NYTimes: The Price to Play Its Way http://nyti.ms/shRNN3

Law Schools

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html

"there are few incentives for law professors to excel at teaching. It might earn them the admiration of students, but it won’t win them any professional goodies, like tenure, a higher salary, prestige or competing offers from better schools. For those, a professor must publish law review articles, the ticket to punch for any upwardly mobile scholar."

The Chronicle of Higher Ed

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/

What Spurs Students to Stay in College and Learn? Good Teaching Practices and Diversity.

too often the blame of college student's failures is simply pushed to high school preparation. Higher Ed has plenty of room for improvement.

Matthew E. Kahn on Universities

http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2011/10/encouraging-better-teaching-at-research.html

http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-can-ucla-learn-from-ohio-state.html

Science Majors

Why do Science Majors Change Their Mind?

Choice of Undergraduate Major

Closing the Girl Gap in Science

Bwog on Physics

http://bwog.com/2011/09/28/the-wild-world-of-particle-physics/

seven out of ten 30-year olds don't have a college degree

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-real-problem-with-college-admissions-its-not-the-rankings/245649/

Rock Is Not the Enemy - NYTimes.com

Rock Is Not the Enemy - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Beyond Baby Mozart, Students Who Rock

By DAVID BORNSTEIN

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems

With school underway, I asked my eight-year-old son this week if he had any interest in learning guitar. He said he’d prefer the piano. I was pleased, but hesitant. I had my own stint with after-school piano lessons at age eight — plinking out notes from classical pieces that were foreign to me. My progress was agonizingly slow and I gave up within months.

Music education hasn’t changed fundamentally since the 1970s. Students are still taught to read notation so they can recite compositions that they would never listen to on their MP3 players or play with friends. The four “streams” in music education — orchestra, chorus, marching band and jazz band — have remained constant for four decades, while a third generation is growing up listening to rock and pop music. And my experience as an eight-year-old is all too common. Many children quit before making progress with an instrument, then regret it as adults. Others play violin or trumpet for the school orchestra or band, then drop the instrument after graduating from high school.

Is Your Degree Worth It? (BWOG)

http://bwog.com/2011/08/25/summer-reading-is-your-degree-worth-it/

In Academically Adrift, sociologists Josipa Rosksa and Richard Arum examine the current state of higher education using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test designed to measure critical reasoning administered to students as incoming freshmen and a second time after they’ve completed sophomore year. According to their results, 45% of students don’t learn anything in their first two years of college due to lack of rigor.

How to Fix Our Math Education

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade

New York Times

 She doesn’t conclude that students should study Photoshop instead of geometry, or Linux instead of Pax Romana. What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

Meme You Can Learn From

http://www.thebigster.com/the-best-of-engineering-professor

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Fish

Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure - NYTimes.com

A Mathematician's Lament

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where
music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more
competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are
put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and
decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or
composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious
black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students
become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it
would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a
thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone
composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until
college, and more often graduate school.
As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this
language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we
take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or
transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures
right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely.
One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit
because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind
of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t
completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply
won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out
the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the
standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and
Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. “It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college
when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high
school.” Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will
ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every
member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact
that they will never hear one. “To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music.
They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of
them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the
minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and
non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were
impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful.
She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.” 

In Acadcemia, who works for Who?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/faculty-governance-in-idaho/

NYT: Piazza, a Homework Help Site,

Latest from the Times

 A New Measure for Classroom Quality

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/

The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other fields and tools, ask questions, talk to other mathematicians, and think about the “big picture”. And yes, a reasonable amount of intelligence, patience, and maturity is also required. But one does not need some sort of magic “genius gene” that spontaneously generates ex nihilo deep insights, unexpected solutions to problems, or other supernatural abilities.

Better Ways to Teach Math

John Mighton and his Jump program

Part 1
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-way-to-teach-math/

Part 2
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/teaching-math-advanced-discussion/

A Chicago parent (32.) wrote: “On a personal level, I cringe when I hear once again that all students are equally capable.” But that’s not the claim here. “What the data suggest is that we can raise the levels of achievement for virtually everyone, so that those differences won’t matter much,” says Mighton. “And children will at least have a choice about whether they want to pursue math or subjects involving math.”
In life, many factors determine success. Whether a scientist will make a profound discovery is not just due to sheer quickness of mind. “Passion, diligence, a willingness to ask unconventional questions, a sense of beauty, and luck — these are all equally important,” adds Mighton. “The point is that if children are all investigators, they are all participating in a beautiful game. As long as they are all contributing, what does it matter if some people are contributing more than others?”

Students Need Sleep

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.html

"After just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."

A Better Way to Teach Math

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-way-to-teach-math/

Imagine if someone at a dinner party casually announced, “I’m illiterate.” It would never happen, of course; the shame would be too great. But it’s not unusual to hear a successful adult say, “I can’t do math.” That’s because we think of math ability as something we’re born with, as if there’s a “math gene” that you either inherit or you don’t. 

The Dark Side of Choice in Higher Education

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/the-dark-side-of-choice-in-higher-education/

Setting Students' Minds on Fire

http://chronicle.com/article/Setting-Students-Minds-on/126592/

http://reacting.barnard.edu/

Race to the Top of What? Obama On Education

Stanley Fish writes:

NYTimes - Race to the Top of What

Quite another account of what is wrong is offered in a new book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The book’s title is “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” and its thesis is that what is limited — in short supply — is learning that is academic rather than consumerist or market-driven. After two years of college, they report, students are “just slightly more proficient in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing than when they entered.”