zygote daddy

grad school brings out the bad parent in all of us

Oh, I SO know how that feels. That has been my life for months now.

The end of the semester is upon us. I am finally finishing up my dissertation proposal, I have a class presentation on Wednesday I've almost started thinking about, d.w. is trying to salvage a term paper group-written with some appallingly underachieving undergrads, and she's about to put in some very long hours in the studio finishing a mixed-media work for another class.

Oh wait, don't we have a baby at home or something?

Yes, yes we do. And thankfully he plays well by himself. But sometimes the pull of Tivo is simply too much, and we have to put on Sesame Street or March of the Penguins so we can get just a little more work done. And he just loves those damn penguins.

I'm afraid we're bad people. No, I'm confident we're bad people. Next thing you know it'll be Ritalin and behavior modification.

I'll be a good dad when the semester ends. I promise.

[By the way, you might want to check out the latest addition to A Compendium of All Knowledge Related to the Rearing of Offspring. At least if you like reading about diapers.]

something curious

I just saw that my university's football coach just got a raise of $200K a year, to a tidy $1.1 million. Guaranteed for four years, no matter what.

Said university has paid its teaching assistants $17,000 a year for as long as anyone can remember.

That's all I'm saying.

one more reason the danes should be in charge, vol. 2

Second in an occasional series. Actually, I just made that up. I just thought this was cool. And Danish.

Can you picture the mind-blowing cuteness of a bus full of Danish kindergarteners? And frolicking in nature everyday, to boot?

something tells me this is not a condoned approach to teaching

Don't look at me. Married to the Sea made me do it.

water water everywhere...

Not many people want to teach high school biology. I happen to be one of them. I also happen to get straight A's, have damn good GRE scores, and will have 3 or 4 publications come out of my master's thesis. But according to most schools, I am unqualified to teach the Krebs cycle to ninth graders. I realize there are programs out there for people like me, like this one and this one. The thing is, with a spouse in school and a baby on the way, they don't make a lot of sense right now.

Although I actually want to go into teaching, I don't see how I can possibly afford to pursue teacher certification. There is no way I can saddle any more student loans, especially if they will have to be repaid on a teacher's salary. So I've basically skipped high school teaching as a job possibility, at least in the near-term, and as a result I am going after a Ph.D. so I can teach at the college level instead.

Getting a Ph.D. actually pays the bills, you see. Free tuition. Health insurance. Subsidized child care. A paycheck. Until either a) teacher education programs start treating (and paying) their students like professionals, or b) an advanced degree carries more weight in the hiring process, I have a feeling I am not the only qualified grad student passing over high school teaching as a career option.

Sad, but true.

As though he were reading my mind, Nicholas Kristof had an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today (well, really yesterday; that whole working on my thesis until the wee hours thing, you know...) on the dearth of qualified teachers in public schools. Here is a good chunk of it, which I have (totally illegally, most likely) reprinted, thanks to the Times' insistence on making us actually pay for (some of) their work:

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.

Alas, they would be "unqualified" for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification.

A white paper from the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution urged, "Rather than dig further down in the pool of those willing to consider teacher certification programs or raise class sizes, we need to expand the pool of those eligible to teach."

In a new book called "Tough Love for Schools," Frederick Hess argues that applicants should be eligible for teaching jobs if they have graduated from a recognized college, have passed a competency test in their field and have passed a rigorous background check. Principals may prefer to hire graduates of teaching colleges, he writes, but they should have the option to hire other outstanding applicants as well.

That's the situation in some of America's most elite private high schools. Phillips Exeter Academy, for example, says that 85 percent of its faculty have advanced degrees but probably only a handful are certified. (Since it is private, it doesn't worry about certification or even keep track of which teachers are certified.)

At Exeter, for example, biology is taught by a former doctor. Japanese is taught by a former businessman who worked in Japan. And a history teacher arrived with no teaching experience but has published five books.

The idea behind teacher certification is that there are special skills that are picked up in teacher training courses — secret snake-charming skills to keep the little vipers calm. But there's no evidence this is so.

