By Christopher Moore
The San Fransisco Chronicle reports that a Quaker math teacher was fired for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance. This is not necessarily physics news, but having gone to Guilford College and having a background in the Society of Friends, this is an interesting story to me.
Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.
You see, Ms. Kearney-Brown did the following each time the oath was presented to her:
Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote “nonviolently” in front of the word “support,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.” All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.
She refused to sign the statement unaltered, and she was fired.
You see, Quakers have this little hang-up on non-violence. It’s nothing big, really, it’s just sort of one of the foundations of the religion. The oath as written is like asking a Hindu to swear to defend the constitution from all enemies, including cows. Also, the statement is vague. Very vague. What constitutes an enemy of the constitution? I claim that a large majority of our Representatives in Congress are “enemies” to the constitution. Who defines “enemies”? And what constitutes “defend”.
Ms. Kearney-Brown makes the following point:
All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don’t care if I meant it, and it didn’t seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn’t matter. Nothing.
By Christopher Moore
Epsori Space Systems announced today that its Free Seeds Experiment will be flying aboard the Up Aerospace SL-2 launch, scheduled for Saturday, April 28 th 2007 . Epsori Space Systems will distribute the experiment to 2500 classrooms in the fall of 2007. The payload contains 22 ounces of mixed vegetable seeds. Teachers in grades 3-5 will be offered a free experiment along with approved curriculum, student workbooks, and packages of seeds that have flown into space. The experiment allows students to compare the growth of seeds in a control group, to the growth of the space seeds. Students are taught classic techniques of scientific observation and record keeping during the experiment’s two week execution.
Epsori Space Systems executives believe its pioneering approach of flying experiments to space to teach fundamental science skills in the classroom provides a fun way to connect children with space science. Quoting Jerry Hilburn, founder of Epsori Space Systems:
By placing seeds which have flown into space in the hands of our children, we engage their minds, excite their hearts, and make science fun!
Teachers are encouraged to visit the site to learn more about the experiment. Epsori is now accepting applications from teachers for the free program.
Epsori Space Systems was founded in 2007 with the mission of delivering affordable space based experiments to classrooms across America . Based in the heart of the New Space industry in Southern California , Epsori plans to launch thousands of experiments onboard emerging New Space commercial spacecraft in coming years. Up Aerospace is the first “public access to space” company to provide a low cost method of placing our experiments in space. Quoting co-founder, Joshua Johnson, “We are excited to be onboard SL-2 and look forward to flying payloads with Up Aerospace for many years to come”. Epsori Space Systems will launch a new social network website for teachers and students in September, which will provide a platform for reporting experiences, research findings, classroom photography, and video content of the experiments execution. Distribution of the seeds experiment will begin September 1st , 2007 .
The Epsori Space Systems media team will attend the launch in New Mexico on Saturday, April 28th, to record videos of the event and interviews of key participants. All news, photos, and videos will be posted at www.epsori.com and ilovephysics.com will provide coverage, as well.
By Christopher Moore
Here is an interesting story about a group of teachers floating in freefall during the “Weightless Flights of Discovery” program, sponsored by the aerospace company Northrop Grumman in cooperation with Zero Gravity Corp.
On one level, the exercise gives educators a chance to demonstrate the laws of physics in an environment like nothing on Earth: Objects in motion (like those plush toys) really stay in motion rather than falling to the floor. Surface tension turns those squirts of water into floating, glistening spheres. CD players and bicycle wheels go into a stable spin like gyroscopes.
“That’s the way physics teaching is all the time,” said Jeff Klein of Cleveland’s Gilmour Academy. “We’ve got great toys.”
Great toys indeed.
Hey, Northrop Grumman — if you need a physicist blogger to float around for a few hours, then I’m your guy. 
By Christopher Moore
Physicists properly join today’s arguments involving the teaching of Darwinian evolution. There is, however, a social issue even closer to the responsibility of physicists: quantum physics is increasingly invoked to promote pseudoscience.
