teaching

When I teach technical writing for my statistics students, I’m always a bit uncomfortable with the dictum "avoid the passive voice;" it doesn’t get to the essence of what I’m trying to say.  Mark Lieberman at Language Log has explained the problem and its solution far better than I ever could: Avoid construction that is Read more

In "Fail Your Customers," James Taranto revives the perpetual college student whine of "students are customers, and the customer is always right, and so I should get an A."  Taranto goes off the rails when he states If students have a sense of entitlement, it is a sense best captured in that old saying: The Read more

Thomas Bertonneau writes his third and most devastating installment of "What, Me Read?" The world soon to be dominated by such people (their world is already rapidly consolidating itself around us) will be awkward and ham-fisted; it will respond slowly and in all likelihood badly to the complicated problems that will impose their contingency on Read more

Karen De Coster isn’t very impressed with our college-educated workforce: I am not hesitant to say that there are many very well-trained monkeys in the workplace, but very few critical thinkers, let alone any of those really strange birds, autodidacts. Most “A grade” college students are intellectually impotent outside of the classes for which they Read more

Eric Schulz has an intriguing article up on the Mathematica blog about teaching mathematics using  palettes to speed learning of Mathematica.  He claims to be writing entire texts with Mathematica notebooks.  I wonder if this would be a useful approach for teaching my course in probability models. Read more

Dr Thomas Bertonneau, SUNY-Oswego, makes a compelling case that college education and students are going to Hell in a handbasket.Tip from Phi Beta Cons. A related article by George Leef leads you to this Branford Marsalis video. Read more

RightWingProf reprises his methods for keeping tests secure to avoid cheating.  Unfortunately, if I didn’t publish previous semesters’ exams, many of my students wouldn’t pass.Tip from Joanne Jacobs. Read more

Falsely changing grades at a college can buy you some serious trouble. Tip from the Instapundit. Read more

Marty Nemko tells it like it is in the Journal of Higher Education, "America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree" Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from Read more

Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay back in March that establishes a hierarchy of disagreement: * DH0. Name-calling. * DH1. Ad Hominem. * DH2. Responding to Tone. * DH3. Contradiction. * DH4. Counterargument. * DH5. Refutation. * DH6. Refuting the Central Point. What a wonderful tool for organizing your thoughts, and doing some self-editing before Read more