Archive for the 'Academia' category

"Of the Wonderful Kind", a play by Claire Hately

Apr 05 2012 Published by under Academia, Personal Updates, Quest University Canada, Random & Gratuitous, Self, [Etc]

You wanted to see a picture of me in a onesie, riding a unicorn and weilding a light sabre? Why, yes, I can accommodate that:

One of the fun things about being at Quest University is the diversity of student "majors". Students don't actually have majors; instead, they choose a "Question" that they focus much of their last two years on. Most of the students I have working with me have a Question that's focused somewhere in the physical sciences, although some are a bit more diverse. One of the ones that is entirely out of the physical sciences is Claire Hately's question, "How Can We Keep Creativity Alive?" For her keystone project (the project that all students do by the end of their tenure here), she wrote and is now producing a play entitled "Of the Wonderful Kind". The one performance is tonight.

The play takes place in two locations: first, in the bedroom of an 8.5-year-old boy who's created a startling and potentially world-changing invention for the next day's school science fair. Second, inside the mind of that boy, as his confused imagination tries to deal with growing up. The play is quite funny and lasts about an hour.

And, yes, I play the 8-1/2 year old boy. Everybody else in the play is a Quest student, and is 24 years old or younger (mostly 4 or so years younger). So, naturally, I was the obvious choice to play the little boy...! Claire herself plays the role of my little sister, and various other students play my mother, the Nymphs of the Night (faeries who carry on like drug dealers), Jesus, as well as various characters in my imagination including a train conductor, the psychotic favorite doll of my little sister, a couple of cats, a foul-mouthed and wryly philosophical toad, a bevel of hard-drinking poker players, a kindly old train conductor and his assistant who turn evil, and, of course, Cowboy Bill, the flying cowboy who does nice things for people but never stops to ask for any thanks.

Sadly, I've had a cold since last week, so I've sort of lost my voice. But, I'll make it through.

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Why go to graduate school in Physics?

Jan 14 2012 Published by under Academia, Astronomy & Physics, Physics & Astronomy, Science, The Business of Astronomy, Vicious Academia

I just came accross an article at The Economist entitled The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is a waste of time. This has prompted me finally to write this post, which I've intended to write for a long time (like so many other posts on my too-quiet blog).

There is one, and only one, reason why you should go to graduate school in Physics or Astronomy. (This is probably true for any other field as well, but I'm going to stick to the field where I actually know what I'm talking about.) That one reason is: because you want to be a graduate student in physics for five or six years. That's it.

It is true that if you want to teach physics at the University level, or that if you want to have a career in physics research where you're leading and doing you're own research, you need to get a PhD. This isn't 100% true; you can certainly teach at the community college level with a masters' degree, and you can get a job working with a physics research group (although those are quite rare). However, for the most part, it's true. This leads many people to conclude that, because what they really want to do is spend their life as a professor at a University, they need to go to graduate school.

However, going to graduate school because that's what you want to do is similar to buying a lottery ticket because you want to be a millionaire. Yes, buying a lottery ticket is a prerequisite for winning the lottery, just as getting a PhD in physics is a prerequisite for being a physics professor. However, the fact that you've met that prerequisite is very far from assurance that you'll be able to do either. Thankfully, the chances of getting a physics professor job aren't quite as bad as the chances of winning the lottery. However, in both cases, they're bad investments.

There is a tremendous opportunity cost associated with being a physics graduate student. It's not as bad as being a humanities graduate student. For the most part, if you can get into a physics graduate school, your tuiton will be paid, and you will receive a stipend of something like $20,000/year. You may be able to make this as a research assistant— a good deal, because you're essentially being paid to do your PhD research. Or, you may have to teach some classes... which I also personally view as a good deal, but that's because I like to teach. (And, the teaching you do as a PhD student is lower stress and less time consuming than what a professor at a small liberal-arts college does.) However, there is still the opportunity cost. With your skills and abilities, you would be able to make a lot more money doing something else.

If you think you want to pursue a profession in academic physics, but you are going to view the years you spend working on your PhD as a sacrifice, then it's not worth doing it. The probability of getting that academic research job is just not high enough, even if you go to one of the top schools out there. What's more, ironically, the experience you get doing something else may well serve you better for any other job you might get thereafter, and it will almost certainly look better on your resume than the PhD will.

On the other hand, the life of the physics graduate student isn't necessarily a bad one. Yes, you will spend several years of your young life making a whole lot less money than you could otherwise. Yes, you will live the "graduate student lifestyle", meaning that you're still more or less pond scum in the hierarchy of your institution, and that you're still in training, still living the life of an apprentice. However, you do get to spend five or six years studying very interesting stuff, and performing original research. It can be a very cool thing to do. Yes, no matter who you are, you will go through moments of self-doubt where you wonder just what the hell you're doing, and you may go through periods of despair. But, overall, it can be a very fulfulling way to spend several years. That is, if you go into it recognizing that you're doing it for the sake of doing it, not as an investment in a future career that you'll have any assurance of achieving.

