I teach and that more or less sums up my current view on the subject. Academic departments and journals of education produce a large amount of crap that later turns out to be poorly researched. This results in nonsense educational fads like learning styles, when there is no good evidence for them:
I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.
Thanks for the link to that review article, I'm definitely going to be reading it. However, I disagree that summarization isn't a valid form of practice testing.
I've seen the sort of summarization described in the original post used as a form of practice testing. For example, a similar method (5 minutes reading, 10 minutes writing a summary, followed by 5 minutes re-reading, and another 10 minutes of summarization) showed very good results in this article.
I second this. I went to a very forgiving graduate school (at least two chances on each part of the process), and a lot of people still didn't make it past the first couple years.
I also disagree with the author's point that a Ph.D. is about changing the world. My seven years of hard work culminated in a thesis that had a negligible impact on the universe. Many of my friends justifiably felt the same way. I set out with the intention of making the world a better place, but reality had other ideas. It's hard to see how spending those seven years at a startup company could have been worse in that respect.
I've played a few of these games, and I also think it's an issue with the core mechanics. Each match can be around forty-five minutes long. So it's really easy to dig a hole for yourself and spend a lot of the game getting repeatedly beat down. Then add in the high learning curve, and small teams. This means that a single player who's learning the game or trying out a new strategy can potentially cause his entire team to lose.
If you intentionally set out to design a game that turned all your players into assholes you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better system.
"In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.[5] To eradicate smallpox, each outbreak had to be stopped from spreading, by isolation of cases and vaccination of everyone who lived close by. This process is known as "ring vaccination". The key to this strategy was monitoring of cases in a community (known as surveillance) and containment."
Reading this reminded me of an anti AIDS campaign we have here in South Africa. I can't bring to mind the catch-phrase but the gist of it is that one HIV free generation could stop the virus forever.
It's a process where you contain outbreaks by identifying them and vaccinating everyone who might come in contact with an infected person. You create a "ring" of vaccinated people around the infected, which prevents the infection from spreading.
One reason for new buildings on college campuses is that donors and the government are much more willing to give funds for that purpose than they are for salaries and benefits, which make up the bulk of most college budgets. So, I understand your frustration if you're angry about tuition rising while your college is erecting a new building every three years, but those are usually two separate piles of money, and there's not much your college can do to change that.
That said, I still flinch every time I hear about a new building on our campus. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the perception that colleges are living large while tuition rates climb, and I feel we should be more conspicuously frugal to combat it.
So I guess a more productive donor gift would be to endow a chair or professorship.
edit: Donors can actually set up scholarships in their name too (and you can even restrict the students who can apply if you so choose -- say, only engineering majors, etc.). Many of my friends in college were given generous need based scholarships from alumni who had set up scholarship funds for future students.
Yep. That's the oldest shuffle in the business, too, since the college will simply decrease their existing scholarship budget by $1 for every $1 of a restricted gift. They're literally as good as cash.
When I was signing my docs at Wash U they gave me an eight question sheet. "You don't have to answer anything that would make you feel uncomfortable, but some of our alumni have restrictions on which scholarships they fund. Check any which apply. Don't worry, your aid package is the same either way."
The two which I remember several years later are a) widow or orphan of a US military veteran and/or b) Methodist St. Louisian desiring to study engineering. They were sort of a fascinating time capsule into what really motivated the ~1945 graduating class.
I went to WashU too, and I remember getting a letter sometime during college saying "Congratulations, you won a $5,000 named scholarship for female engineers!" And I was excited until I read on and it turned out that the 5k was just going to replace 5k of a merit scholarship I already had.
Yep. For bonus points: even if you won an outside scholarship, they'd reduce your merit award by 50% of the total. (e.g. If you win an essay writing competition and pick up a $5k scholarship from a private organization like your local Boy Scout troop, they'd reduce your loan by $2.5k and your merit grant by $2.5k.)
n.b. for all current and future college attendees: this policy is negotiable. My mother called the financial aid office, pitched a fit, and got a one-time exception to it about eight different times. I was embarrassed by this, but only because I was young and stupid, since ten years later I certainly care more about the ~$10k of debt that I don't have much more than my status as a quiet, go-with-the-flow cog as measured by a financial aid officer whose name I don't know and who has almost certainly forgotten those calls ever happened.
It sounds like Wash U. screws its students over. It wasn't like that at Case Western. I got merit scholarships and scholarships from the alumni association. One couldn't impact the other.
Perhaps. However, I was from a middle to upper middle class family and had a ridiculous amount of financial aid and merit scholarships. For a 40k/year school, my family was paying about 5k total, and I graduated with no loan debt. So to an individual, it seems like this policy screws you over, but in general, they are extremely generous, and this policy allows them to move money to other people who need it to afford to come there. There are certainly arguments against it, but a blanket statement like "WashU screws its students over" is certainly unwarranted.
the college will simply decrease their existing scholarship budget by $1 for every $1 of a restricted gift. They're literally as good as cash.
This is exactly the first thing that occurred to me when I started thinking about donating to my alma mater. Haven't really figured out a way around it.