Granted, intellectual brilliance alone does not make a great teacher. When I think of my best teachers, like Juanita Trantina in the fifth grade, they didn't just teach us but also inspired us, humored us, tamed us and enchanted us. Maybe it helps to be brilliant and to have studied teaching, but mostly it is personality. Colin Powell, Meryl Streep and many anonymous others would dazzle the surliest student, so why continue to bar them at the schoolhouse door?

Amen, brother.

DDT and creationism in the Atomic Age

I am a total sucker for old science books, which d.w. just doesn't seem to understand. In fact, she is rolling her big, brown eyes at me as I write this. Old books offer a lot of perspective. I have come to accept, for instance, that everything cutting-edge I am studying now will soon be embarrassingly quaint. It really takes a lot of the pressure off: "So what if I make up data? This won't matter in a couple of years anyway!"

Dude, I'm joking. Really.

Anyway, I bring it up because our local public library's annual book sale was today, and I brought home a stack of lovely, musty old library books. One that will find a place (again, d.w. rolling her eyes) on the new shelf of baby books is Functional Anatomy of the Newborn. Useful stuff, in case we ever want to know the weight of the hatchling's pituitary gland, or the anteroposterior length of the maxillary sinus. By far the best find was a general science textbook from 1950, entitled Our Environment: How We Use and Control It. A few select tidbits:

On physics:

No savage can tell you why a log or canoe floats, but he uses the principle of bouyancy every day of his life if he lives near water.

On chemistry:

Whether or not DDT will prove as useful in the protection of crops against insects as it has in the protection of human beings, time alone will tell. We shall consider this remarkable insecticide in greater detail at a later point in our study.

On geology:

At best a theory is only a guess and should never be taken too much for granted. By contrast, the story of creation as told so beautifully in the Bible gives us the great truths of creation. We should keep that story constantly in mind as we study [geology]. Yet, as we read and reread its simple, inspiring narrative, we realize that it purposely leaves many interesting details for men's inquiring minds to fill in.

On engineering:

Hardly had the steam engine become well-established  when along came the gasoline engine with its invaluable contributions, especially in the related field of transportation. Then came the dynamo and the Age of Electricity. Now we are face to face with the Atomic Age, and no one can yet foretell what wonders of industry its power holds for the world. Perhaps the time may come when we shall be flying around with enough atomic energy packed away in our pockets to keep our automobiles or airplanes running for a lifetime.

And finally, on genetics. Hoo boy:

Some families have been known to science for many years in which immoral, feeble-minded, pauper, vagrant, and drunken traits appear with regularity through several generations. There are others where the descendents were generally of a high type physically, mentally, and morally.

There are thirty-five normal-minded persons to every feeble-minded person in this country. The future well-being of the nation depends upon these normal-minded people. To encourage the recognition of this fact the science of eugenics has developed. Eugenics is the science of improving the human race by better heredity through better parents.

So what insights can we glean from such a, um, perspective? Well, in 1950, apparently only white people understood basic physics and being poor was a genetic disorder. Oh, and scientific theories (like gravity) were really no more than a wild guess.

It does make me wonder though. Are my kids going to think that this decade (whatever the hell it's called: ots? oughts? aughts? oh's? owe's? o's?) is as backward as we the 50's were?

I can only hope so.

a plague of frogs

The BBC was absolutely giddy yesterday reporting a story about how Americans know more about the Simpsons than they do the First Amendment. Apparently, 20% of us think the right to own a pet is one of the freedoms guaranteed under the amendment. Only one in 1,000 could remember all five.

You know what the stinker is? Only 1,000 people were polled. Lucky that one dude got called, or else, statistically-speaking, NONE of us would know them all. I managed to get four of them (speech, religion, press, and assembly), but I forgot the right to petition the government for a redress of grievences. Silly me.

So this got the dear wife and I talking about what other seminal documents we could remember, and the conversation veered toward the Ten Commandments. Killing and adultery we remembered. Always good for married folks.