Such pseudoscience promotions often start correctly stating some intriguing implications of quantum mechanics, move on to legitimate hyperbole, and then go off into complete hype. Take a recent “international hit” movie as our case in point. It’s strangely titled: “What tHe #$*! Do wE (k)now!?” (It’s sometimes called “What the Bleep?”) Time magazine describes it as “an odd hybrid of science documentary and spiritual revelation featuring a Greek chorus of Ph.D.s and mystics talking about quantum physics.” Early on, the movie illustrates the uncertainty principle with a bouncing basketball being in several places at once. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s recognized as pedagogical exaggeration. But the movie gradually blends to quantum “insights” leading a woman to toss away her anti-depressant medication, to the quantum channeling of the 35,000 year-old Atlantis god, Ramtha, and on to even greater nonsense.
A layperson cannot tell where the quantum physics ends and the quantum nonsense begins. And many are susceptible to being misguided. According to polls, well over half of Americans (and English) have significant belief in the reality of supernatural phenomena. Robert Park in his book, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, puts the problem well. “Many people . . . seek a certainty that science cannot offer. For these people the unchanging dictates of ancient religious beliefs, or the absolute assurances of zealots, have a more powerful appeal. Paradoxically, however, their yearning for certainty is often mixed with a respect for science. They long to be told that modern science validates the teachings of some ancient scripture or New Age guru. The purveyors of pseudoscience have been quick to exploit their ambivalence.” We should not underestimate how persuasively the imprimatur of physics can be used to buttress mystical notions. We physicists bear some responsibility for the way our discipline is invoked.
The human implications of quantum mechanics that fuel popular discussion arise in the “measurement problem” and “entanglement.” That’s at least how we refer to these topics in a physics class, where we rarely go much beyond their mathematical formulation. These same issues are also legitimately discussed more broadly in terms of the nature of reality, universal connectedness, and consciousness. But we don’t distract physics students with excursions into issues that extend embarrassingly beyond the boundaries we define for our discipline. Science historian Jed Buchwald notes: “Physicists . . . have long had a special loathing for admitting questions with the slightest emotional content into their professional work.” Accordingly, unlike the biology student able to defend evolution against Intelligent Design, a physics student may be unable to convincingly confront unjustified extrapolations of quantum mechanics.
(more…)
By Christopher Moore
Robert Tai, a science education assistant professor at the University of Virginia recently published a study that claims students subjected to block scheduling in high-school science classes performed worse in college-level science. Tai along with high-school biology teacher Kirsten Dexter looked at a national sample of 8,000 introductory college science students from 31 states, many of whom went to high schools that use block scheduling.
Here is the UVA press release. From Ascribe:
Block scheduling is a way of structuring the school day so that students have fewer classes for longer periods of time. The most common type comprises classes that last for 90 minutes alternating two or three days a week, in contrast with the traditional schedule of classes that run 45-55 minutes and are held every day. Increasingly adopted over the past 15 years, the schedule remains a subject of debate. Claimed as a way to help prepare students better for college, Tai found that was not the case when students in introductory biology, chemistry and physics courses were surveyed.
“Final college course grades are a real-world measure with long-term impacts,” Tai said. “Even when students had teachers who used instruction methods specifically geared toward block scheduling, the students who had a traditional schedule had better grades in college.”
Block scheduling has been all the rage over the last few years. I have taught both block and traditional formats, and as a young teacher, I actually preferred the block scheduling. I never noticed any difference in performance or learning that I could attribute to how many days during the week a student saw me. But I also tried to be very efficient and I have very few “data points”, so my preference is just that. I preferred block scheduling mainly because it was easier for me to prepare for class.
Block scheduling has come under fire recently. Jeff Lindsay maintains a site called “The Case Against Block Scheduling” that details its problems. School administrations like it because it is cost-effective and some studies show that it helps student performance. So obviously the jury seems to still be out.
I had traditional classes in high-school. And when I got to college, my first-year physics and calculus classes were 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week as well. Today, most colleges and university classes meet longer and fewer times a week, with the exception of language classes.
Which brings up a pretty good point: foreign language teachers have successfully argued that daily exposure to the language increases retention. That’s why college Spanish classes usually meet daily. Shouldn’t the same be true for math and science?
Colleges have block-like schedules because of logistics. There is no academic reason for classes to be arranged the way they are at the university level. But it’s understandable, because it’s the only way to make it work. So high-schools are moving to what may be a poor scheduling scheme to get kids used to college schedules?! That’s the main argument for block, but that logic doesn’t make sense.
