academia

For a lot of my College/University instructor/professor friends, including myself, this week was the first week of the fall semester. So how did it go? Have you survived add/drop yet? The Pop Quiz is a question posed to you, the Scholars of Doubt. Look for it on Mondays, Wednesdays and …

The other day I was talking with my father-in-law who helps out at their church’s school. He was telling me about how they were cleaning some stuff out to get things ready for the new school year. As he was telling me this he also managed to describe how they …

See my post about Monday August 11 to understand where the content for this quiz is coming from. So I am not going to beat around the bush. A natural disaster happened on the way to work the other day and I did not cancel class because it happened so …

I am about to give everyone a very good indication where I live because I am about to describe my commute to work on Monday evening. This is a prelude to the pop quiz for this Friday. I woke up on Monday morning to a very gloomy sky. I went …

If I do not have a mediated classroom with at least a computer in it that is capable of projecting information and pictures on a screen my astronomy lectures are broken. I need the ability to show pictures. I have colleagues who still use slide projectors to show examples of …

*Ha!  Not the snake! This whole post is about computer programming. This past weekend I went to PyOhio the Python programming language conference held in Columbus, Ohio. The conference serves the needs of both beginner and experienced programmers. So there were an array of different types of talks from introductory (“Hello …

A lot of the classes I teach are at night. I mean really at night.  Sometimes I don’t get out of work until after 10 pm.  This means that these classes can start right at the dinner hour or during the long evening hours when people are tired. In an …

Summer is conference time for scientists and I just got back from a fantastic one in Australia.  The Great Barrier Reef  science was quite fun and educational.  In between seminars as we are wont to do, we talked funding and how tight things are these days.  One’s chances of getting …

Warning: This post is Northern Hemisphere-centric! Also, keep in mind I did not do an exhaustive statistical analysis of this survey so take it as you wish. Every semester at the beginning of my Introduction to Astronomy course I give a variation of the survey from The Collaboration for Astronomy Education …

I allow laptops in my classroom.  I do a lot of slides so I figure if they want to annotate them they can either print them out or bring a tablet/laptop to class to do so. I know that those with laptops are sitting there half paying attention and half …