BBC Big Read

I was reminded of this when Profgrrrrl recently posted her version of a top 100 book list from an old meme. I blogged my annotated list back in July of last year. She credited the BBC, but her list and mine came from the National Endowment of the Arts. The NEA selected books for the NEA Big Read, a national community reading program, so these are books they consider both important and suitable for a city-wide reading project. In contrast, the BBC list resulted from voting by listeners following their Big Read series in 2003, which makes comparing the lists rather interesting.

I'm going to use the same rules I followed for the other list:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) put a trailing "++" after the books you LOVE.
5) Put a dagger † where you've seen the movie but not read the book.

Like Swans on Tea (who added #5 for the other list), in many cases I've seen the movie (usually an old b/w version that is really faithful to the book) enough times to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

The BBC Top 100 can be found here, if you want your own "clean" list. If you follow the side links, you can see their full list, which goes all the way to number 200. My annotated list is below the fold.

I see my earlier guess, that I've read a lot more of these, was wrong. I'm still around a quarter of them. (I was fooled by the top half of the list, with all of the Potter books. There are quite a few in the second 50 that I have never even heard of.)

1. † The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. † Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams +
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee ++
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. † The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller ++
12. † Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. † Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. † Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. † Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. † Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. † The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck +
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll ++
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. † Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. † Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. *† The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. † The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. * Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. † A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. † Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. † Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. * Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. † The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

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Rate Your Student's Parent

Oh, this is classic stuff.

Rate Your Students posted a letter from a parent complaining about how some mean professor made her kid go to class on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, followed up by a collection of a dozen rants from various professors responding to this parent. Go read them yourself. They are worth every minute.

UPDATE: There are even more replies in a final ? collection.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Milo takes on the student as customer argument. About the only thing he left out was a concern for the OTHER customers in the classroom. I can never figure out why they don't get mentioned.

They really make my day because it reminds me of how well off I am. I had 80% attendance* in my WEDNESDAY afternoon class ... the class day after I gave an exam! I actually have students in my classes who want to learn! No attendance policy, no attendance grade, no extra credit, just physics. Even my "C" students make me proud to have them in my class. Gotta remember to tell them that on Monday. Anyway, back to our little College Drama.

The Parent is "mighty pissed" that Offspring's professor will penalize students for skipping class, and can't imagine why Out of State University wouldn't want to keep the Parental $$$$ Source happy ... by not educating the Student?

Actually, my guess is that the professor either (a) has an attendance penalty every day and Student can't afford to incur any more of them at this point in the semester or (b) is actually offering extra credit for showing up, extra credit that Student desperately needs to have a tiny chance of passing the class, but Student is not about to tell Checkbook Parent the real reason even if there are hints that Parent suspects Offspring is not like my students.

But go read it for yourself, then come back for my answers to the Parent's Meme:

• Do you ever think about the folks who essentially pay your salaries?

I think all the time about the citizens of my state, doing my best to avoid graduating any 'students' who would make incompetent engineers whose bridges would fall down. (One way of looking at the economics of a state-funded CC is to say that the state appropriation pays the full-time tenured faculty whose salaries are a recurring cost, while tuition pays for the part-time faculty and other staff that would be eliminated if our enrollment were to fall suddenly. However, our state appropriation also depends on enrollment, so it is not that simple.) As for the students who pay their way, or their parents, I certainly want them to get their money's worth from my class. To me, that happens to mean teaching a great class the day before Thanksgiving rather than shortchanging them by cutting class myself. (And it was a great class. I think I set just the right tone for the key material we get to in the last week of class. We'll see on Monday, but I expect to see them ready to rock when they get back.)

• Do you have any feelings for your "employers" and their offspring (besides contempt ?)

You Betcha! I've gladly posed for graduation pictures with former students, and enjoy hearing from them after they transfer to Engineering school. I rarely complain about the ones who come to class. I even feel sorry for those Parents whose slacker Snowflakes sign up for my class and never bother to attend.

• I mean, do you like being a College Professor ? (I admit it, I read just some of the blog...)

