Advice to those seeking tenure

There was an excellent article in IHE today providing advice to those in a tenure-earning position. I was going to add it to a collection of articles in a followup to one of my "jobs" series, particularly part 4 on tenure at an R1, but think it deserves its own place.

What I Wish I'd Known About Tenure by Leslie Phinney.

Read it, but keep in mind that it is clearly written about tenure at a comprehensive or graduate research university, not a teaching college like a CC. (The author was formerly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

I should add a few comments about the parts I think are relevant at a CC, but will do that at another time.

Updated on March 28, after the first 3 comments appeared:

One of those instances of someone with a high-quality research program being denied tenure at a top-10 physics department (alluded to in my comment on this blog) is in the list of blog comments at the bottom of my article two summers ago about the difference between being hired into a t-t job and earning tenure in it. I've also put a back-link to that article up at the top of this blog entry. UIUC is in the top 10 for both physics and engineering, so the experiences of the author of that opinion piece about tenure are most relevant at that level of competition. Unlike universities at other levels in the top half of all physics research programs, the top ones are much more likely to hire people without the presumption that they are more likely than not to earn tenure if they merely continue to publish grant-supported research. I have heard respected researchers refer to a particular department as being "nuts" to deny tenure to certain individuals, individuals who went on to great success in their field (at another university). For example, getting a 4-year NSF award and a NASA fellowship (as in the case of Dr. Phinney) would absolutely guarantee tenure at a mid-tier R1 unless you did something illegal along the way.

Now, as noted earlier, I am going to add my comments about each item in the original article, mostly (but not entirely) from a CC perspective.

• 1. The Gamble: Part of the gamble at an R1 is that the 3 M$ commitment is balanced against what the university has already gained in profit from the first 7 years of research funding by the person up for tenure, and a judgment concerning the chance this productivity will continue. The other part of the gamble concerns the cash flow at the university in any particular college or department. The latter consideration is all that applies at a CC (where the gamble might be "only" 1.5 M$), but that decision is normally made before the t-t line is advertised. There are some exceptions, particularly today with the chance of further major budget cuts on the horizon, where one-year hires occur without the promise the job will even be considered for tenure. It does remain true that the final decision is made in the college's interest.
  
• 2. The Fraternity: This is generally good advice, but some of it reflects being a female professor in a college that has few women above the Asst Prof or Instructor level. Physics shares that distinction with Engineering, whether in academia or private practice, so this is advice that looks more significant to me than it would someone in the Evergreen areas or Education (where Sherman has his experience as a historian of education). It is much less important at a CC where female and minority faculty are more common than at universities, particularly in the sciences and math, but still relevant. However, I think the tenured faculty at our CC push this process of integration into the college so less initiative is needed by the newly hired prof.
  
• 3. Making a Solid Case for Tenure: This pretty much mirrors what I wrote about tenure in my "part 4" article about universities, and I already wrote a detailed article about the differences at a CC as part 5 in my jobs series.
  
• 4. The Gray Area: I believe this bit of advice has little relevance below top 10 institutions, although it can also apply at upwardly mobile top-quartile or (in particular) second-quartile departments. Elsewhere, hires appear to be made with the assumption that the candidate will likely get tenure unless they screw up and fail to maintain the quality research and/or teaching program that got them hired in the first place. That is certainly the case at our CC, but I have seen one instance where the person just didn't have what we thought they did.
  
• 5. Risk Factors: This is mostly relevant toward the top of the R1 heap, and many of the things I mention under item 3 (and in my "part 4" article) apply here as well. It certainly is VERY risky to go to a top R1 without a research post-doc and some experience with grant writing to support a research program that is uniquely yours rather than one identified with your major prof. It can even be risky to take a teaching job at a CC with little teaching experience.
  
• 6. Mobility: This observation looks a lot different to me today than it might have a few years ago. Budget cuts have made my job much harder than it used to be, due to significantly increased student loads and less support from staff in the last two years. However, I doubt that it is any better at most other schools! But, if necessary, I think I have the record needed to move elsewhere (assuming that the utter collapse of our state government is the exception and not the rule). And that should be the message to someone at an R1: Build a program good enough that you can move to another, more rational institution if your first choice does not see the value in your contribution.
  
• 7. Priorities: I can relate to this. My priorities are much more easily satisfied teaching physics to motivated, upwardly mobile students than pushing a research program at an R1. That is also true for a significant number of the PhD faculty at my CC.
  