And, of course, to enjoy the graduate student lifestyle, you have to keep some perspective on life. If a professorial job were guaranteed, then perhaps one could stomach the idea of living several years with your life on hold, being underpaid and undervalued for working too hard. But, since that professorial job is far from guaranteed, you can't sacrifice your whole life to be a graduate student. Some will consider this heresy, will believe that graduate students are supposed to work really really hard because "your education is an investment in your future". But, again, a PhD program is today a terrible investment. Yes, you should probably expect to work up to 50 hours a week... not because you're overworking, but rather because you're inspired by your subject. But you should not, under any circumstance, join one of "those" labs where the professor expects you to work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need to have a life. Work hard, but keep perspective. Recognize that you need to value your life right then.

What's more, you'll need to recognize that the culture of the PhD program is a bit dysfunctional. You almost certainly will feel cultural pressure to want to achieve the highly valued research professor position after graduate school, especially if you go to a top tier graduate school. You will feel this pressure from peers, and from your institution. (They partially judge the "success" of their graduate program based on the "placement" of their graduates.) Take it all with a grain of salt. It's your life. You are decidedly not a failure if you don't get one of the vaunted research positions, and indeed there's nothing shameful about deciding that you don't want one. Try to get one if you want one, and it's inevitable that you'll be disappointed if you don't, but don't feel ashamed, don't feel like a failure, and don't feel like you're letting anybody down if you don't get one. After all, most of us, if we're honest, will admit that we're overproducing PhDs in all fields, including physics, for the number of jobs out there that Physics PhDs are "supposed" to want.

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The End of Nobel Week

Dec 13 2011 Published by under Academia, Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Personal Updates, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, science & society, Self, The Business of Astronomy

The Sunday (Dec. 11) after the Nobel Prize ceremony was a slow and quiet day. I slept in a bit (due to having gone to bed so late the night of the cermoney), but not as much as I had intended. That was fine, though, as late in the afternoon I fell asleep, to wake up briefly in the evening, only to fall asleep again. So, the day before yesterday, I slept a lot. (If only you could bank sleep.) The one fun thing I did on Sunday was head down to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship that was launched in the early 17th century, commissioned by the then-king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus II. Its trip didn't last long; on its first voyage, it tipped, took on water, and sank. In the mid-twentieth century, it was rasied again, and today forms the basis of a museum all about early 17th-century Swedish ships, shipbuilding, and life related to these things. The Vasa was a warship, loaded with cannon. At the time, Sweden was perenially at war with Poland (and sometimes Denmark as well). Ah, the Renaissance.

[Vasa]
The Vasa

On Monday, I did a bit more gratuitous walking about Stockholm, and then in the afternoon there was a symposium at the Albanova University Center. This is where SCP member Ariel Goobar is headquartered, along with the graduate students and post-docs who have worked with him and continue to work with him. The symposium was introduced by saying that we'd heard a lot from Saul, Adam, and Brian at the Nobel Lectures; for these two hours, we'd hear from other members of the team. The three laureates moderated, while four different panels representing four different eras of the whole supernova search business gave short talklets about the prehistory of the whole thing. That included Rich Muller talking about the LBL robotic search, as well as Rich's Nemesis idea that (if I am not mistaken) was the topic of Saul's thesis, and Bob Kirshner talking about supernova work "back in the day" when he was the thesis advisor for both Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss. It also included Richard Ellis talking about the original Danish high-redshift supernova search (which wasn't really succesful; they found only one supernova, and after maximum light). Mark Phillips talked about the genesis of the Calan-Tololo supernova search, which established Type Ia supernovae as calibratable standard candles suitable cosmology, and whose supernovae served as the low-redshift comparison set for both high-redshift teams.

[Saul on the Phone]
Many people commented on Saul's propensity for calling people at observatories, as Richard Ellis does here

The second panel was about the early days of the project. Carl Pennypacker, Brian Boyle, Heidi Newberg, and Warrick Couch talked about the early days of the SCP, when the weather was extremely frustrating, and Heidi figured she'd get a thesis out of it even if they didn't manage to find even a single supernova. (The first supernova was found in 1992.) Nick Suntzeff talked about the genesis of the High-Z team.