This is quite true. For state schools, new buildings may be a "gift" from the political class to show the public their support for higher education. The stupid irony is those buildings typically don't come with operations and maintenance funds. At the same time, state appropriations are decreasing, putting the pinch on O&M and department support. The university (or publicly supported research institute) has a shiny new building in which they can put neither equipment nor people.
The political class frequently uses college buildings to help fund re-election campaigns. The construction is done by a union or company that then donates to the political actor.
The Hollowmen (an Australian political sitcom, somewhere between Yes, Minister and The Thick of it) had something like this. The Prime Minister wanted a building, so he could get his name on it. The problem is, Canberra (the capitol) was already full of buildings with Prime Minister's names on them, and there wasn't any space to put anything new.
It's a great photo-op. "This $x million building will teach a new generation of students".
There's also the scope for corruption, when they pick the builders, but that's another story.
It's too bad the donor money comes with so many strings attached. I wonder if the universities could get away with renting out some of the space in some of these buildings. That could at least cover some of the operating costs.
It's a little ironic that I don't give to my alma mater's annual giving program precisely because there would be no strings attached and I'd have no idea what the administration would be spending the money on.
I'm hoping that in the future I'll be able to give to the Engineering school in some meaningful way, or contribute to need based scholarships.
Actually, colleges build buildings because USNews gives points for new construction in its annual ratings, whereas educational quality is too hard to measure.
I teach college biology, and I've never seen a textbook in my discipline that wasn't written in a soporific and meandering style. Some are worse than others, but I've never seen a textbook I thought was good.
If I needed to fill a gap in my knowledge or learn a new subject I would never resort to a textbook until I had exhausted every other available option.
That may well be true in your discipline, but there are some excellent, concise texts in undergraduate mathematics. For example, Apostol's Calculus or Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. Not the most accessible texts by a longshot, but not your average Pearson or Wiley drivel either.
likewise, the explanation for how the concepts flow together. drawing these connections is usually the last step for me in the "a-ha" moment, and too few resources explain the connections between concepts really well. khan academy being a strong exception.
Helena Curtis wrote a wonderful college level intro textbook as of 1980 when I last used it, but the publisher (Worth) let it die after she retired (which also pretty much killed them as I recall).
The most memorable part of the movie for me was when the interviewer asked Jiro what it takes to be a master of your craft. He started off mumbling standard old-man stuff about hard work, and then he mentioned something I've never heard before, that you should never complain about your job.
I was thinking about this in the context of my teaching. In general teachers complain about their students three times as much as students complain about their teachers. Here's an example, take a look at the Chronicle of Higher Education's forum on teaching:
The overwhelming majority of the activity there consists of complaints about students, with "the thread of teaching despair" currently at 447 pages. There are even entire websites devoted to the practice, like College Misery.
It's not like I've never vented about my job, but I've also always been a bit uneasy with the practice. After reflecting a bit, I think it's because time focused on what other people are doing wrong isn't spent figuring out what you should be doing right.
So as an experiment I'm going to force myself not to complain about any aspect of my job during the coming semester. If I'm happier and better at my craft by the end I'll adopt it as a long-term practice.
A splendidly heroic way to miss the point. Someone who doesn't complain isn't actively trying not to complain, they are content with their lot. Thus, forcing yourself yourself not to complain is as silly an ambition as declaring "I will not think of elephants".
Complaints stem from discontent and/or powerlessness.
It is important that Jiro is largely in control of his own destiny, however small that might be. Most teachers are not really in control of anything significant at their workplace, cetrainly not their destiny. Most students don't yet have a destiny, they are forced to attend and are purely reactive.
Choose the right thing to do, be content doing that.
PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote are more important to my job (I teach) than any other program. But none of those features will improve my work, and the impending subscription service makes me want to look at other options.
I'd be interested in seeing recommendations for alternatives.
You don't have to subscribe. Office 2013 will be available standalone:
"Is Office 365 required to run Office 2013?
No. You will still be able to purchase any Office 2013 edition with a perpetual license that doesn’t require any ongoing subscription fees. This version can be combined with a free Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live account) to allow online document storage and sharing."
I'm not sure about OneNote, but you can go a long way (even export PowerPoint and Excel files) with both LibreOffice (which is free for you and your students, forever) and with Apple's iWork, which is very expensive, but comes free with a beautiful computer. If you already own a computer beautiful enough, it's quite cheap.
Note: actually, iWork doesn't come with every new Mac, but I felt the joke irresistible.
A mix of google docs and libre office sounds appropriate. They can interopt on a lot of data formats, so you can keep your powerpoints available anywhere via google docs (and do rapid fire editing with the web interface) and download and edit them locally. Google drive streamlines that all even more, and it would take a lot of tables to fill up the free gigabytes Google gives.
Not an option. Moving my teaching materials to other programs would be a mountain of work at this point, but in five years it will be exponentially worse.
PowerPoint is the main issue. I've made a lot of animations for my courses that I'll have to remake from scratch if I switch programs.
If you accept that you will be switching at some point in the future, the sooner you start migrating to an open optionlike LibreOffice, the better. It feels good to know that nobody is going to pull the rug from under your feet.
(that said, I don't love LibreOffice and I don't know of any truly solid presentation solutions that are open, cheap, multiplatform and reasonably future-proof. I'm a coder so I've ended up in HTML5 + Sublime Text for my slides, but tooling for this option is rather limited)