• 8. Job Flight / 9. Life Choices: To thine own self be true.
  

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Defense?

A CBS "commentator" said something about U Conn having to face the "frenetic defense" of Missouri. Sorry, but "holding" Memphis to "only" 91 points (2 more than they scored in a win over Maryland and 10 more than they scored in a win over Cal State Northridge) is not my idea of defense.

Holding Duke to 54 (10 less than the scored in a win over Texas) is my idea of defense.

But it was frenetic: especially if you take the meaning of "deranged" or "insane".

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy watching the tiny bit of the game we saw in our region even if it hurts to see big basketball players cry. I wonder if it was just sinking in that their conference had not prepared them for the challenge of a tournament game.

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Madoff's Ponzi Lesson

You all know about good old Bernie Madoff, whose recent conviction has brought the story to the forefront. CNBC assembled some of his "victims" (scare quotes because a Ponzi scheme, more so than a normal con like driveway sealers or a money switch, relies on greed rather than just pure salesmanship) to discuss the matter. You can read some of that in this story.

Now, granted, there are plenty of reasons to point to the failure of the police in this matter (the SEC regulators who are supposed to be giving speeding tickets), and one very good lesson for those of us in academia. [The person who repeatedly blew the whistle on Madoff complained on "60 Minutes" that the SEC was full of lawyers who could check that forms were filled out correctly but could not follow a simple statistical or mathematical argument. We should mention that every time a student in the liberal arts complains that ze does not need math because ze is going to be a lawyer.] But I was sorely disappointed when one person on the TV broadcast was asked point blank what lessons she had learned.

Sadly, she did not learn that the reason she only lost 2/3 of her money while others in the room had lost all of their their retirement funds was that she had only given 2/3 of it to Madoff.

The lesson from Madoff, and other recent events, is to Diversify.

Those events have reminded me of a bit of family lore that has guided a few decisions I have made over the years. Here is the story.

Both of my parents were raised during the Great Depression, so I know some things about their view of that time but almost nothing about what THEIR parents were thinking as they struggled to survive and raise kids. I'm not sure my parents knew much about their parent's economic thinking until a half century later when illness or death brought their parent's finances under their control. Those finances have a lot to tell us, and my parents made it a point to share those stories with us.

Story 1:

After my grandfather died rather suddenly, it fell to my Dad to figure out his financial records. My grandmother had never even written a check in her life, let alone have any clue about the family finances. She got her weekly cash and that was it. [So lesson 1 is that my wife and I are careful to be sure we each know as much as possible about the big picture, including our separate retirement accounts.] My Dad ended up having to visit or write every bank in Chicago plus those in another city to try to find all of the accounts and CDs my grandfather owned. [Lesson 1A is that my parents are also careful to be sure we know where their money is buried.] One can only assume that Grandpa lost a lot of money as a result of bank failures circa 1930 and had distributed his cash as widely as feasible. He had dozens of bank accounts, in addition to other investments. He would never have given it all to Bernie Madoff.

I don't have all of my retirement money in accounts managed by the same company. That was by plan. But I never really thought about the fact that we have accounts in several different banks and credit unions until now. However, we keep it down so we know where they all are.

One of his other investment strategies always struck me as a good one, but it isn't as feasible today as it used to be in the days before mergers and conglomerates. As one example, he owned stock in Borden because he liked Cracker Jack. He had bought stock in Cracker Jack, which was later bought by Borden. (Like a product, buy their stock. Of course, today Cracker Jack is owned by Frito Lay and Borden is part of Hexion Chemical that is owned by a private equity company. So much for THAT strategy!)

Story 2:

The finances of the other set of grandparents didn't become clear until they became seriously ill and had to go into nursing care. When cleaning up and out their house, they found a bag of money (mostly silver coin) under the mattress. A big bag. Turns out they had more cash than the other, apparently much better off, set of grandparents. In fact, they didn't know how much they had, so they didn't know that they could have moved into a very nice, upscale, retirement community with lifetime care. [Lesson two, learned by my parents: Know your net worth, and plan to move into a lifetime care facility while you are still healthy enough to walk in the door. Once you are sick, your choices become extremely limited.] Sadly, they also didn't know they had the funds to visit "the old country" with plenty to spare.