I can see why you might get the wrong impression from "Rate Your Students" or other stories you see on some of my favorite blogs. Those faculty are venting their displeasure with the small (and, sometimes, not so small) group of students that enroll in classes but are not Students. Fooled by an 89 average in HS, because they don't know that an 89 is actually below average among their fellow HS grads planning to go to college, they think showing up will guarantee a B, or at least a C. They never hear my orientation warning to new students. We genuinely like most of our students, although we can do without their Helicopter Parents. You can also see what I really think of my students at many places in my blog, but particularly in this old article. I will agree that some faculty, particularly untenured professors at a research university, think undergrad students just get in the way of doing their main job, which is winning research grants and publishing papers. But you can hardly blame them, since they get paid to do that, not teach.

• Can you honestly tell me that we are getting our money's worth, or do you teach to support your_______________ habit ?

I work for my Health Insurance habit. But seriously, I can honestly tell you that some Parents are not getting their money's worth. I see their Offspring show up in a basket on my classroom doorstep after they drink and party their way out of Wannabe Flagship, only to cut my class and fail to learn either physics or the lesson they should have learned the first time they flunked out. But it's not my fault their Offspring don't want to learn. It's their kid's fault. I can't make them attend class, nor can you, which means you are not getting your money's worth out of your kid.

Parent closed with "Here's hoping you get that well deserved rest you need over the Thanksgiving break...", to which I reply that I will still be grading exams and lab reports, just like I do on most weekends. My work really starts when my student's work ends.


* Percentage measured relative to the number of students who took the exam during the previous class meeting, not the number originally enrolled. My retention is pretty good this year, not that good!

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The Big Read

This meme concerns the NEA Top 100 book list, via Swans on Tea and Faraday's Cage, from Abbi.

There is also a BBC Top 100 list that I might do, since I might have read more of those. They list the Harry Potter books separately, as they should. This list double counts, since Hamlet is part of the works of Shakespeare.

The rules
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE. [not done]

Updated: I put a trailing "++" after the ones I really love.]

PLUS Like Swans on Tea, I put a dagger † where I've seen the movie without ever bothering to read the book, often because I've seen the movie enough to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

Wow, I've read almost one quarter of them! (Mostly not for school.)

1 † Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 † The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ++
6 The Bible [And I never intend to read the begotcha books]
7 † Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 † Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ++
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 † Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 † The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 † Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck +
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ++
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 † Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 † The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 † Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 † Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 ? The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 † Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 † A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 † A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 * Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 *† Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 † Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 † Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker +
73 † The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 † The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 † Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 * The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle +
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ++
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 † The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 † Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 † Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments:

†† Yes, I have watched a lot of old movies. I've seen more than one version of some of these.

I think I was the only person in my circle who did not read #12 in HS.

I read #24 in fourteen days flat, the library loan period, including all of the essays at the back of the Norton Critical Edition. I've read parts of some of these in the original foreign language.

But where the heck is Rabbit Run? or Heart of Darkness? [Oops. Found it and fixed it.] Not to mention Physics by Halliday and Resnick? How can you read the Bible and not read the 2nd edition "blue bible"? Its opening is at least as enchanting as that of David Copperfield. I mean, how can "Chapter 1: I Am Born" compare to "Chapter 1: Measurement"? The latter features the failure of the first transatlantic cable because the company building it had ignored the careful new experimental measurements made by its hired engineering consultant, William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin). That story, along with Lord Kelvin's view that "when you can measure what you are speaking about,and express it in numbers, you know something about it", is a great way to kick off a fine piece of technical literature.

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No Accent Here

Found over at The Little Professor's place:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Not too far off.

Because I do speak standard english! It is everyone else who has an accent. One interesting thing is that I did hang out with someone with an accent containing elements similar to what is heard in Philly, so no surprise to see that up there.

And if you read this far, a recent article by the Little Professor about the number of English majors was rather interesting. I went back there today to give it another read ... and see a priceless comment that appeared since I first saw it. That info about English sounds like the comments among physicists about physics degrees. The fraction of grads is going down even when the number of degrees increases. This is especially true of advanced degrees. And it is not a bad thing.

But say what? Someone is complaining that they only have 45 faculty and they only have 90 English majors? And they used to have a ratio of 55 faculty to 120 majors? Just be happy you have service courses to teach or you would only have 5 or 6 faculty!

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Monday After Break Question

I think I'll see if I can start something here.

How many e-mails did you get from students the day after break ends saying they could not make it to class due to transportation issues?

