the usual arguments pro and con. The real gem shows up in a comment by RWH: And what will you have learned about mathematics by witnessing a slick solution to the problem? Hardly anything. Mathematics is about struggling Read more

Every professor who’s any good wants to be this guy. Tip from my cycling buddy, Jaime Garces. Read more

Check out this column* by David Dunning in the 5 May issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education: Take as one example work we have done in my laboratory on the plight of the incompetent. In many intellectual and social domains, such people suffer a double curse. First, because they lack knowledge and skill, they Read more

By way of giving the big Ho-Hum to the recent Earth Day, Jimbo over at Parkway Rest Stop has suggested some new Designated Days, all of which are big improvements over such mendacious artifacts as Bosses Day or Grandparents Day.  My own suggestion, a day that should be strictly observed worldwide on all college campuses, Read more

…is one of the stupidest cliches I’ve ever heard. Here’s a stupid question I get asked at least a dozen times every semester: I didn’t come to class last time. Did I miss anything important? Other folks intellectualize about this. I suppose I need to start teaching my students how to ask questions. Tip from Read more

Reading the owner’s manual has suddenly become respectable again: There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The F***ing Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it. [my ***] But the best one-liner comes from Read more

Apparently the second week of class was w-a-a-y overstimulating for me. Last week’s extreme point came during office hours when one student–a so-so math major–keyed the number 0.0044 into his calculator, squared it, and interpreted the result, 1.936E-05, as an error.  "Look!" he said in confusion. "Yeah? So?" I replied; there’s nothing remarkable about a Read more