Paraphrased conversation. Mom: "Wasn't it uncomfortable with that bag under the bed?" Grandma: "We were used to it." When they moved from one house to another, they had somehow moved that heavy bag of money themselves so no one, including family who helped with the move, even knew it existed. I would assume that they also lost money when banks failed circa 1930. That zero interest investment strategy looks pretty bad until you look at 40% losses in the stock market or 100% losses with Bernie Madoff.

They had continued to save even while on Social Security, just to be "safe". They could do this because they owned their home, so their only living expenses were food, power, property taxes, and insurance. That could be how their cash resources remained significant even with inflation going on. [Lesson three: Don't re-mortgage your home with payments extending 20 years into retirement. Own it, and live in it. A home is a great investment if you can live in it rent free for 20 years. What you had been paying toward the mortgage becomes available for investment while you are still working, and what you don't have to pay in "rent" will make retirement income go a lot further.]

All of their decisions were not good ones, just as all of mine have not been good ones, but diversification has (so far) protected one big chunk of our investments from any loss of value in the current slump. Talking about finances within a family can be the most valuable investment of all.

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First Day of Spring!

This white narcissus always seems to be the first bloom of the season.

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Happy St. Patrick's Day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

We had a fun one at work. I think the faculty have more fun with this one than the students do. One of my colleagues wore all sorts of green bling to his classes, while the students seemed focused on learning.

I see the dual advantage of giving an exam right before spring break: (1) the students have it all crammed in their heads from studying and doing homework right up to the exam, with no chance to forget it all over break, and (2) the wake up call when they get back from a week of work or partying and get the exam back.

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Bunnies Made of Cheese?

Today is Approximately Pi Day (3.14) as well as Einstein's 130th birthday (and also, according to Google's promotion of Mars in 3D, Giovanni Schiaparelli's birthday) ... so what better way to celebrate than with yesterday's announcement that Chad Orzel's book about teaching quantum physics to his dog Emmy is on its way under the title "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog".

Click here for full size view of lame cover art.

It is scheduled to ship just before Christmas. This link to the Amazon order info was on Chad's web page, and is the place to go to request that they publish it for Kindle.

What is disappointing is the first level of marketing: the title and cover.

It is hard for me to figure out why they chose that title, or even the dog used on the cover. I mean, why isn't "quantum physics" in the title? And even Emmy's blog photo might make for a better cover if it showed her thinking about the overlap integral between bunnies and cheese (such as an appropriately labeled graph of the s and p solution with just "probability" on the vertical axis) than what they have in the cover mockup. If bunnies aren't appropriate for some marketing reason, they could pick something else (treats and dog food, steak and cheese) or just have a quantum/classical duality question in her thought bubble. Too late to change the title, but you need to get quantum on the cover.

Chad, these ideas are free to you to use ...

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Second Blogiversary

It has been two years now since I got this thing started on the eve of Pi Day.

What better way to celebrate than with a story from the BBC (complete with video) about flossing monkeys in Thailand teaching their infants how to floss! If only my mother had been nearly as successful as these. For me, it was never "monkee see, monkee do"....


And below the fold, how about the charming presence of Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna, on facebook to help promote her role in Chad's pop-science book about Quantum Mechanics? Having vastly enjoyed the stories on his blog (see this collection for a sample), I eagerly await the appearance of that book - and hope to see his book tour visit to the Colbert Report.

Or an argument (not unfamiliar if you have heard any talks about "Brain-Based Education") whether the internet has, or has not, created a stupid generation? I take the Negative side on that debate. When professors see uncritical use of citations (or not) from the tubes of the internets in student work, they forget that they used to see uncritical use of periodicals of questionable repute and cribbing from print sources in the past. One generation was cured of that the same way this one can be, by actual instruction in critical analysis. In some ways it should be easier today: there was nothing like Google or Turnitin to identify the use of copied works.

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Advice for a New Professor

Rather late for someone starting work about seven months ago (woo hoo, only two more months to go!), but IHE has a nice article today titled I'm a Professor. Now What? with advice for the new college teacher fresh out of grad school.

The premise that someone will enter a teaching job without anything more than a PhD is rather a stretch, since most people who fit that description are at an R1 that should emphasize research over teaching during the first year (as described in a recent article by FSP), but the advice is mostly solid.