My answer is below the fold. Put your answer in the comments, or blog your favorite.

Two.

One car broke down, and the other was stuck in the Philadelphia airport.

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Why I Teach (Physics) - The Meme

I put Physics in parentheses because I was teaching long before I taught physics, but teaching physics is my current career and the topic of this post.

This article is a response to a suggestion at Free Exchange on Campus last month that was triggered by yet another of Dr. Crazy's interesting articles on teaching: why she teaches literature. I've been a bit slow joining all of the other responses, including Dr. Crazy's own addition to the meme, an early response from Sherman Dorn that was what first brought my attention to it, and Profgrrrrl's comments this past week that reminded me I still hadn't written about it. Too busy getting rolling through the first exam block of the semester and all the other little things of life.

It is also a very challenging topic to write about.

I probably put it off at first because it is very hard to articulate an answer. It is easier to say why I enjoy teaching physics at a community college, which I will take up separately. Nonetheless, the fact is that I enjoy teaching and have always enjoyed teaching, but there is more to it than that. I'll follow Profgrrrrl's lead for two reasons: I think her approach of starting with history will make it easier to work my way into the topic, and I owe her an answer elaborating on the similarity in the way our stories start.

Background:

I also started teaching before I had any idea that is what I was doing. For me, teaching started in elementary school. I was part of a "pull out" program for gifted students, and we spent part of one year on algebra. That came naturally to me (I worked my way through the first 3 or 4 chapters of my Dad's College Algebra book in fourth grade) and I worked with some of the other kids in the very open classroom environment used in that program. We also team-wrote a play, by the way. That continued into high school, but I never considered myself a teacher. In particular, unlike a friend who wanted to be a teacher (but never did), I never took any opportunities to do a pseudo-student-teaching gig.

Except I did. I just didn't see it that way at the time. I taught one day of my physics class, introducing special relativity. It was actually meant as a learning experience for me, which it was on many levels. One lesson I learned right there was that it was much easier to understand (or think you understand) a subject yourself than it was to explain it to others.

I was a math major as an undergraduate, and got asked to be an undergrad TA in the residential college I was in. (Talk about leading edge; we had a learning community embedded within an Enormous State University before the people pushing them today were even in school.) Now I knew I was really teaching, or at least playing at being a math professor. I think I was still more effective at 1-on-1 assistance at that time, but I got excellent training before, and mentoring during, that experience that helped me transfer individual teaching methods to the classroom. That also was the only training I ever got in teaching! It was also the first time I taught an undergrad who went on to graduate school in physics.

I also participated in a really novel training program on interpersonal communication via my best friend, a dorm Resident Assistant. I still use those skills, when I remember that I have them.

Thanks to burnout in math, a recession in the sector that otherwise could have used a really clever programmer and applied mathematician, and well-timed recruiting by a physics professor, I went to grad school in physics. As I commented in some thread over at Dean Dad's, I was "lucky" enough to be in a research group that had more students than money for research stipends. Someone figured I had enough of a clue to teach recitations, and I got pretty good at it. (Really good according to the University, which gave me a teaching award, but I was still a hack by my present standards.) No training there at all, but some really excellent mentoring from another best friend, a fellow physics grad student who continues to be an award winning teacher at his university.

Best advice ever: Be yourself in the classroom.

I then spent a long time (almost two decades) as a post-doc or research faculty member, teaching a class or two or subbing here or there along the way. I even turned down a t-t job in a small department at a university (one with an engineering school at that) along the way. No, I was more interesting in doing research than teaching at that particular time. And, although doing a good job at research most definitely requires the skills of a teacher, when you try to communicate some really new result to people who are learning it for the first time, its not at all the same.

I was quite lucky to stumble on my current job as the contracts that my research position depended on led to a "change in emphasis" where I was working. In all modesty, they were lucky that I was there. I am back doing what I have always loved, if you haven't figured that out already.

Why Physics teaching is important to me

Lives depend on it. Physics is one of the basic skills, along with critical thinking and mathematics, upon which engineering is based. The vast majority of my students want to be engineers, so a bridge might fall down if someone does not do a good job teaching basic physics to them. (If you missed that memo, the I-35 bridge in Minnesota did not fall down because of poor maintenance. It fell down because of a design error made 40 years ago by someone figuring out whether the net force at a joint could be resisted by a particular piece of metal, and got it wrong.) There are some key skills that my students need to learn, and I mean learn for life (not just the next test), if society is going to survive after they graduate.