Either block scheduling helps student performance or it doesn’t. That should be administrators only concern. I don’t know the answer to this one. But Tai believes he does.
By Christopher Moore
An old post got an interesting comment yesterday, which got me thinking: was I well compensated as a high-school teacher?
The commenter, Doinkicarus, has a few things to say about Michigan’s new tougher graduation requirements that I disagree with. He’s against them. I’m trying to change the culture of education, so I like more required math and science. Stricter requirements themselves are not necessarily a bad thing (although I admittedly know nothing about the new requirements.)
But I care more right now about what he points out later in his article:
I submit that you need to increase the incentives for math & science teachers, or rather, allow the market to work it out properly. But as sure as I sit here, the teachers’ union will not hear that argument. The teachers union unfairly restricts the pay of math & science teachers, who can earn far more, in a more rewarding environment in the private sector. The teachers’ union is the one to blame for these distorted incentives, where a woodshop teacher is paid on par with a chemistry teacher.
Teachers unions do restrict pay of math and science teachers in some states. Some of Virginia’s (right-to-work state, thank God!) counties have”workarounds” such as offering extended contracts and bumps in “experience levels”. But are math and science teachers generally getting shafted when it comes to pay?
Doinkicarus again:
According to Salary.com, the median income for an entry level “scientist” in the Detroit area is about $87,900. “Chemist” indicates a median income of about $48,000, and an entry level “Physicist” can expect somewhere in the neighborhood of $53,000 annually. Now the median high-school teacher also earns about $54,000 annually. But that’s the average median, not the median for “entry level teachers.”
Now I won’t pretend to know about the cost of living in Detriot, so I’ll use Richmond, VA numbers and compare them to my entry-level salary in the Henrico County school system.
Salary.com has the median entry level “Physicist I” earning about $48,000 per year. In Richmond, the median high school teacher salary is about $49,000. Now as Doink points out, that’s not entry level.
My very first contract with Henrico was for $38,500 per year. I had a Masters degree, so it was higher than average. But the average starting salary for a teacher is somewhere around $34,000 per year. Now off the bat you might think a $14,000 difference is pretty big. But what isn’t included in these salary reports is how much time during the year are you working.
The typical high-school teacher has a 9 month contract. The typical physicist has a 12 month contract. That means the starting physicist gets paid roughly $4,000 per month of work and the new teacher gets paid about $3,800 per month. If the teacher works during the summer then s/he’d make just about as much as the physicist!
It’s not the pay that’s the problem. It’s the hurdles teacher’s unions place in the way of math and science teachers. It’s an entire culture of education geared towards humanities. It’s the fact that education classes put scientifically minded people to sleep.
By Christopher Moore
Michigan is warning its teacher colleges that they better produce better teachers or else. The Detroit News has the story:
State officials want to crack down on state colleges to ensure they are preparing future teachers to meet the state and nation’s rising education standards.
Michael Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction, now plans by June to have a way to rate low-performing colleges and is developing a process to more thoroughly evaluate how well they prepare new teachers. State officials say the plans ultimately could mean taking away universities’ authority to certify teachers if, for example, they have too many graduates teaching in failing schools and too few passing certification exams.
This sure sounds like a good plan to me. If an education school continues to pump out bad educators, then they should be penalized.
But the state doesn’t go far enough. If the teachers these schools are producing are sub-par, then fire them!
Here are some interesting quotes from the article:
A 2005 report from the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York found that nine out of 10 principals nationally felt that teacher graduates weren’t prepared, with many saying college courses lacked rigor and were outdated. About 80 percent said education schools were out of touch with K-12 schools.
I’ve attended education classes. They certainly do lack rigor. What’s more interesting is that an education professor will spend countless hours in the front of the classroom with an overhead projector explaining how you need to incorporate various methods into your teaching. Now this may not be the norm — my experience is limited — but from the anecdotal data I have collected (stories from about 1 dozen new science teachers), education classes in general are easy and incredibly boring. Are education classes important for aspiring secondary school teachers? Yes. Should they be better? Of course.
In Macomb County alone, officials estimate they’ll need at least 70 new math teachers over the next couple of years as more students are required to take advanced math.