Relax and be yourself is probably the best one, along with the KISS approach outlined as "black and white". However, that begs the question of the actual objectives of the class. You have to have clear objectives that guide everything from the book you select (if you have that option) to the material you emphasize to the format and coverage of your exams. Temper that with the expectation that they might truly retain (long term) only 10% of what they get right on a test so you choose your battles carefully.

What I dislike is the failure to emphasize the use of a single local mentor on a regular basis, not just when setting up the syllabus. It is not a sign of weakness if you ask for guidance. I've seen the arrogant opposite, and it isn't pretty. It is much more than "don't reinvent the wheel" if you really haven't taught before. I was well prepared by my undergrad department, and got eased in by doing recitations where you see all of the difficulties that require a solution in lecture and problem sessions. I can't imagine where I would be if I was teaching a major class without that preparation and experience.

What seemed missing was to look at your own notes from the class you took as an undergrad - but to tailor it to the institution you are teaching at now. Your own teachers might have had some good ideas about what was important, and you now have the background from grad school to add your own views to that frame.

Finally, I really like the US Army lesson plan format linked at the end of the article, as a warning. Something tells me we will be doing that for all of our classes before SACS et al get done with their emphasis on detailed learning objectives. I just wonder about the value of having over 140 of those pages archived somewhere for a class like mine when the thing that works the best on a given day wasn't even on my own outline of what I planned to do.

Updated April 2009:

There was a really good article about the transition from post-doc to professor from Professor in Training that deserves a link here as well as in one of my older articles. I gather that Prof in Training is wrapping up the first year of research AND teaching. Quite the perspective. Even though that is ancient history to me, I agree that there is a lot you don't know as a post doc, and even as a research professor on someone else's grant. For other links and comments, go to a more detailed article in my blog.

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Comment semi-Moderation

Hat tip to Dr. Crazy for this one.

I've had a few contemporaneous 'spam' comments show up on the blog, and tolerated them by mocking them in my reply. However, I have recently noticed them show up in older articles, particularly ones that get linked in a comment on another blog. One was particularly lame, to borrow Dr. Crazy's term, simply a list of words that were linked to various places.

So I am enabling comment moderation for articles that are more than 10 days old. That should cover it, with little pain for me. Moderation will be light, but might not always be promptly carried out.

The way you make this change is simple. You just go to the "Settings" tab, click on "Comments", and select the middle option to moderate comments posted more than N days after the article appears.

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Math with Manipulatives

Another hat tip to Sherman Dorn for his comments about the "Springboard" math (and language arts, aka English) curriculum in his county school system based on an article in the local paper about it.

[By the way, when did they invent "language arts" anyway? Do they read poetry in the original Russian or plays in the original Greek? Aren't all of the classes based on English translations when they deal with foreign authors? It's English, folks, and your students need to be able to read and write it so they can deal with my lab class and know enough about literature to survive college classes in composition and the humanities.]

Based solely on the article, which spent most of its column inches criticizing the content of the HS literature courses (when it wasn't shocking me with the huge difference between their curriculum and mine as noted in a footnote), I think I came away with a misleading view of what they are doing on the math side. I find the example Sherman ridiculed to be potentially very effective in the hands of a competent teacher because its purpose was not what the journalist thought it was. Details are below the fold.

The article introduced the math content as follows

In math classes, just four SpringBoard lessons are required each year. Among them is an Algebra I SpringBoard lesson that starts with students arranging baby marshmallows and spaghetti on blue paper to discover different ways to multiply binomials.

Seventh- and eighth-graders in Jennifer Apgar's Algebra I honors class at Ferrell Middle Magnet School in Tampa couldn't wait to dig into their bags of marshmallows in January and were relieved to find extras for eating.

The marshmallows represent office computers; spaghetti separates sections of the office.

"I'm kinesthetic – I like to use my hands," said Giana Moore, 12. She said she prefers such hands-on activities to doing math problems on the computer. The seven computers lining one wall in her class are rarely used, she said.

Well, at least I know where the student mentioned in my previous article picked up on that Learning Style terminology! In Middle School? (Little does this girl know that this is actually a visual learning tool. Your hands are only used to arrange them. Kinesthetic learning would be actually connecting computers into a network, getting your muscles to learn how to pull cable and plug in the connectors.)

