I gave today’s Pop Quiz to my 8th grade son, who calls himself the biggest G in ghetto (ghetto?). Without having participated in the course, he got a D. Is he a nerd, brilliant, the product of a sad upbringing — or are my tests too easy? My son’s theory is that the class struggles with my tests because they can’t understand my accint. [What he calls the true meaning of yiss]
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Tests that test.
Ironically, the most friction I have had with the students has been over the part of the course I am most pleased with. They hate my tests. I think my tests do good.
PB&J
We roll into Thanksgiving week, and then there are just two weeks left. Hard not to ruminate on course failings. Did we do poorly on transmitting the Passion, Beauty and Joy? Damn. Might be the most important.
"I don't understand"
I discovered a curious thing in class Tuesday. There are students who don’t understand something, yet don’t ask in class, or anonymously text the comment wall, or drop by after class, or send a follow-up email, or ask at a revision session.
How lousy is non-science?
Perhaps the most important implication of the gross inefficiencies of medical science actually lies beyond science. If just 2% of medical ideas generate positive benefits, and as many generate harm as help, think what the hit rate must be in fields of human inquiry where experimentation and hard inference are impossible.
Think economics. Whole chunks of politics. And law. Policy makers must be really groping in the dark.
More humility.
Another of Dean Larson’s pearls came after he had told the students that when they were born, we thought the stuff in the universe was star dust. Today, we think that less than 5% of the the universe is star dust; what constitutes the remaining 95+% is mysterious (the physicists, who can get away with such things, call it ‘Dark’).
The Dean on the Cosmos
Dean Larson gave the class a crash course in astronomical and cosmological thought last week. Two hours on the whole lot. Two startling moments:
2. In front of a huge Hubble telescope shot of a distant galaxy, and having explained it likely contained 100 billion stars, the Dean wanders up an aisle, stops mid sentence, and says “I think that is just awesome”.
Humility
How lousy is science?
Fortunately, it turns out that medical science is actually not that good. Analysis of 50 years of U.S. cancer RCTs have shown that that most of the time, the new experimental treatments do nothing at all, but that when they do, they are as likely to harm as help. Consequently, the trials are – magically – ethical (whew). On average, you are as well off getting the placebo as you are getting the fancy experimental treatment.
One of the best things about teaching…
Oddly, I found myself presenting one of my SiOW classes at lab meeting this week. Odder still, none among the assembled PhD students, Post-docs, Senior Research Fellows and Faculty complained about being taught a class I designed for undergraduate non-scientists.