The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • Throwing Out the Textbook (Part II)

    (Part I gives the background.)

    Since the date to order a textbook has long since passed, I’m pretty committed to not going with one for “Space Science & Astrophysics”. I’ve taken the plunge. The problem is, I don’t know exactly what the course should look like now. Most especially, I don’t know of a good way to evaluate the students. I do not want long papers to grade every week! Also, although Scientific American articles are written for “the intelligent layperson” and so should be within the reach of 12th graders, there won’t be the same organized, coherent narrative that a textbook can give. In other words, when you know that you’re going to cover tides in detail in Chapter 5, you can arrange Chapter 3 more intelligently.

    I won’t have that luxury. It would seem that that would lead to more lecturing, a proven-bad way of teaching. I will have to lecture somewhat but I want to minimize how much. One thing I’ve considered is throwing it back onto the students. There are tons of sites dedicated to popular astronomy and astrophysics. Perhaps I can give them weekly worksheets with terms and ideas they need to research. Certainly class participation is going to carry a lot more weight than usual in my class, because a lot of what we handle is going to have to be tailored to what they bring to discussion. There will almost certainly be papers of some sort. I am also considering weekly quizzes just to ensure that people have read somewhat. Finally, each quarter will conclude with some sort of group project/presentation. What’s worked well in the past have been things like The Pluto Prosecution as well as a detailed project on Exobiogenesis.

    An intriguing possibility is that I will have functioning laptops for each student. This opens up the chance to do actual web-based instruction — but what would that look like? How can it be used to enhance the course? Most especially, web-kits often take a lot of time to develop, and I’ll be doing this largely seat-of-my-pants.

    What has me concerned most is tests. How much objective stuff can I put, when their sources are likely to be wildly divergent? And what would be the most effective way to assess the objective content? For the past two years, I’ve used a mixture of multiple-choice and fill-in questions, and (I have to admit) I’ve been immensely dissatisfied with both.

    So… anyone have any thoughts on how to assess this class? All suggestions will be deeply appreciated.

  • Throwing out the Textbook (Part I)

    (You can skip to Part II.)
    Some of you might remember that this is nominally a blog about education. It’s time again to shunt aside all the personal and political things I like to blog about, and to instead post about my classes. I do this in part because school starts soon and I am still up a creek regarding one of my classes, and thought that the great wide Internet community might offer some ideas.

    Here’s the situation: For the fifth semester I will be teaching “Space Science & Astrophysics”, a 16-week overview of the discipline intended for seniors at my prep school. Due to the vagaries of our curriculum, many if not most will be taking this course to complete their science requirement — and hence will not have taken regular HS physics beforehand. For the past two years I’ve used The Cosmic Perspective by Bennet, et al. (I’ve been using 4th edition but I see they’re up to 5th now.) I really liked the book, actually, and still think it’s a fantastic textbook for its audience … but its audience is not survey-level 12th graders many of whom have not had physics. As I observed even my best students falling behind in the reading, and as I considered the $125 price tag, I grew guilty and frustrated. So I decided to shake things up.

    More below the fold.
    (more…)

  • Review: Counting Crows with Maroon 5

    Counting Crows with Maroon 5
    Also with Sara Bareilles
    Thursday 2008 Aug 7
    PNC Bank Arts Center
    Holmdel, NJ

    My usual way to review a show would be to give the playlist and say what I did or didn’t like about each. That’s not going to work this time for a host of reasons. First off, I don’t really know the body of work for either Sara Bareilles or Maroon 5. I wouldn’t be able to name almost any of their songs, and it wouldn’t be fair to give an in-depth review of material I was hearing for the first time, under concert conditions. I can say that I was impressed with both groups, enough that I’ll probably plunk down some cash and check out their studio work. Ms. Bareilles has tremendous range and an endearing quality to her voice. Maroon 5 also covered a lot of ground stylistically, from hard rock to something that sounded a bit like late Police work.

    I do know most Counting Crows songs, and I will be posting their playlist. But it really isn’t meaningful to analyze each in detail, for reasons that will be made clear below the fold.
    (more…)

  • I Didn’t Know

    For all the regular readers — both of them — wondering what’s prompted the past week of short bursts of happy posts, a hint. It’s about as subtle as a bowling ball and not nearly so good as it should be, but for what it’s worth, it is earnest. Further details, alas, are embargoed for a short while.

    (An aside: It is surprisingly hard to rhyme “breath” without dragging in the morbid. I didn’t pull it off.)
    (more…)

  • One incredible week

    It’s been an amazing seven days for me. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t quite take first prize for Most Significant Week Ever. But in my little world it’s running a close second. As of yet I’m not at liberty to document why, but I’m hoping that will change shortly.

  • Echos of Sins Past

    Regular readers of this blog, were there any, would know that in early June, The Mongrel Dogs That Teach was high-jacked by people of malicious intent who inserted “invisible” code into my text to direct people to infected sites and to sites offering badware. This resulted from my neglect of the infrastructure of the site, specifically, from failing to upgrade regularly. Let that be a lesson to you!

    Anyway, the malefactors pulled off their dastardly deed using a glitch in WordPress (since fixed) that allows one user to modify the posts of another. So the creeps created a spurious account, leavened my site with their crap, and (as far as I know) moved on. Following advice I found on the Net, I deleted the fake users (instituting user moderation for the future) and purged their comments, after upgrading the WordPress installation. This, I thought, solved the problem; but I was wrong.

    Today, browsing to my own site, I was blocked by Firefox, which told me that Google has deemed the site unsafe. Further investigation made clear that many of my posts were still harboring the vile iframe and noscript tags that causes the problem. I discovered admin tools that simplified my search-and-destroy mission, removing the offenders from every post and comment.

    Now I’ve submitted a request that Google check the site again and clear it. Let’s hope that works out.

  • Six days and counting…

    … and it’s still all good.

  • Regression to the mean…

    … has not yet set in. Maybe it’s a new mean.

  • The streak…

    … continues, with today topping even yesterday.

  • As for today…

    … even better than yesterday, which I would not have thought possible.