This description from the newspaper article sounded a lot like the "discovery" (aka look-say or guessing) way of not teaching math that has been used in some elementary math curricula. The sort of curriculum that produces students who cannot divide or work with fractions when they get to college. What changed my mind was seeing a video showing what it really is, in action, albeit in the hands of an experienced and clearly skilled teacher. That video is part of an article from a Tampa Bay Online story from February 2009 that turned up high on a Google search for the term. The video probably resulted from the same dog-and-pony show, since it featured the same teacher at the same middle school in Tampa (clearly filmed on January 15). It just took another month to get the print version of the story out.

Several things were immediately clear.

The marshmallows were not being used to discover equivalent ways of multiplying binomials, they were being used to represent computers in a cube farm that was described in a rather long and detailed story problem (correction, they are now called Word Problems because story problems are even scarier than nuclear power) that you can see on the screen at the start of the video. [Side comment: I love how up-to-date the problem is, dealing with physically networking computers. The simplest answer to this problem is to go wireless!] That problem would be way over the heads of most college students I encounter, who act as if they had never had to analyze a word problem. My colleagues at Wannabe Flagship say the same thing, and my guess is this results from it not being on the local HS exit exam. From what I can see, the trend in "college" algebra has also been to avoid word problems as much as possible unless they fall in a very narrow class so only one 'type' shows up on an exam and can be solved out of habit rather than by analysis. (They spend the time gained from dropping this topic to teach students how to graph functions on their calculator.)

Anyway, back to the main point:
The video makes it immediately clear to me that the marshmallows are not being used for what the reporter says, but rather to help visualize the geometrical situation that has been described in words in the problem. Even better, the developers of this module recognize that there might be a vocabulary issue with the word problem and make that part of the analysis explicit. As the teacher puts it, "A lot of good practices are in Springboard". Looks that way to me. The 'manipulative' (which has the advantage of being edible) is there to illustrate why the equations work out the way they do. I really like the emphasis on collaborative learning, which is a great way for students to work on problem solving by articulating their strategies.

I see this as the math equivalent of theory and experiment in physics. We set up a problem, we solve the problem, and then we see what happens when we measure the unknown in an experiment. Incorrect approaches are exposed by the harsh light of reality. You see an example of that in the comment of one student in the video story. I can see why the math faculty have had little trouble adopting this system. In addition to changing only a fraction of their curriculum because they added selected modules to supplement their existing approach (no doubt tailored to their HS exit exam), it does what experienced teachers already do. The upside is that it helps inexperienced teachers by giving them an entire exercise with printed worksheets to guide students through this process.

The unanswered question is whether they can transfer this skill to wholly new problems. If it is just one exercise with no reinforcement, it will be lost quickly. Experienced problem solving requires more time and additional coaching. (Do they still do "coin problems"? Those can be tested with play money.) Can they use everyday objects like marshmallows to model some other problem? To identify the marshmallow with a variable like "x"? That would be great. But unlikely except in the best classes.


* Long Footnote:
I really was shocked to see the huge difference between what they described as the "national" curriculum and the college prep curriculum I experienced decades ago. Bro, if you read this, please comment on the sequence your kids followed in HS. We had a 7-9 and 10-12 system that only changed to the middle-school scheme when my 2000 capacity HS went from overcrowded with 3 classes to capacious with 4, so I don't have a clear memory of what we did in 9th grade. I can still remember the trailer where I studied 10th grade American Lit, which was followed by a year called "world" lit that started with Greek plays and ended with British literature, so we got a good mix of plays and poetry that year. Senior year was devoted to a capstone composition class that featured (in my case) a wide range of fairly contemporary short novels and short stories with an existentialist bent, with major focus on learning how to research and write a 10+ page term paper. We read Conrad, Hesse, "Clockwork Orange", etc. No movies, no "iTunes", the modern books-on-tape, but (unlike one class mentioned in the article) we could all read at the 9th grade level or above. Even one kid notable for his lack of intellectual curiosity got connected in this class.

The curriculum described in this article lacks a senior composition class and puts world lit before American lit so they have limited exposure to advanced American English before taking their "high stakes" exit test. If this is a national curriculum, it is no wonder so few students can even write a decent lab report. I think they also struggle with reading problems because they appear to have never heard of the critical reading exercise of writing a pre'cis (a short summary of a text that contains only facts, no opinions) that was common in our curriculum.