This is actually a good sign. Requiring more students to take advanced math may be a sign that the culture of education is changing. Now if they would just take a look outside of the education schools to find these math teachers …
And here is an interesting problem:
Rachel Roth-Haverland, a high school junior from Royal Oak, said she’s felt the frustration of having a teacher who knew the subject well, but just couldn’t explain it to all students.
She dropped out of Royal Oak’s Kimball High School in January, in part because she became overwhelmed in her precalculus class. She said her math teacher tried to explain the concepts, even staying late after school, but just couldn’t connect with her.
“I felt like he was trying to explain Latin,” Roth-Haverland said. “It really lowered my self-esteem.”
I feel for Rachel. I also feel for her math teacher. Sometimes you can work hard and not succeed. I have never been very good with foreign languages. I would study for hours and I still managed to get a high C in Spanish and German. I’ve had students that worked incredibly hard in my physics classes, and just barely pulled Cs. I’m never going to be a translator, and those students of mine are never going to be physicists. And that’s ok. But we’re all better for having learned what we did manage to learn.
I think school districts should hire more high-school teachers with degrees in their subjects, and not worry as much about education degrees. But I certainly don’t think doing so would be a panacea.
Is it possible to be a good teacher without an education degree? Yes. But just because one has a degree in physics doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be a good physics teacher. Evidence of this can be found on just about every college campus. This is one of the reasons why teacher tenure below the college level is a pretty stupid idea. Whether someone has a degree in the subject they are teaching or not, they can still be bad teachers. So what’s the solution?
Fire them.
By Christopher Moore
Edward Morely advocated the end of “Physics for Poets” yesterday at insidehighered.com. Or did he? Although I believe he is not advocating the end to physics classes for non-majors, I think he does take issue with the conventional wisdom of how such classes should be taught.
Conventional wisdom … has it that there are three basic elements that go into making up a good non-majors science course. First, the class should cover a relatively narrow range of topics…
Second, the topic chosen as the focus of the course should be something relatively modern…
The third element is perhaps the most important: the course should involve the minimum possible amount of math.
I definitely agree with Morely that this is the prevailing attitude among college (and high school) administrations and fellow faculty. These basic elements are not completely misguided, but polling non-science educators about what works in and should be done in science classes will always lead to something stupid!
Why do we require science classes for non-science majors? Morely states:
Science for non-majors offers an important chance to reach out to students outside the sciences, and try to give them some appreciation for scientific inquiry. This is critically important, as we live in a time where science itself is under political assault from both the left and right.
Or as I like to say: Physics is a liberal arts education for a technological society. Anyway, asking why non-science majors have to take science is like asking why non-english majors have to take a literature class, or why non-art majors have to take some sort of fine arts class. Neither required English nor required art is under attack. If you want a college degree you have to have a basic command of the English language. Makes sense to me.
But why do we keep dumbing down math and physics classes? Let’s look at the points above.
Although it is completey appropriate for one to have an understanding of both verbs and adjectives, requiring a non-science student to conceptually grasp both force and electric potential may be asking too much. I’m not quite sure how one would go about constructing a physics class with a “narrow range of topics.”
But if you could create such a class, how good could it possibly be if we’re confined to teach only “relatively modern” topics. Once again I’m at a loss. How do I teach someone about, say, Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) without broaching the concepts of force and electrical potential … or just about any other basic concept of physics … or chemistry. And while we’re on the subject, how am I supposed to teach students how a television works without refering to an electron gun?
And if we’re to impart an appreciation of scientific inquiry, then how am I to do so without at least acknowledging the tools that make such possible.
So do we trash “Physics for Poets”?
Morely doesn’t have much of a solution, and neither do I. A general disdain for math and science is ingrained in our culture. The only way we can reverse that is by changing the culture of education from elementary school on. “Physics for Poets” has to become just as stupid a concept as “Poetry for Physicists” is now.
The main reason math and science gets back-of-the-bus treatment in secondary school is that elementary teachers are largely psychology majors, middle school teachers are mostly english and history majors, and high-school teachers are teaching science subjects they never even took in college. And these folks were able to get their degrees without the need to be competent at basic algebra.
I’m gearing up for a cultural revolution. Who’s with me?
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