I live in the city where Richard Feynman did a bunch of amazing things. I’ve chatted with a number of people who knew him. He is fondly remembered as an inspiring teacher, engaging writer and phenomenal scientist. He is also remembered as a creepy guy who frequented a local strip club, and for misogynist quips, even in his popular writing. Continue reading
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Even more sincere answers to stupid questions
StandardFor better or worse, I am able to see some of the search terms that are bring people to this site. Some are tragic, some are misdirected, and many people attempt to use google as an oracle. As I’ve done a couple times before, her are some sincere answers to some stupid questions entered into google over the past few months.
grading hell
According to yelp, Hell gets 3.5 stars out of a possible 5 stars. Continue reading
Recommended reads #39
StandardThere’s a site named Shit My Reviewers Say. Which has a bunch of heartless and unsubstantiated zingers that folks discover in their reviews. There are a several gems.
Wayne Maddison wrote a wonderful, brief obituary for Herbert Walter Levi, “one of the grand arachnologists of the 20th century.”
There was an absurdly absurd op-ed in the New York Times that explained to us that all of the sexism problems in science are fixed. This was based on data from an not-yet-in-print paper in a social science journal. I’ll spare you reading it, but I do think the response from Emily Willingham is worth your time. Continue reading
Social media: what is it good for?
StandardFor better or worse, I am the only person in my department who engages regularly in social media. Blogging here, reading other blogs (and occasionally commenting), chatting on twitter…over the last year or so these have become regular activities for me. So for our informal seminar series, I decided to talk about using social media as a scientist. Continue reading
What to do if you’re facing tenure denial
StandardA nontrivial fraction of tenure-track faculty are denied tenure, well over the standard 5% threshold for Type I errors that we use in the sciences. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Continue reading
The conference hangover
StandardThis week I definitely had a ‘hangover’. Two weeks of meetings* left me a strange mixture of excited, enthusiastic, invigorated and completely drained. I have lots of new ideas and enjoyed both making new connections and reconnecting with others. But I can forget how drained I can feel after such intense social activity, even if I don’t travel far. Continue reading
The statistics of busy, or the management of approachability
StandardIn one Seinfeld episode, George puts on an annoyed busy-all-the-time act at work. Consequently, nobody bothered him with work.
Academia is a cult of busy. We all are very busy, and often complain about it when we shouldn’t. However, being busy is part of becoming more efficient. Continue reading
Recommended reads #38
StandardEcologist Timothée Poisot has what I think is a remarkable insight about the myth/cult/phenomenon of busy in academia. This is one of those topics that causes people to people spill lots of neurons and ink, often recycling a lot of the same notions. But this one is different and worth your time. Continue reading
Conference report: SACNAS
StandardHere is a detailed report on my brief experience with the SACNAS meeting, aggregated as an unordered set of observations and thoughts. Continue reading
Taxonomy vs research theme based conferences: which do you attend?
StandardThese two weeks are allowing me to contrast two very different kinds of meetings. As a member of the Linnean Centre of Plant Biology in Uppsala, I attended our yearly meeting last week*. Continue reading
Having “The Talk” with students
StandardRecently, I posted on my regular blog about two separate incidents at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. One was a male allies panel gone horribly awry, and the other (which was all over the news outlets the next day) was a statement from Microsoft’s CEO about how women should trust the system and not ask for raises. Continue reading
Does your campus allow Federal Work Study awards for undergraduate research?
StandardI used to have Work-Study students doing research in my lab, when I was visiting faculty at Gettysburg College. Then I got a job somewhere else, and I couldn’t do that anymore.
The university where I now work does not assign Work-Study students to work with professors, just like my previous employer. There was a clear institutional policy that prohibited using Federal Work-Study awards to fill undergraduate research positions. Continue reading
The Church of High Impact Practices
StandardEducational fads come, and educational fads go. A dominant fad at the moment is “High Impact Practices.” Several years ago, George Kuh wrote a book about High Impact Practices that has come to dominate discussion in universities throughout the United States. If you want the nutshell version of the book, this seems to be a good summary.
I doubt anybody is actually reading the book. Continue reading
Recommended reads #37
Standard- I’m not a big fan of crowdfunding, because of the asymmetries in who gets money. And I’ve seen firsthand that expressed need sometimes doesn’t match reality. Caveats aside, I really like this one: Planting Science, which is about bringing working scientists into classrooms to mentor students and support science teachers. And because it’s about plants.
- Michael Balter writes, “Why I have taken a leave of absence from Science: to protest the abrupt firing of 4 colleagues.
- Melissa Wilson-Sayres is doing a huge service by writing up summaries of the information sessions that her university is running for new faculty. The latest is about how to deal with teaching. The part about Creating and Authentic Model of Authority is so spot on, especially if your appearance might suggest that you’re not much older than your students.
Writing a review: thoughts from the trenches.
StandardSomehow I’m in the middle of writing three review papers so I am gaining some perspective on writing them. The first one is basically my own fault; I started thinking a lot about nectar rewards and how they fit into my research. That thinking lead to a talk last year on some of my ideas to a bunch of like-minded folk at the Scandinavian Association of Pollination Ecologist’s meeting. Main lesson from my experience: never end a talk asking if you should write a review (and/or for interested co-authors) unless you really want to. Continue reading
When are minority-focused conferences the best choice?
StandardSometimes, the title has a question mark. The body of the text usually has the answer to the question in the title. This is not one of those. I don’t have an answer to this question.
Have you heard of SACNAS or ABRCMS?* These organizations put on a big science conference somewhere in the US each year. (SACNAS is passing through my own city next week.) Continue reading
Which institutions request external review for tenure files?