The next batch of people included Alejandro Clocchiatti and Chris Smith from the High-Z team, and Peter Nugent and myself from the SCP. After Peter told a very funny story abuot observing at the CTIO and neary running over Brian Schmidt in a runaway CTIO volkswagon bug whose brakes had failed, it was difficult to follow myself. In the SCP, we'd only been told what the program was and what we were going to be talking about an hour or so before the thing began, and I had no idea what anybody else was going to say, so I didn't really plan anything. The result was that I just blathered a little bit about Moore's Law and computer (and network) technology having made it all possible, and I completely failed to make any of the two or three points I was hoping to make about what it was like to adopt the search software from Alex Kim and Ivan Small, and spend 40-hour days processing the data as it came in during a search run.

Next, Alex Filippenko, Isobel Hook, Chris Lidman, Ron Gilliland, Saurabh Jha, and Alex Kim talked about spectroscopy (showing off how much better an 8m telescope is than a 4m telescope for the more distant supernovae), using HST to observe supernovae, and some other things. Saurabh told an amusing story about performing the supernova photometry. Adam Reiss had been put in charge of the analysis that lead to the High-Z team's discovery paper by team leader Brian Schmidt. Adam, in turn, had farmed out the work of getting the photometric lightcurves to several team members. When the due date came, he sent out an e-mail to all of them saying (I paraphrase) "thank you! Everybody but one (you know who you are) have turned in your data." This made Saurabh, a young grad student at the time, feel terrible, because he was the one. He went nuts over the next 36 hours, and managed to get his data in. Only after that, running into Peter Garnevich and Ron Gilliland, did he figure out that in fact nobody had managed to get their data in, and Adam's message wasn't entirely serious.

Finally, Ariel Goobar, John Tonry, Peter Garnevich, and Craig Hogan talked about the cosmology analysis. Craig Hogan, the theorist, went last. He pointed out, as we all know, that while we've established that the Universe is accelerating, we don't know why. "Dark Energy" is the name we give to the phenomenon, but we don't know what it is, or even if it is stuff at all; it may in fact be that we're seeing the breakdown of General Relativity. Craig and John did, at the end during a Q&A period, rain a bit on everybody's parade by saying that this field is more or less a dead field. I've had similar feelings myself for a few years, but few would agree with me. There are parameters about Dark Energy that can be measured; my suspicion is that we're just going to keep narrowing the errorbars around the default, not-terribly-interesting answer. (If the values are even slightly different from that answer, it's extremely interesting. However, you can never prove that that answer is right, you can only shrink the error bars around it. There are arguments, however, why it's not a waste of time to do this, and I won't get into it here.)

During the Q&A period, Hubble Space Telescope director Matt Mountain asked a leading question about "can't we all just get along?" He talked about repeated semesters where the HST time allocation committee would assign time to either Adam or to Saul; inevitably, he would then hear from the other one shortly thereafter. He suggested that with HST having only perhaps five years left, and nothing to follow it very soon, it was a crucial time for them to figure out ways in which the community as a whole could work together. Indeed, it sounded to me like he was inviting them to get together and put in a proposal to ask for a truly impressive amount of HST time, even more than the already-impressive amounts of time that has gone to supernova cosmology work. (This was what triggered Craig Hogan and John Tonry to caution that perhaps beating down the error bars on the two parameters we've identified, rather than trying to be more creative, might not be the best way to proceed.)

[Big Rodent]
For example, the human-sized rodent was pretty scary

After the symposium, both groups retired to the Junibcken museum, a museum dedicated to Swedish children's litrature, in particular the stories of Astrid Lindgren (the author of the Pippi Longstockings books). (I have to admit to being nearly compltely ignorant about those.) We all rode their Story Train (in little cars of 3), that took us through 15-minute tour of lovingly recreated dioramas of scenes from these stories... none of which I recognized. I was sitting with Shane and Stormy Burns as we made the trip, and we agreed that these would probably be delightful to kids who were fans of the books. We also thought that some of the scenes would be quite scary.

At the end of the train ride was a dinner, for both of the teams together. Of course, at the end of the dinner, there were some speeches, which were all quite nice. Alex Filippenko— who started collaborating with Saul on the SCP, but defected to the High-Z team in what I gather was a rather unpleasant falling-out— gave a nice speech crediting the two teams' differences with being strengths, as each team learned from the other. (And, of course, he mentioned, as did a man from the Royal Swedish Academy (whose name I didn't get) involved in the Nobel selection, that the fact that there were two different teams with the same result is part of why the world couldn't just dismiss it right away, as we so far have more or less done with the FTL neutrino result.) Several other peple told stories about various things, including Saul's father, and the woman from the Swedish diplomat service who had been appointed as Saul's liaison and shepherd during the whole process. She had only met Saul just this week, but said that she was impressed with how gracious he was talking to nearly everybody. Whether it was a 15-year-old or a colleague, he was always interested when talking to them.

[Santa Lucia]
Santa Lucia showed up to help banish the darkness; she brought with her a rather nice group of a capella singers who sang Christmas songs. At least, I think they were; but for "Deck the Halls", they were all in Swedish.

