My PhD student David Bunde just successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled “Scheduling and Admission Control”. David's thesis isn't up on the web yet—D is for deposit!—but you can sneak a look at his defense slides [pdf]. You also can see some of David's research results on his web site. In a few weeks, David will join the Computer Science Department at Knox College—yes, that Knox College—as an assistant professor.
I'd suggest it might be better for communities to figure out how to care for all of their members, even the ones who seem inclined to complain. Ignoring the interests of some members of the community to further general harmony (people get to keep doing things the way they want to, advisors can decide how to treat their grad students and other pieces of lab equipment, etc.) is a risky move. Not only might the trouble-makers you're ignoring have valid concerns -- concerns which would do more to ensure long-term harmony should the community heed them -- but, their reaction at being shut out by the community might be ... bad.
From Eurekalert:
In an experiment in which students either took quizzes or were permitted to study material repeatedly, students in the study-only group professed an exaggerated confidence, sure that they knew the material well, even though important details already had begun slip-sliding away. The group that took tests on the material, rather than repeatedly reading it, actually did better on a delayed test of their knowledge.
From Rate Your Students:
My classes are large, so I mostly use multiple-choice tests. One day, being one question short of a nice round number, I used this question: "The answer to this question is D. Be sure to mark D on your answer sheet." The offered choices were: (A) This is the wrong answer. (B) This is the wrong answer. (C) This is the wrong answer. (D) This is the correct answer. Be sure to mark it on your answer sheet. (E) This is the wrong answer.About 20% of the students got it wrong.
One of the professors in my department was recently asked by a student if she was using a European teaching style. The prof had no idea what the student meant, so she asked for clarification. The student apparently found it strange that he was expected to read a book.
Rate Your Students appears to have been hacked to death.
Call me crazsy, but I'm thinking it wasn't by a tenure committee.
David Drew and Paul Gray just finished a four-part series of articles in Inside Higher Ed, aptly called “What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School”. Some of the advice is rather cynical, and some of it is just plain wrong, but it's all worth reading (including the reader comments).
A Ph.D. is a license to reproduce and an obligation to maintain the quality of your intellectual descendants. Once you have the Ph.D., it is possible for you (assuming you are working in an academic department that has a Ph.D. program) to create new Ph.D.’s. Even if your department does not have a Ph.D., you can be called upon to sit on Ph.D. examining committees either in your own or in neighboring institutions. This is a serious responsibility because you are creating your intellectual descendants. Recognize that if you vote to pass someone who is marginal or worse they, in turn, have the same privilege. If they are not up to standard, it is likely that some of their descendants will also not be.
Avoid serving on a committee on which you have technical expertise. If you know something about libraries, don’t serve on the library committee. If you do, you will be put on the subgroup (or, worse, become the subgroup) to make recommendations or solve the mess in your area of expertise. Such service will eat up enormous amounts of your time with little visible result and even less personal gain for you.
Understand why tenure is such a hurdle. Consider the cost of a positive tenure decision to your institution. Assume for simplicity that you are making $66,666 per year and will serve the university 30 years after tenure. [...] From your point of view, you certainly think of yourself as worth the $2 million dollar the university must make. But think of it from administrators’ view. [...] Any statistician will tell you that, given these upside and downside risks, universities are absolutely rational to err on the no side, not on the yes side.
“The rich get richer” holds in academia as well as in society in general. Once you establish a reputation, people will pursue you to do things such as write papers, make presentations at prestigious places, consult, etc. To reach this position you have to earn your reputation. If you do reach it, remember that fame is transitory. You have to keep running, doing new things, to keep the demand going. Those who read these Hints will want your place!
Last week I visited my dad and step-mom in St. Joseph, Missouri (home of the Pony Express). My dad is a medical physicist. He used to be a professor in the Department of Radiology at Vanderbilt, but left for reasons that are best left unstated, since I don't know what the statute of limitations is on these things. Let's just say that I was well aware of the existence and nastiness of academic politics well before I became a participant myself. And I still don't trust doctors.
Anyway. Dad told me the single most WTF-inspiring education story I've ever heard. Some thirty-odd years ago, he was supervising a visiting student from another country. As a sort of warm-up exercise, he asked the student to measure the dead time for a scintillation camera. A scintillation camera consists of a radioactive source and a screen of material that converts charged particles into visible photons. Basically, it's a Geiger counter, only with flashes of light instead of ticks of sound. After each flash, a scintillator element needs some time to recover before it can flash again; this interval is the camera's dead time. There's a standard experiment to estimate dead time called the two source method: measure the response to two calibrated sources, both separately and together, all for the same duration, and plug those three measurements into a simple formula.
Anyway, the student went to the lab, did the experiment, and came back with a dead time of minus 3 milliseconds.
Confident that the scintillation camera had not spontaneously mutated into a time machine, my dad asked the student to repeat the experiment while he watched. She set up the the first source, set the timer on the camera, and pushed the start button.
Click, click, ding!
Now, the experiment called for a twenty-second measurement interval, and ‘click click ding’ was just way too short. Rather than correct her directly, my dad asked the student, "How much time was that?"
"Twenty seconds."