I take this pretty seriously. I first learned it in grad school when someone told me he decided on final grades in a pre-med course based on whether he wanted to find himself in an emergency room with that student standing over him. Same goes for driving across a bridge built from plans signed by a former student.

The original blog asked about academic freedom. You might think it odd that a well-established subject like physics would have that concern, but it does. There are preachers out there who would want a bogus version of thermodynamics taught so they could use it to justify their anti-evolution preaching. There are people who reject relativity because they think it leads to free love and abortions and would not like to see it taught. We all must stand for the right to teach the truth as we see it.

Why I teach

I teach because it changes lives, for the better.

I teach because my impact on society is magnified by every student I teach that goes out there and does an important job as well (or better) than I could if I had gone into the corporate world right out of college as I had planned to do.

I mentioned teaching someone in an undergrad calculus class who went on to graduate school. It was quite a surprise when he told me he had learned calculus from me, and a bit of an eye-opener. As an undergrad, I enjoyed teaching because I was helping my fellow students figure things out. It was fun to put my knowledge to use, and always rewarding to show off that I could do the hardest nastiest problem someone decided to assign that semester, but it was more than that. I'd help kids who were not in my class. Or some friend's girlfriend who was having trouble with chemistry. That old scouting "do a good turn every day" thing, perhaps. But it never quite crossed my mind that I could help someone get into grad school.

Then there was the day that I saw a picture of a former student in Time. A kid who was in my physics recitation had made a big splash in medical research as a resident. (He now runs an entire building at Stanford Medical.) OK. If someone learns like he did, and has the initiative he did, anything is possible. And I could help make it possible. How many lives has he saved, or enriched. It boggles the mind.

More recently, I saw that one of my better students had earned an MS in Engineering. (This would be one of those non-traditional students, who literally came out of the woods to attend our CC before entering a big university. She did not have any confidence at all when she came in here. Did telling her that she was as good as that guy 20 years ago, the guy now at Stanford, help her see herself differently? I sure hope so, because she is good enough to change the world, too.)

I get some students who are straight out of high school and could go to a university as their first step, but most of the really good ones are returning students. The group of Iraq vet Marines (you are never an ex-Marine) who formed the most interesting cross-cultural cross-ethnic study group I've ever seen. Really smart kids who, for one reason or another, never went to college. The cosmetologist who was brilliant at mathematics and is going to be a chemical engineer. Or the kid who earned a scholarship as a now-honest graduate of a "residential" school for delinquents. We see the great cross-section that the CC was created to serve, and some of them use everything we have to offer and more.

A big part of my job is the same as it is at a university teaching calc-based physics. We all are trying to give them an entirely different way of looking at the world and (simultaneously) the tools to enter a highly technical profession. Few students enter physics with the unique perspective the subject requires. Few normal people see vectors of forces when they look at a bridge, or think about the coefficient of friction and terminal velocity when watching automobile racing, but most engineers and physicists do. When Dr. Crazy writes about how going to college changed her in a way that makes it difficult to fit into her parent's world, I know what she is talking about. My students face that same challenge, in a more technical than philosophical sense, and I am here to help them with it.

I teach to help my students achieve their goals, if they are willing to work at it.

I don't teach to "help" students pass if their bridge would fall down without extra credit or a retry at an exam.

And I teach because I seem to have a talent when it comes to simplifying the complex and clarifying the opaque for kids who are willing to work at it. I've never understood how I make those connections for them, but part of it must be the same talent that helped me make some connections that changed how physics is done in a few narrow fields of little interest to hardly anyone.

And finally, I think I teach because it is in my genes along with building and designing things. My grandmother was a teacher, and one grandfather actually taught physics labs while studying engineering as an undergraduate. And my father taught me all sorts of things almost every day when I was growing up. Things like this week's factoid/ homework example: The average person puts out the same amount of heat as a 100 Watt incandescent light bulb.

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Shakespeare never said this ...