StandardToday, I’m submitting my file for promotion. It’s crazy to think I submitted my most recent tenure file five years ago, it feels closer to yesterday. Unless I get surprised (and it wouldn’t be the first time), I’ll be a full Professor if I’m here next year. And yet, throughout this entire process, there has been zero external validation of tenure and promotion. I think this is really odd. Continue reading
Invasive species, immigrant emotions and a guilty conscience
StandardI have a confession to make: I live in Sweden and I have lupines in my garden.
I didn’t plant them, they were there when I moved in, but after two seasons I haven’t removed them either. In Sweden, I see escaped lupines along roadsides and although I’m not sure how much of a problem they are to native ecosystems here*, they are definitely non-native.
Seeing lupines along the roadsides is a treasured memory from my childhood. The kicker is that lupines aren’t even native where I grew up. Continue reading
Let’s stop mixing up education and social capital
StandardWhen people talk about the “value of a quality education,” they’re probably not talking about education. What does a “quality” education look like? It’s expensive. The money doesn’t really get you a better education. It gets you social capital. Continue reading
Recommended reads #36
Standard- One Woman’s Life in Science. This came out almost twenty years ago in the Sigma Xi magazine, but it reads as if could have been written yesterday.
- “Student course evaluations are often misused statistically and shed little light on the quality of teaching, two scholars at the University of California at Berkeley argue in the draft of a new paper.”
- The Royal Society awarded 43 fellowships this year. Two of them went to women. At the application stage, shortlist stage, interview stage, and award stage, the proportion of women kept dropping. This is enraging.
Graduate training, missed opportunities and the good ol’ days
StandardA couple of recent conversations have got me thinking about the culture of academia and grad school training.
The first conversation relates more to the general culture of academia. The complaint was that these days people are very selfish; they don’t want to participate in departmental events or even come into their office unless there is a very personal benefit they can see. The research groups are little islands and everything is about me, me, me. Young professors and graduate students aren’t thinking about how that can and should contribute to the academic community but rather always focused on what they need to do for themselves and/or their group. Now we can debate about whether or not this is really the state of academia or even if it is true for the particular department that was being complained about but it is an interesting thing to think about. In these days of extreme competition, for grants, positions, paper publications, and on and on, are we becoming too focused on ourselves? Is it really all about me? Continue reading
12 tips for talking to science faculty about new teaching strategies
StandardAttention education researchers: Here are some tips about interacting with science faculty. I’ve noticed that this genre uses a lot of lists. So, here’s a list:
Thinking about what we can do about sexual assault and harassment in the sciences
StandardIf you haven’t seen it yet, go over and read this courageous, important and stunningly written Op-Ed piece by Hope Jahren over at the New York Times.
Her story reflects the unexpressed story of many others. Continue reading
The two-body problem isn’t temporary
StandardWouldn’t it be amazing if both you and your partner landed great jobs in the same city or even the same institution?
Hell yeah, that would be great! Even if you’re not in a dual-academic career couple, having landed two jobs near one another isn’t so easy. Continue reading
Vocabulary, teaching, and being understood
StandardEnglish is a crazy language, with an exceptional number of grammatical conventions, and required exceptions to the conventions. And that doesn’t even explain the senselessness of pronunciation.
There are many ways of saying the same thing, with different shades of meaning. By choosing words carefully, we can increase accuracy and precision of meaning.
This can present a dilemma while teaching, and interacting with students. Continue reading
Recommended reads #35
Standard-
Papers that triumphed over their rejections. How world-changing papers by Fermi, Krebs, Higgs, Margulis, Brockman, Mullis and more were rejected by Science or Nature. It’s fascinating to see the rationales for rejecting these manuscripts that, in hindsight, are so huge and important. By Nikolai Slavov.
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The new “What if?” book by Randall Munroe of xkcd is spectacular. I think it’s the best science education book of the decade, because it’s so fun and so chock full of applied science. This would be an amazing book for a physics class. Or for yourself. Or your kid, tween and up. Continue reading
Active learning is flexible and designed to reach the reticent
StandardI’ve gotten positive feedback about a post in which I explain how it’s not that much work for me to do active learning in the classroom. However, a couple entirely reasonable misgiving seem to crop up, and I’d like to give my take on those causes for reluctance to start up with active learning approaches. Continue reading
Where do you eat lunch? And does it matter?
StandardLunch culture seems to vary a lot from place to place.
I will admit to sometimes eating lunch at my desk, even though it is seems a highly unusual thing at European universities. But these days it is rare for me to do that, partly because most people aren’t and partly because it is just nicer to take a moment and eat properly. Continue reading
This device can improve your quality of life
StandardIt’s easier to get work done if we use time efficiently and work to stay healthy. If I had to give a recommendation for something that can help out with those two things, near the top of the list would be: use a pressure cooker.
Don’t have time to cook a real dinner? With a pressure cooker, you do. If I sound like an infomercial, it’s only because I really am that enthusiastic about spreading the Good Word of pressure cooking.
Me and my buddy, the pressure cooker
Efficient teaching: Doing active learning an easy way
StandardHere are a few difficult facts about education in college classrooms:
- Lectures don’t work well. People just don’t really learn much from hour-long lectures.
- People learn when they discover ideas on their own.
- People learn best when working with peers.
- It’s a hell of a lot easier to just explain something to someone than to set up a situation in which this person can figure it out for themselves
- It takes a lot longer for a person to figure something out than it takes for you to just explain it to them.
I suppose you can take issue with some of these facts and argue that they’re not true facts. But just as climate scientists are mighty darn sure about anthropogenic warming trends, education researchers seem to be just as sure about this these facts. I let them take my word for it about ecology and evolution, and I’ll take their word for it about education.
And this is a problem, because it means that what a lot of us have been doing appears to not just suboptimal but downright inadvisable. Continue reading