Dad looked at the camera and realized the problem. The camera's timer had a Nixie tube display. The decimal point in the second-to-last tube was defective, so the display read 20 (or 2.0) when it was set to 2.0 seconds.
But she should have noticed that. So Dad asked the student to run the test again.
The student checked the sample, set the Nixie timer to "2.0" again, and pushed the button. Click, click, ding!
"So how long was that?"
"Twenty seconds."
"Do you see that clock on the wall over there? I want you to look at the clock, and watch how long it takes the second hand to go from the 12 to the 4."
The student looked at the clock. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. "Okay."
"How much time was that?"
"Twenty seconds."
"Now run the test again."
Click, click, ding!
"Now how long was that?"
"Twenty seconds."
The student simply could not conceive of the idea that the timer display could be wrong. The display said "20", so the time must have been set to twenty seconds, no matter how much time it seemed to take.
That's where Dad's story ended, but it doesn't explain the student's original answer. A shorter experiment would give a less accurate estimate of the dead time, but it would still be positive. The only way to get a negative solution from the two-source formula is to take one measurement over a longer time period than the others. Since the student was a physics major who had won a scholarship to study in the US, she probably did the high-school math correctly and followed the experiment's directions slavishly. I can only surmise that the decimal point on the Nixie tube went out during the experiment, and the student didn't notice the discrepancy.
"I'm sorry, but on 'compelled speech,' nobody thinks that this law school is speaking through those employers who come onto its campus for recruitment," the chief justice said. "Nobody thinks the law school believes everything that the employers are doing or saying."The lawyer adjusted his focus. The law schools have their own message, "that they believe it is immoral to abet discrimination," he said.
This time, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took issue. "But they can say that to every student who enters the room," she said.
"And when they do it, your honor, the answer of the students is, we don't believe you," Mr. Rosenkranz said.
"The reason they don't believe you is because you're willing to take the money," Chief Justice Roberts interjected. "What you're saying is this is a message we believe in strongly, but we don't believe in it to the detriment of $100 million."
"I was headed to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee; why didn't I just keeping going?" Klocek said. "I don't know. But if militant Zionists had been there, I might have engaged them too. Being a truth seeker means being a loner."When the students complained to Klocek's dean, she and other administrators apologized profusely to them. She called in Klocek separately and suspended him, with pay, for the semester. She also noted of his 14 years at DePaul: "Never during that time have we experienced a situation in which he lacked judgment, abused his position as a teacher to force his ideas upon students or treated students with disrespect." [...]
"I'm not the ideal poster boy," Klocek said. "But freedom of speech is a cause worth fighting for."
DePaul's president agrees.
"I get accused of being against free speech," Holtschneider said. "But freedom of speech for students requires they have a professor who treats them with respect."
Klocek's attorney, John Mauck, is representing him on a contingency basis: He doesn't get paid unless Klocek wins. Mauck said he took the case because members of his firm, evangelical Christians, have a philosophical commitment to freedom of expression.
Exhibit C.1 [pdf]:
Throughout the trial and in various submissions to the Court, Defendants vigorously argue that the reading of the statement is not “teaching” ID but instead is merely “making students aware of it.” In fact, one consistency among the Dover School Board members’ testimony, which was marked by selective memories and outright lies under oath, as will be discussed in more detail below, is that they did not think they needed to be knowledgeable about ID because it was not being taught to the students. We disagree.Dr. Alters, the District’s own science teachers, and Plaintiffs Christy Rehm and Steven Stough, who are themselves teachers, all made it abundantly clear by their testimony that an educator reading the disclaimer is engaged in teaching, even if it is colossally bad teaching. See, e.g., Trial Tr. vol. 6, C. Rehm Test., 77, Sept. 28, 2005; Trial Tr. vol. 15, Stough Test., 139-40, Oct. 12, 2005. Dr. Alters rejected Dover’s explanation that its curriculum change and the statement implementing it are not teaching. The disclaimer is a “mini-lecture” providing substantive misconceptions about the nature of science, evolution, and ID which “facilitates learning.” (14:120-23, 15:57-59 (Alters)). In addition, superintendent Nilsen agrees that students “learn” from the statement, regardless of whether it gets labeled as “teaching.” (26:39 (Nilsen)).
Exhibit C.2 [pdf]:
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
I've been telling prospective graduate students for years that the distinctive strength of Chicago political theory was its pluralism. [...] That's good for the students; and it's good for us. I was shocked by the self-study's endorsement of a different path long before I realized its consequences for my employment. It seems to me untrue to our strengths, and bad intellectually, and bad professionally for graduate students.
Colleges and universities should welcome intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas. Such a commitment will inevitably encourage debate over complex and difficult issues about which individuals will disagree. Such discussions should be held in an environment characterized by openness, tolerance and civility. [...]The validity of academic ideas, theories, arguments and views should be measured against the intellectual standards of relevant academic and professional disciplines. Application of these intellectual standards does not mean that all ideas have equal merit. The responsibility to judge the merits of competing academic ideas rests with colleges and universities and is determined by reference to the standards of the academic profession as established by the community of scholars at each institution.
I'm just sayin'.
From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; "iron, 100 percent" is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say "yes"; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say "yes" (almost the same percent in both classes!).
[via Marginal Revolution]
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