In the end, several people remarked that it was unusal for a group this large, especailly including collabortors, to come out to the Nobel Prize Ceremony. Brian, Adam, and Saul may be the ones with the glory, they may be the ones that history will remember, but they did a good job of sharing some part of the glory with the rest of us during this week. Somebody (I forget who, but it may also have been Alex Filippenko) commented that it's too bad that too many members of the public think that science is done by individuals working away all by themselves— antisocial individuals, even. For these groups that's certainly not the case, and indeed this science could never have been accomplished in such a mode. The fact that the Nobel Prize celebrates individuals only serves to cement this model in the public mind. However, as I said, Saul, Brian, and Adam were very generous with making it clear that there are a lot of people who share the credit for this discovery.

And now I'm on my way home; I've composed this post in fits and starts along my way home, and won't finish getting all the pictures embedded until after I'm home in Squamish. (I decided not to attend the Lucia Ball on the 13th, but to head home.)

This last evening, I also got what I think is the coolest souvenir of the trip. The Astrophysical Journal put out a special "Nobel" commemorative reprint of the Perlmutter '99 paper (as well as the corresponding Riess '98 paper, although I didn't see that one). We were all given copies of it. At the end of the night, those of us who were still there passed the copies around to each other to sign. A few signatures are missing, but I do have this Nobel commemorative reprint with the signatures of Saul and all the other authors (including myself). That's going to get framed and put on my office wall next to the Gruber prize!

[Signed Paper]
Perlmutter et al., 1999

I can't help but get a wee bit choked up when I think about this last week— when I think about the fact that I was a major contributor to one of the coolest discoveries in science in the last couple of decades, and that the world has now recognized that discovery with its highest honor. It's been quite a week.

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Quest University Canada, Class of 2011

May 01 2011 Published by under Quest University Canada

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This Morning: Quest University's First Ever Graduation

Apr 30 2011 Published by under Academia, Quest University Canada

In an hour and a half, I will head up the mountain to Quest University's first ever graduation. As you can imagine, we've had a number of events this week to celebrate the completion of our first class of students' studies. Of course, I've only been here for a year; those who've been here four years or more are (visibly) much more affected by the fact that Quest has managed to get to this state.

Yesterday afternoon, the five students whose capstone projects received distinction all gave presentations in front of an audience of a few hundred, including students, faculty, parents, and maybe even a few members of the community. They all did an impressive job, and showed tremendous poise. They also performed very well when receiving questions from the audience, showing a comfort both on stage and with the material they'd studied. The projects varied quite a bit, from a study of human perception from primarily a literary and philosophical point of view, to a study of just war theory and military response to terrorism, to a psychology experiment testing whether environmentalism corresponded to a "world view" under a particular definition, to a survey of wildfire managers about trying to reintroduce what used to be the natural wildfire cycle in BC, to a combined biological and social study of the factors influencing the spread of a particularly nasty virus in Bolivia. Everybody I talked to was quite impressed with what the students did, and I think that the first through third year students were a little scared by the standard that had been set.... (We must remember, however, that these were what we identified as the top five projects out of the 45 or 50 in the graduating class!)

It's pretty exciting to be a part of this experimental University. I'm just happy to be teaching again, but I'm particularly happy to be teaching at a place that really cares about teaching. Quest's mission is focused entirely around teaching. What's more, the students here by and large are great. At Vanderbilt, at least in my large introductory classes, I wouldn't see the whole class except on the day of an exam. Here, if one student is missing one day, I'm surprised, and will often e-mail afterwards to see what's up. Everybody comes to every class, pretty much; that's unheard of at most any other University. (I will say that in my upper division physics electives at Vanderbilt, generally almost everybody was there every day, but certainly not by any means in the introductory classes.)

After today, Quest will for the first time have alumni. I hope it has many more, and I hope that I'm able to stay around for a few decades and participate in this experiment.

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Teaching Quantum Mechanics to "Liberal Arts" Students

Apr 11 2011 Published by under Academia, Astronomy & Physics, Quest University Canada

Before I even get started, I have to get defensive about the "scare quotes" around "Liberal Arts" in the title. The word "Liberal Arts" students is used to mean a lot of different things. The context I'm using it in here could very easily be interpreted as the context that I most dislike, hence the scare quotes. Often, when science types talk about "liberal arts" students, there is a subtext of "people who can't handle math and science"... that is, somebody who, at least as far as the study of science goes, is a lesser. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about "liberal arts" students as in the vast majority of students who are at higher end colleges and universities in North America. Students who aren't getting a technical degree, whose studies aren't "training", but who are studying a broad range of topics with the goal of becoming broadly educated. Yes, even many/most physics majors are "liberal arts" students, because they do things other than just pure physics. Even some engineering majors are this!