Not remembering all ten, I whipped out Exodus looking for them. I forgot what a wonderful treasure trove of archaic belligerence the book is! Had untold millions not been murdered over the millenia because of its priceless little tidbits, I would even characterize it as "amusing." Either way, it certainly provides persective.

Anyway, the reason I am here: I'd forgotten the frog part. Oh, man, can I stick this in my thesis? That would be awesome. Here we go, Exodus 8:1-14

1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs:
3 And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs:
4 And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.
5 And the Lord spake unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch forth thine hand with thy rod over the streams, over the rivers, and over the ponds, and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt.
6 And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up, and covered the land of Egypt.
7 And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.
8 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, Intreat the Lord, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people; and I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the Lord.
9 And Moses said unto Pharaoh, Glory over me: when shall I intreat for thee, and for thy servants, and for thy people, to destroy the frogs from thee and thy houses, that they may remain in the river only?
10 And he said, To morrow. And he said, Be it according to thy word: that thou mayest know that there is none like unto the Lord our God.
11 And the frogs shall depart from thee, and from thy houses, and from thy servants, and from thy people; they shall remain in the river only.
12 And Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh: and Moses cried unto the Lord because of the frogs which he had brought against Pharaoh.
13 And the Lord did according to the word of Moses; and the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.
14 And they gathered them together upon heaps: and the land stank.

...and that's where all the current frog extinctions began.

 

changing the world, one tomato at a time

Alice Waters had an interesting op-ed piece in the Times today, calling for healthful eating to become part of school curricula, just as physical education became part of the curriculum a half century ago. Says Waters,

At [Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School] today, 1,000 children are involved in growing, preparing and sharing fresh food. These food-related activities are woven into the entire curriculum. Math classes measure garden beds. Science classes study drainage and soil erosion. History classes learn about pre-Columbian civilizations while grinding corn.

We're not forcing them to eat their vegetables; we're teaching them about the botany and history of those vegetables. We're not scaring them with the health consequences of their eating habits; we're engaging them in interactive education that brings them into a new relationship with food. Nothing less will change their behavior.

[W]hen a healthy lunch is a part of a class that all children have to take, for credit — and when they can follow food from the garden to the kitchen to the table, doing much of the work themselves — something amazing happens. The students want to taste everything. They get lured in by foods that are beautiful, that taste and smell good, that appeal to their senses. When children grow and prepare good, healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and, what's more, they like this way of learning.

We need a revolution, a delicious revolution, that will induce children — in a pleasurable way — to think critically about what they eat. The study of food, and school lunch, should become part of the core curriculum for all students from kindergarten through high school. Such a move will take significant investment and the kind of resolve that this country showed a half-century ago. It will be costly, but if we don't pay now, the health care bill later will be astronomical.

Along this same vein, I'd also like to direct your attention to Slow Food, a great international organization seeking nothing less than to redefine modern society's relationship with food and food production. Another one to look at is the American Community Gardening Association, which is dedicated to the synergistic goals of food security, community vitality, and urban ecological health.

Just thought you should know.

 

 

now we can get on to liberating the children of kansas

Well, it finally happened. Dover, PA's experiment in creationism died a quiet death yesterday when it's newly-elected school board unceremoniously killed its policy in a unanimous voice vote. About damn time, frankly. Maybe there is hope yet for science education in this country.

And now on to Kansas...

a victory for children

So I go to post a witty anecdote to pass the time while running some computer simulations, when I see in the Times that a federal judge ruled that "intelligent design" can't be taught in Dover, Pa. public schools.

Today is a very good day for the children of Dover.

I was worried. Pennsylvania is a nice place. I know some great people from Pennsylvania. I would hate for their home to become as much of an educational laughingstock as Kansas, now the only state on my do-not-move-here-with-children-under-any-circumstances list.

After all, now that Kansas' definition of "science" includes supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, science teachers are free to teach about wicca and astrology.

Oh yeah, and pirates.

By the way, have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage?