|
|
We teachers have a bias against Wikipedia as reference material for students. While many entries are well written and accurate, there are many that are plain junk. It might be hard for a student to tell the good from the bad, so we typically advise either avoiding Wikipedia for formal research papers or supplementing it with more traditional sources.Enter Conservapedia, a so-called “trustworthy,” wiki-based encyclopedia. Founded by conservatives who believe Wikipedia has a liberal bias, Conservapedia endeavors to provide a more palatable online source to students, scholars and the idly curious.
Some of the science blogs I read have been dumping on Conservapedia lately, so I thought I would take a peek. I started with something I know pretty well, physics.
Now, Conservapedia is still being developed, so I was not expecting as an elaborate entry on physics as Wikipedia has. I was mortified, however, to read this entry, which I will reproduce here in its entirety to save you a click.
Physics is the study of nature, and is the science of studying the laws of God’s universe. Galileo was the first to discover and propose some of the fundamental laws of physics that we still realize today. He began by studying how a ball rolled down an incline and showed that its speed would be proportional to the height it started at. A scientist that studies physics is called a physicist.
This is a preview of If Wikipedia is bad, then Conservapedia is the utter pits. . Read the full post (1283 words, 1 image, estimated 5:08 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
Laura Mallory of Gwinnett County, Ga., believes J.K. Rowlings “Harry Potter” series promotes witchcraft, so she kicked up a fuss to have the books removed from the local public schools.
Her argument: witchcraft is a form of religion, and using the Potter books in class violates the Constitutional separation of church and state, so the books must be banned.
This crackerjack legal argument failed to impress Superior Judge Ronnie Batchelor, who ruled that the Georgia and county boards of education were within their legal rights to use the popular books.
Mallory apparently represented herself in the Superior Court hearing, giving credence to that old saying that a person who represents herself has a fool for a lawyer. Undeterred, she intends to take her case to federal court, after she works on it a little.
“I maybe need a whole new case from the ground up,” Mallory said, according to the Associated Press.
That’s affirmative, Miss Laura. You need to drop the whole idea. There is absolutely no logical connection between Harry Potter and wicca or any other belief system, so the case is doomed from the beginning.
I doubt she will give it up, though. Like other so-called Christians who want to push out any religion — except theirs — or free thought from the public schools, Mallory has her churchy blinkers on. Witness this quote, again from the AP:
“I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again,” Mallory said. “I think we need him.” This is a preview of Harry Potter wins a court case, no spells required . Read the full post (333 words, 1 image, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
 Popular cartoons and movies may say humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, but the idea is just plain wrong. The dinos were dead long before our hominid ancestors evolved. The fossil record leaves little room for argument.
The Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. To reconcile Scripture with the fossil evidence, creationists have to perform some fantastic mental and logical gymnastics to explain how Genesis somehow omits mention of such obviously big creatures.
On Memorial Day, believers in these convoluted arguments will celebrate the opening of the Creation Museum in Boone County, near Covington, Ky. The Museum, a project of Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, was built with $27 million in donations, so there are either a lot of very gullible donors or just a few very rich, gullible donors.
Excuse me, I mean faithful donors.
To counteract this monument to misguided generosity, a group calling itself Rally for Reason will hold a peaceful protest outside the museum’s gate beginning at 9 am that Monday. Although an atheist organization has spearheaded the rally, churchgoers will be there, too. If any of you out there will be in the area that day, I hope you will join in the protest.
It’s a free country and creationists can believe whatever they like, even if it’s just plain wrong. The danger in this museum is that it gives the uninitiated the impression that creationism is somehow “science.” Creationism is religious thought, and the museum is really just a church in disguise. [If you doubt the Sunday-school nature of the Museum, check out this walk-through
from the AiG site. I'm seeing more religion there than science.]
Possibly related posts:
One of my Honors students gave me this link to a YouTube video. It’s pretty funny.
The math jocks doing the rap wear their TI calculators on a cord around their necks. In my day, we wore our calculators on a belt clip. I must have missed that geek fashion tip …
Permanent link to this post (53 words, 1 image, estimated 13 secs reading time) Possibly related posts:
And don’t we all …
It’s close to the end of the year (Classes end 5/16 at my shop.) and as usual I find myself looking at the Procrustean bed of my syllabus. How do I fit in five weeks of material into three weeks’ equivalent of classtime?
Chop chop chop.
At this time of the year, I am trying to wrap up the year with light and the atom. We have covered electricity and magnetism already, made the connections between the two, and are now studying how electromagnetic waves are the logical result of EM induction.
Except there’s that pesky wave-particle duality and quantum physics, two of the most important (and difficult to comprehend) aspects of modern physics. Rather than plodding through the wave descriptions of the behaviour of light, I now have to condense a century’s worth of research into roughly 20 days of classtime and make it understandable.
When you think about it, the progress of science and technology since 1850 or so has been phenomenal. Most of the devices we take for granted now have roots back in the 19th century. Cellphones, after all, are just the descendents of Marconi’s radio sets. But cellphones, and their cousins, computers, depend on the quantum understanding of electronic behaviour. So, to provide students with some passing idea of the how things work requires me to cover wave-particle duality and QM.
In three weeks.
Hang on to your hats, kids. It’s going to be a rough ride.
Possibly related posts:
I have decided that one of hardest jobs is to get all of my students to write decent lab reports. Despite my published guidelines, scoldings and examples, some of them just do not yet know how to write a good lab report.
Grrr!
In their defense, I myself did not know to write a good one until college, when the labs we did in freshman lab were far from the cut-and-dried high school experiments. The college lab was also a bit more, shall we say, competitive, with anxious premeds* bucking for A’s. Still, one would hope that even in high school a student could think a little harder or more critically about the matter at hand.
Here’s the most important stuff that I want to see in a lab report. Comments are invited.
The introduction has to include some background behind the experiment: pertinent concepts and equations, references to the history of the experiment, clear description of the experiment, clear idea of its purpose and a prediction/hypothesis that the experiment can actually test.
The procedure has to be written in a way that someone unfamiliar with the experiment can understand what the student did. I tell mine that they should be able to write the procedure such that their English teacher could reproduce what they did. Clearly describing the procedure presupposes that the student actually understood the methodology, of course.
Possibly related posts:
Today was my students’ final exam in physics. With the exception of two absentees, all my kids were in the same room, working diligently away at their responses, while I walked the aisles doing the invigilating-teacher thing.
Maybe it’s the season, but it hit me that I really care about these kids. I want them to do well on the test. Like a parent looking in on his sleeping children, I had the chance to watch my students in a rare quiet moment, without the added responsibility to lead the class and keep them alert.
Some of my students are brilliant, and given a few additional years of coursework, could probably teach me something about physics. Others have a really tough time with the subject. And there are a few who are just plain incorrigible, who with the right attitude, could probably run rings around the rest of us.
I care for all of them, and this feeling is what sets really good teachers apart from those teachers who just show up to collect a paycheck. If I ever start to not care about my kids on an academic (or a personal) level, it will be time to find another line of work. Without some emotional connection between teacher and students, I doubt any real learning can take place.
Possibly related posts:
|
Recent Comments