The comments on this article were also interesting. The usual suspects show up attacking "government" schools, but I have seen little evidence in our area of a major difference between non-selective private schools and the public schools. They also place into 5th grade math. The public doesn't know how they measure up because they don't have to take the state exit exam to graduate from HS, so everyone assumes they are doing a good job.

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Learning Styles

A month or so ago, Becky Hirta blogged that "Learning styles are the academic version of horoscopes." (When I shared that with some colleagues, one immediately planned to develop an "astrological inventory" to give his students to be sure their failure can't be blamed on a conflict between their respective astrological charts. I think he was joking.)

Anyway, with a hat tip to Sherman Dorn who linked to a blog from the Dallas Independent School District (back in August of 2008) that contained the video below, here is the confirmation for what many of us have always suspected:


This is from Professor Daniel Willingham, at the University of Virginia in the Dept of Psychology. His closing remark that "Good Teaching is Good Teaching" really does say it all. Well, not all ...

My example was a student last year who came up to me at the end of class (early in the semester) and said something like "I can't learn this the way you teach it, I'm a visual learner". (The topic was net force = mass * acceleration involving several forces acting on an object.) My response was quick and to the point. "That is why I draw free-body diagrams and motion diagrams on the board, and do demonstrations whenever possible." (Motion diagrams illustrate the sequence of events and/or positions as a function of time when doing kinematic problems.) He looked like he had been hit between the eyes with a 2x4. Stunned. Mouth agape. (I am not making that up. You should have seen his face. He must have gotten a lot of mileage out of that one in the past.) And it was true. Visualization is difficult. Turning words into equations requires some picture of what is going on, in your mind if not on paper, and engineering classes push this to the point of requiring the relevant free-body diagram in every problem whether they ask for it or not. You can't get the problem right if you don't have the right picture, and truly complicated problems (not the toy problems we deal with) make that step essential.

Interestingly, he was a good enough student to suddenly realize that the visual part was there - and that it alone will not supply all of the meaning needed to solve a physics problem. With that excuse gone, he buckled down and earned an excellent grade in that class. I haven't heard that complaint from him again, but I do notice that he is now careful to take notes that include the drawings I put on the board.

Reflecting on that story after watching that video was somewhat enlightening. We do all of those things (visual, kinesthetic, verbal) when we solve problems. You can't do it without putting every tool to work in some way. We read the problem. Analyze and pick out key words, translating them into our own vocabulary. (Critical reading.) Construct a picture of what is going on and make a highly stylized drawing, the free-body diagram, that relates what is going on to the algebraic variables and numerical values we were given in the problem. Then we do math. Some might use strengths in one area to help in another, but none can avoid any part of the process.

I think what makes me a good teacher is that I know several ways to bring out each of those steps, making each one of them visible to the students. At that point, the only remaining challenge is to convince them that they need to follow those steps. Somewhere in the past (I am guessing some experience with teachers who could not function without the "teachers manual") they got the idea that there is a magic formula for every problem, and experts know all of those formulas. My biggest job is to convince them that the principles are what matter, and the steps I listed above are the only "magic formula" they need.

Hmmm. I think that will be my theme for the week after Spring Break.

There was something else in that blog by Sherman Dorn, but that needs its own topic. I need to correct my first impression of a new math curriculum now that I see how it fits with what I just wrote up above. That won't get done until Wednesday.

PS -
You might also want to watch a related video from the same professor about "Brain-based Education". Very interesting. It is even more fun to test this by watching a (student produced?) video from a "learner support center" about learning styles ... with the AUDIO OFF! Does this reach non-auditory learners? How can I interact kinesthetically with this video? Why do I have to sit and watch it? One thing that really breaks me up is when the college brings in an outside speaker who gives a LECTURE about how we should not use lectures to convey new material. Right.

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What I am Reading Today

Video and story from the BBC about the remains of Shakespeare's first theater. The thought of a new theater rising on the foundation of one where Romeo and Juliet might have had its premier is really quite remarkable. They also show the portrait recently identified as that of Shakespeare.

Dean Dad's musings about spousal hires and the next group of college leaders. The commentariat jumped on the spousal hire issue, probably because it is an even bigger issue in the current economy. Having seen my share of two-body hires over the years, it has been about 50:50 where hiring the woman was the driving force and I have also seen one instance where the guy was the primary hire and his spouse turned out to be the star. You really can't tell. Maybe the second half, about a possible leadership vacuum, deserved to be left alone. It comes up often, about as often as worries that we won't have enough of X coming down the pipeline. There always seems to be enough of X coming along. As DD seemed to say, if you really do think it is a problem, start grooming the next group of leaders at your own institution.