At Quest University, students in their first two years take (for the most part) classes that are part of a "Foundation Program". There are 16 of these classes, five of which are science courses (which I think is pretty impressive, if you compare the ratio of science that shows up at most places). One of these is "Energy & Matter". This course has never been extremely well-defined, and indeed each time it's been taught it's been a different course, but at its core is the course in the Foundation that introduces students to physical science at the fundamental level. (Another meta-course, "Earth, Oceans, and Space", is about the "larger systems" applications of physical science.) Thus, it's been taught as standard introductory chemistry course, among various other ways. The last time I taught it, I tried to go for my own ideas as to what the most important things to get out of a course with that title would be. The result was mostly physics, with some chemistry mixed in.

More recently, some of us have been trying to make it so that students will have some idea what this course will be when they sign up for a given iteration of it. As such, we've taken to subtitling the course. A colleague of mine will be teaching it entirely as a lab course. Another (if he ends up full-time at Quest) will teach it focusing around understanding the energy needs and uses of a realistic city. One constraint we always have is that there is a huge range of abilities in this class. Some people have a strong background in physics, some people can barely do algebra (like all too many college students). In order to not bore the stronger students without blowing away the students with weaker backgrounds, one tactic is to teach something that you know that none of them will have had in high school. To that end, I've created the course "Energy & Matter: Our Quantum World", which tries to really get into the meat of quantum mechanics, but at the level approachable by a student who has had no previous physics nor any calculus.

Although I still need to tune it up, I think it worked. The thing about this class is that I wanted it to go beyond the descriptive level that you do often see in non-majors general physics courses. I wanted students to struggle quantitatively with the notion of probabilistic reality, with calculating amplitudes and probabilities. The result was that this time around, I spent much of the course focused on electron spin and thought-experiments based off of the Stern-Gerlach Experiment. Towards the end, we got to talking about quantized energy levels in general, and the Hydrogen atom in particular. We also talked about fermions and bosons, and the notion of a "Fermi gas" (including the electrons in a conductor). I did give them the Schrödinger Equation, but only in its most abstract form:

\hat{H}\left|\psi\right>\ =\ E\,\left|\psi\right>

Since I wasn't using calculus, I wasn't able to give them the full differential form for the kinetic energy part of the Hamiltonian. Then again, the notion of coping with mathematical abstractions was a major theme of the course. Some of the material I covered is stuff that physics students may not see until a junior year quantum mechanics class: Dirac notation, propagating amplitudes, Dirac spinors, matrix representation of angular momentum operators. This did mean I had to teach a wee bit of matrix multiplication to the students in the class, but it was all quite approachable.

Although there are definitely things I will tune up next time around— I'd like to figure out a way to actually talk about waves so that the term "wave function" can be more than jargon, if I can figure out how to make it fit without making the class overfull— I believe that overall the effort was successful. It was quite a marathon for me, as I was effectively writing the textbook as I taught the class. (I would joke that I would write the reading assignment in Google Docs, and the students would watch as a typed it. It wasn't quite that bad; for one, I used LaTeX, and for two, all but two or three days I had the next day's reading assignment posted before the beginning of the current day's class....) There were a few students who felt quite lost, but frankly, that was as a result of a particularly weak grounding in algebra, and they would have had trouble in my previous iteration of Energy & Matter. Many students, however, seemed to get it, and really seemed to grasp what was going on with these probabilistic systems. A few students also commented on how cool they thought it was. My favorite quote was from a student at the end of her presentation about the Quantum Zeno effect: "Quantum mechanics is something that's hard for us to conceptualize, but it's also very very awesome."

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More thoughts about teaching on the block system

Dec 24 2010 Published by under Academia, Astronomy & Physics, Quest University Canada, Science Education & Outreach

So, yes, it's been nearly two months since my last post, and posts were few and far between even then. Well, right now I'm on winter break (and have been for almost a week), and I'm back into a state of mind where I can post. There may be a torrent of them in the next several days; we shall see.

A few months ago, as I was just getting started here at Quest University, I posted about teaching on the block. The block system is how classes are organized here, in the same way as Colorado College. Students take one class at a time, and hyperfocus on it. That also means that I'm teaching one class at a time, but cram a full semester's worth of teaching into 18 extremely intense days. When I'm teaching on the block, I can do almost nothing else. It really does take away your focus. It's not just the hours. Yes, because I try to be available to my students, many days I'm spending several hours talking to students in my office outside of the three "contact" hours in class. (There are also students who aren't in my class, but with whom I talk, either just because they drop by, or because I'm taking them on as a mentor for their last two years, or because they want to talk about future classes and independent studies.) However, it's also the "energy" level. I put energy in scare quotes, because of course it's not something that's measured in Joules and that would be recognizable as energy to a physicist, but it's the sort of "energy" that we mean when we tell each other that we're feeling particularly low energy today. There's only so much creativity and intellectual effort that one can put into something until one is exhausted, until the point of diminishing returns is indistinguishable from its asymptote. (This is why the notion that grad students are supposed to work 80 or 100 hours a week, and the schedule that medical residents or programmers on a "death march" are put on, are fundamentally absurd.)

