Schooling
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On paying teachers for value added.
Pay the best teachers more? Sure! But are the best teachers the ones who program their students to fill in the right bubbles?
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On proving that elections will make you miserable.
Somehow I’d deluded myself into thinking that typing this essay would make me happy. I see now that I was wrong.
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On the question of whom to blame for the paucity of women in science.
We castigate scientists for the number of women in STEM fields, but the behavior of non-scientists might be equally to blame.
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On Jon Krakauer’s Missoula
I am obviously thrilled that Jon Krakauer’s Missoula has been getting so much press. There are still a wide variety of pernicious misperceptions out there, and Krakauer does an excellent job of addressing them in a very accessible format. I hope lots of people read his book, and, like Nicholas Kristof, encourage their friends and…
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On biomedical research (and why I no longer do it).
Getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford is excellent preparation for two careers. One, becoming a research professor at one of our nation’s universities, in which case you get to help mint more Ph.D.s because the workforce employed by research professors is primarily composed of doctoral candidates. Two, conducting bioscience science research at one of…
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On Welcome to Braggsville and…
Because it’s a tragicomic collegiate novel about racism (hey! I wrote one of those too!), I’ve been looking forward to reading Welcome to Braggsville for a while. And, praise be to the local library, I finally got my chance! Thank you, library. Thank you, T. Geronimo Johnson, for caring about these issues enough to write…
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On talking to students about school, particularly high schoolers.
Oscar Fernandez (find him @EverydayCalc) recently wrote a charming little article about how to talk to your high-school-aged kids about math. Well worth the quick read, if you’re a parent, or might someday be a parent, or happen to interact with other people’s kids. He has some great tips, and provides a lucid description of why it’s…
coaching, cross country, hating school, high school, How to Talk to Your Kids About Math, math, math with babies, math with toddlers, mathematics, Oscar Fernandez, Out-of-breath conversations about mathematics, parenting, running, school, sullen teenagers, track, volunteering, What was your best class today -
On the PubPeer lawsuit, scientific fraud, and anonymity.
There are some problems with academic bioscience. That much seems to be well agreed on. There are a lot of contributing factors — the pyramid-scheme-like training & employment setup, the recent propagation of soft money positions (universities hiring without setting aside money for salaries, expecting salary money to come out of research grants instead), a…
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On the potential psychological ramifications of certain insular societies, or: that fraternity video in the news.
After N woke up from her nap, I strapped her into the jogging stroller and took her to the local playground. Holding my hands, she stomped around while I dripped on her: a sudden blast of warm air from the south brought summer-like weather to our town today. Then, after about twenty minutes of stomping,…
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On cheating in school.
Find the first essay I wrote about this topic here. I have a little bit more to write about McBrayer’s “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts” editorial. But this’ll be the end of it, I swear! It’s just that I didn’t manage to cram anything in as a response to this passage:…
Frank Brown Cloud 