I can't resist time-wasting junk like this (from Dr. Crazy via Profgrrrrl), particularly when it does not take much time to do it:

It is the physics,
The physics above us, govern our conditions.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Heck, that was so easy that I will try another:

Come not between the Dr. Pion and his wrath.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Heh, heh. That one is priceless!

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Time to say "hey"

Time to delurk, maybe let me know you should be in my blogroll.

You could also post a topic request. Any physics topics of interest out there?

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Alternate Careers

Profgrrrrl pointed to the Career Cruising site and listed a username and password to enter it. Given her rather interesting results, I thought I would give it a try.

The first set of questions did not even put professor in the top 40, but did include quite a few things that I have done in the past (highlighted in bold face or italic depending on how seriously it was done), although not necessarily as an employee with that title. Some were done in the ancient past, when the term had a somewhat different meaning.


1. Multimedia Developer
2. Astronomer
3. Optometrist
4. Website Designer
5. Desktop Publisher
6. Criminologist
7. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
8. Computer Programmer
9. Oceanographer
10. Animator
11. Driving Instructor
12. Video Game Developer
13. Computer Engineer
14. Physicist
15. Meteorologist
16. Mathematician
17. Environmental Engineer
18. Actuary
19. Biomedical Engineer
20. Civil Litigator

Seeing astronomer in there is interesting. I've done some amateur observing and worked with a planetarium, but don't own a telescope. Ditto for meteorology, with an emphasis on storm watching and tracking. But my first degree is in mathematics (which I have also taught) and I could slam code with the best of them back when I felt like doing it.

My second pass, after including education level and answering another set of questions, did not include programming for some reason, but pushed Professor into the top 10. Maybe the program sensed that I no longer like slamming code.

1. Computer Trainer
2. Optometrist
3. Criminologist
4. Business Systems Analyst
5. Multimedia Developer
6. Astronomer
7. Professor
8. Announcer
9. Mathematician
10. Meteorologist
11. Physicist
12. Computer Support Person
13. Historian
14. Computer Engineer
15. Judge
16. Database Developer
17. Artist
18. Anthropologist
19. Writer
20. Environmental Engineer

But Optometrist? Someone seriously missed the boat on that one.

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Doubly Tagged?

It would seem that two people circulating in a similar part of the blogosphere (first Twice Tenured, but it was Rebecca's that I noticed first) have sequentially ! tagged me with the latest meme. Amusing. I'd already seen this meme elsewhere, but had not given it much thought.

The Rules:

• I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

Hmmmm. Both of my taggers skipped that last rule!

Names of those tagged are inside the full article.

Where to begin with the eight random facts? Well, since a computer scientist in the applied math world got my attention ...

• I took a year of PhD-level Numerical Analysis as an undergrad math major. If I had not grown bored of math (in a junior class, not that one) and gotten recruited into physics, I probably would have gone to grad school in Applied Math. I still owe Dr. G for getting me into this physics career that I love so much.
• But I still have a very nice PDE solver. Old School stuff: partial pivot plus various bells and whistles. On cards. Somewhere.
• I have oatmeal for breakfast every morning, even in the summer.
• I scored all sorts of goals in intramural soccer despite never playing it until I was in grad school, but am pathetic at basketball, which I "played" my whole life.
• Not too many people take quantum mechanics as a senior just to fill out their schedule, but I did, the same year I took grad applied math. My QM prof recruited me into physics, but it was the sophomore QM prof that actually hooked me on it.
• I always play a game of Free Cell while the computer finishes booting up Windoze.
• I once turned down a tenure-track faculty job, and still have no regrets about that decision.
• I personally know (on a first name basis) the Drug Czar.

Now, who to tag.

I should tag The Little Professor, for using xyzzy in a post last week. That was a flash from the past. Would it violate the spirit of the meme to mention that I know how to get a perfect score by leaving the magazines somewhere and then not doing something? And that we figured out how to get (actually keep) that last point by disassembling the computer program? Plugh!

Next up:
The Thomas (who comments here and there but has not posted anything new in months), Astroprof, Sherman Dorn, Dean Dad (eight facts from his blog vacation?), Profgrrrrl (where I'd like to hear some unexpected things about Thailand), and Chad, over at Uncertain Principles, should consider themsleves tagged, along with anyone else who wants to play.

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