I'm learning other things about teaching on the block— things that, to be fair, I was told about ahead of time. The most important lesson is probably "less is more". This is true of teaching in general. When I first started at Vanderbilt, there were seminars about teaching for the new faculty where they basically told us this. (Faculty would say that every time they taught the same class again, they'd try to cover less than the previous time.) This is even more true on the block. The format just does not lend itself to "survey" classes (of which I have to admit that I'm dubious anyway!). Because you're working closely with students for three hours, probably three consecutive hours, each day, it's far more suited to getting into stuff in depth than it is to driving by a large number of topics.

This last block, I taught a first course in calculus-based physics. I used Thomas Moore's books Six Ideas That Shaped Physics. I'm finding that (with one or two caveats) I like these a lot. There are six books. At Pomona, he uses three each semester. Each chapter is designed to go with a single 50-minute lecture period. Already, you can see that I have to adapt a little. I find, however, that three chapters is far too much for a single 3-hour class meeting. Thomas Moore goes through three books a semester, and I'm doing the same thing right now: three books in December, three books in January. However, next time I teach this, I think I'm only going to use two books each course. That does make me a little sad, as the third book from Physics I is Relativity, and I think it's very cool that if students only take one calculus-based physics course, they get some Special Relativity. (I also really like the way he does Relativity, emphasizing the metric (or the "invariant interval"), and getting to that before the "cool effects" of time dilation, simultaneity, and length contraction.) However, my observation is that we rushed through the material too fast, and that students didn't digest the material as well as I had hoped. On many things, I wished we had a second day to work through problems and work with the things we were working on. So, in the future, I'll do Conservation Laws and Newtonian Mechanics in the first physics course; Relativity and Electromagnetism in the second; and save Quantum Physics and Thermodynamics for the third. (That will be two years from now; Quest isn't big enough at the moment to teach introductory calculus-based physics every year.)

As time goes by, I hope to find a way to keep up with blogging while teaching on the block. However, if I'm slow to post, it's almost certainly because teaching on the block really does take over your life. It may only be during the summer, or during blocks I'm not teaching (which at the moment appear to be being taken over by planned independent studies!) that I will be able to keep up with blogging!

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Do science students do their reading?

Sep 27 2010 Published by under Academia, Quest University Canada, Science Education & Outreach

Many science professors hold it as an article of faith that students do far less of the reading in their classes than they do in humanities and social science classes. I heard this expectation expressed at the APS workshop for new faculty I went to several years ago, and in other presentations I've heard about physics and astronomy education. The technique Just In Time Teaching was invented partly as a way of allowing science classes to make better use of textbook reading. Is it not a waste to spend classroom time in information transmission, telling students in a linear fashion what they could just have easily read from the textbook? Physics education research has shown that active learning is much more effective in getting the students to really understand the concepts.

When I've heard talks about this, the view I've heard expressed is that it would be crazy to expect students to come to a literature class without having done the reading. They would be completely unable to participate in that day's discussion. On the other hand, the view is, the norm is that students don't do the reading for their physical science classes, except perhaps in a last-ditch attempt to figure out how to do homework problems ("find an example that matches!").

In my statistics class that met this last September (ending last Friday), all of the students had a project; they chose a question, obtained data, and analyzed it. One student, Julian Seeman-Sterling, surveyed students at Quest to find out how much of the reading they did. Below are a couple of his results:

Histogram about Reading

You can tell just looking at the histograms that there's no appreciable difference between the amount of reading that students claim to complete in the natural sciences as compared to other disciplines. And, indeed, Julian ran a statistical test on these, and there's no evidence of any difference. (Note that Julian calls "physical science" what is more commonly called "natural science"— that is, it includes things such as biology.)

I do have to say that I was surprised to hear that, but of course it all comes with caveats. These are the results of a survey of students at Quest. Quest is an unusual place; students only take one class at a time, and it's very intensive. They don't have stacks of reading for many different classes to do; they only have the one class. As such, they tend to be very engaged with the one class they are taking. Also, these are the results as reported on the survey. As Julian pointed out during his presentation in class, he couldn't know if they're really true without following a lot of students around throughout their day... and that wouldn't be entirely practical.

So, do students do less of their reading in physics and astronomy than they do in their humanities courses? I don't know. Julian's data suggests that that is not the case at least at Quest.

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Teaching on the block

Sep 12 2010 Published by under Academia, Quest University Canada, Science Education & Outreach, Self

As you will know if you've read the sidebar of this blog, I teach at Quest University Canada. I've started there this year, and started teaching my first class just under two weeks ago. The class is "The Practice of Statistics". Because Quest is so small, the faculty here teach a wider range of subjects than they would elsewhere. At Vanderbilt, I taught only astronomy (with undergraduate General Relativity having been defined as an "A" course so that students could count it towards an astronomy minor without our having to revise the catalog description of the minor). At Quest, the first class I'm teaching is a math class.

Quest runs on the "block system". This is a system for scheduling courses that was pioneered (I believe) at Colorado College; certainly CC is the best known college that's on the block system. Students take only one class at a time. However, they hyperfocus on the class. Class meets three hours a day, every Monday through Friday, for three and a half weeks. Then there's a two-day block break (next to a weekend, so it's sort of a four day weekend), and the next block begins. Full-time students take eight blocks over the course of two semesters, so it amounts to the same number of courses. (You aren't really able to overload, however.)

Professors teach six blocks during the year. This is also a similar load; at the higher-end private liberal arts colleges, the typical teaching load (I hate that term, but that's a rant for another time) is either three courses a semester, or two one semester and three the next. (Lots of details about lab courses complicate this.) (This is in contrast to a research University, where scientists might only teach one course a semester.) However, if you think about it, at a typical college those six courses are spread out over eight months. On the block system, those eight courses are condensed into less than six months. Everybody who has taught on this system has told me, and I can now confirm this from my limited experience, that the course you are teaching takes over your life, and you can do basically nothing else while you are teaching.

Each day, I teach from nine to noon. I usually decompress a bit, and then spend the afternoon trying to get some grading done, but in practice I spend a lot of the time talking to students. In the evening, I complete whatever grading there is to do, and then try to figure out what we're going to do in class the next day. Then I collapse, go to sleep, and start over the next morning.

Because students are there for three hours straight— we do take a break in the middle, but that's it— you can't approach the class the same way you would if you saw them for an hour three times a week. Straight lecturing just doesn't make sense; you can't just talk at people for three hours straight. Or, rather, you can, but you will probably dull their minds permanently. Of course, astronomy and physics research has shown that straight lecturing basically doesn't work anyway, so that's just as well! In statistics, I talk at them a little bit, but try not to talk at them uninterrupted for more than 10 minutes or so in a go. We spend a lot of time working through processing data (using GNU R), there are "labs" that the students do in small groups, and I'll sometimes give them problems and challenges to work out individually during class.

So far, I like it. Yes, I'm pretty damn busy, but I knew that that was going to happen going in to it. I like the fact that the students are hyperfocusing on my class. There's no other classes whose tests and homework compete with mine. They aren't going to neglect my class because another has a big project due. Their attention isn't divided. I don't know if this is the best way to do things for all students, but when it comes to how I, personally, have learned things throughout my life, it's very unnatural for me to try to learn several things at once and spread it out over several months. If I'm learning (say) a new computer language for a project I need, I will dig into it and focus primarily on that for a long time. It means less multitasking. Generally, when people talk about multitasking, they're talking about switching tasks several times a minute or an hour, but switching tasks a few times a day is also a form of multitasking, and it can also be distracting.

This year, after the statistics class, I'll be teaching a class that's part of the foundation courses entitled "Energy & Matter". After that is an astronomy course, and then two courses in a sequence of calculus-based physics. That will have been five blocks in a row, each with a different course, so I expect when it's over and February rolls around, I'm going to be completely used up. I plan to get nothing done in February; I am just going to recover. In March, I teach "Energy & Matter" again, and then the year is over for me. One of the advantages of having your teaching condensed into six months is that in the other months, you may actually be able to focus on other things and get a real amount of research or development done. I'll see how that goes this coming April! (And maybe in February, but I really do expect I'm going to need to decompress.)

I will have a lot more to say about what it's like to teach at Quest as time goes on.

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What to do about overproduction of PhDs?

Aug 19 2010 Published by under Academia, Rant, [Education&Careers]

There is an interesting and anguishing post on Inside Higher Ed by psychology professor Monica J. Harris entitled Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students. (Hat tip: Chad.) She describes a problem familiar to anybody who's paid attention to the PhD market in probably just about any academic field in the last couple of decades. Departments continue to admit and produce PhD students, and college administrations (and rankings by professional societies) judge departments partly on their ability to produce large numbers of PhD students. Yet, there are very long-term jobs out there for people with PhDs. Knowing that society and her department isn't going to change to address the problem, she's tried to do what she thinks is the only ethical thing she can: she's no longer accepting new graduate students into her lab, so that at least she personally won't be contributing to the oversupply problem.

The comments are also very interesting. The range from agreement and sympathy to outright claims that she is lazy and "not doing her job." I think the best comment was made by "scandal and a byword":

Many of us PhD students DO know what we're getting into. The problem is that (at least in my experience) we're strongly discouraged from making contingency plans. I get a fairly explicit mixed message from my teachers:
1) There aren't many good (tenure-track research) jobs out there.
2) If I don't get a tenure-track research job, I'm a failure, and my name will ever be a scandal and a byword and a source of discomfort to my teachers. If I have any plan B, I'd better not mention it!

My own field is physics, and the problem of physicists being trained for and expected to get tenure-track faculty positions, without enough of these positions being out there, has been a sore topic for two decades (at least). My last year or two of college (1989-1990), I remember reading a national report about how there was going to be a "shortage of scientists". This was based on a rather naive consideration that the boom of scientists who went into the field after Sputnik were all about to retire. In reality, the tech push after Sputnik created a system whereby a tenure-track or tenured physics professor at a research institution produces during his career something like 10-15 PhD students. In other words, while he will retire only once, he replaces himself 10 to 15 times. At first, this worked, because there was demand for that level of expansion. But not for long. Even considering that some will go to smaller, undergraduate-only colleges, this level of over-replacement is not sustainable.

By 1991 or 1992, far from the "shortage of scientists" talks, there were regular columns and letters to the editor in Physics Today talking about how physics graduate students could usually get post-doctoral positions, but it was very tough for those post-docs to move on to a faculty position. At one point, one of Caltech's colloquium periods (perhaps it was Astronomy journal club-- I don't remember exactly) was given over to a discussion of this topic. One of the things parroted there, as in many of these articles, was that we need to be training our PhD students also for jobs outside of academia. Professors said this... but I almost hear each professor present thinking, "but my students will be the ones to get those coveted faculty positions." (Or perhaps it was "but Caltech students will...".)

At least in physics, and at an institution like Caltech, there is a very strong cultural sense that "success" means "ending up in a tenure-track faculty institution at a research University". When, in grad school, I would despair with my friends about our chances, I would sometimes mention that I was as or more interested in teaching than primarily in research, they would say, oh, well, you can get a job at a small liberal arts college! Of course, those jobs are just as competitive as the research jobs. Yes, sometimes people "settle" for those jobs, but the truth is that there are a bunch of us who really value teaching as a primary professional, intellectual, and creative activity.

I also remember hearing students talking about PhDs who had gone on to teach high school, and how depressing that was that they'd have to settle for so little. At the time, I was seriously considering that as a long-term possibility, but I didn't say anything. And this comes back to the comment of "scandal and a byword" above: the culture of PhD granting institutions in many fields remains extremely destructive to the notion of PhDs being self-respecting individuals if they don't get one of the very few coveted faculty jobs.

Many of the comments on thread note that cutting off the opportunity for people to get PhDs cuts off the opportunity for the people who value the PhD work itself. This is a valid point. What I tell people is that if they're going to go to graduate school in physics or astronomy, they should do so because they want to go to graduate school. There is absolutely no guarantee that the PhD will allow them to spend the rest of their lives in physics research. With their skills, the PhD is a more stressful and lower-paying occupation (*) than other things they could be doing. If the coveted faculty job were likely, it might be worth the "sacrifice" of going through a PhD program, but because that faculty job is not likely, the PhD has to be worth it all by itself.

(*) (Aside: in physics, it's a lot better than it is in the humanities. You generally teach for a couple of years, and most of the time your advisor has grant money to pay you a research assistantship to complete your PhD research. In the humanities, you may have a fellowship for a few years, but it's more common to have to teach for many years, or to have to do research assistantships that are not your own thesis research. Yes, you're being paid a pittance in physics, but at least you're being paid.)

You also need to be aware that you're going to receive direct and indirect pressure to consider "success" as going on in research. Even the pep talks about how great a given graduating class is will come across as pressure: "I'm sure you'll go on to do great things to advance the field!" It's supposed to be a compliment, but it bolsters the culture that success is going on in research. You have to be aware of this, and have to be aware that you're still a good person, still a good PhD, and still contributing to society even if you don't manage to go on, or if, horrors, you choose not to go on in research.

The whole culture of the system is broken, and I don't see it changing any time soon. We've been collectively wringing our hands about it for at least a couple of decades, but the evaluation criteria for ranking departments remains "more PhDs" rather than "a responsible number of PhDs", and administrations at Universities continue to pressure departments to produce lots of PhDs to make their numbers look good. How we each respond to this ethically is difficult; I admire Monica Harris' response, and am dismayed by those who think she's finding an excuse to be lazy. Myself, I think the most important thing is to make sure that undergrads going on to PhD programs are not fed a line about a "shortage of scientists", and are fully aware of what they're getting themselves into.

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