Reading more of an excellent discussion from last Thursday over at Dean Dad's, where a bunch of random ponderings generated quite the open thread. I put in my dos centavos more than once, but I want to elaborate here.

On the question of demographics, the population of our CC has been pretty stable for the past decade. We have the odd feature that the median age (around 21) corresponds to a local minimum in the age histogram! The mean age is several years higher than the median, reflecting a long tail toward the high end. We have always been a "transfer" CC, feeding Wannabe Flagship University down the road ... filling in the empty seats as their students drink their way out of school. We thus get a lot of traditional age students, including ones from outside our service area who are forced to go to our CC because they didn't make the freshman cut. The past year has seen an apparent decrease in the out of town group (staying closer to home because of money issues?) but an increase overall as budgets force a reduction in freshman enrollment at Wannabe Flagship and more top notch students (AP calculus, etc) choose us because we cost less. I have not seen the latest IR numbers for our "unduplicated headcount", but they will be interesting.

On the issue of more men coming to school, and how that impacts the college, I found the suggestion of a need for more support systems quite interesting. Our college is planning for one group, returning military on the GI bill, who will likely need a variety of support systems to adjust to the "real" world. I already see quite a few of those in my physics classes, but most were from Iraq 1 or the early part of Iraq 2. I'm guessing that the Army hasn't let too many out who can put boots on the ground. (The exception being young men like the triple-amp who is taking classes in our building.) We have only limited experience with that cohort, but we have some veteran's groups on campus that provide mentors and a support group. What we don't seem to deal with very well are the unemployed and underemployed young men who were failed by the K-12 school system the first time around. Our support systems seem to work much better with women who return to school, often while being the sole support for their children, than with men who find their way here.

We appear to do particularly badly with high school "graduates" who are barely literate and end up in our developmental ('prep', 'remedial') classes. I fear that most of those classes are organized too much like the structured environment they grew to hate in K-12, and we struggle to get them to use our less-structured learning environments.

Then there is the peripheral, but non-trivial, issue of female professors in mathematics and the sciences. Doctorate or not, they just don't get respect from our fairly conservative male students. They seem to view any woman in the classroom as a "teacher" (and K-12 teachers get no respect) rather than a "professor". They don't respect or trust what they are being taught, acting as if they know more chemistry than someone with a graduate degree in the subject. I wish there was some "academic support system" to help these kids adjust to the real world where experts come in two different genders as well as several different colors and accents. When racism (based on national origin, not color) showed up this semester, I was particularly taken aback. That last kid will be in for quite a shock when he gets to the Wannabe Engineering College and discovers how few professors there speak English as a first language.

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What I am Reading this Weekend

Lots of blog reading and commenting is in store this weekend, now that Spring Break has arrived to let me catch up on my reading rather than doing the grading that needs to be completed a week from Monday.

First, in the academic life territory, we have "Angry Professor" dealing with e-mail from a snowflake that appears unlikely to earn a Gentleman's C. There are a few more where this comes from. A student I deal with as an academic adviser took this approach: "I'm going to stop attending class X to punish the prof for not giving me enough help outside of class to make up for other classes I missed." Punishing whom? Right. Somehow these students appear to be attending a large number of different institutions. Check out this example "Becky Hirta" posted this past week.

I'll put that above the fold. More academic discussion will follow some obligatory physics reading. The very last one is a definite read, by the way.

I found several interesting items from the link lists at Uncertain Principles. I guess I will build them into my own list and comment on them as I have time.

• Exposition on significant figures. "Good Math Bad Math" really comes through on this one. I really like that he "rounds to evens". This is essential to avoid biasing the results of a calculation, but many people have given up in the face of the ubiquitous flawed code in Excel and some calculators. There are also some good comments, but one fails to get the point of sig figs. Erring by having too few digits in the resultant is not nearly as bad as erring by having too many. Unjustified precision is where danger lurks. Thinking you have fewer significant digits leads to conservative (safe) design.
• Michael Faraday. Only the latest in a series of articles by "Skulls in the Stars" (the others are all back linked), this article takes up Faraday's attempt to unify gravity with electricity and magnetism.
• Photons in the Room from "Built on Facts". This is a really nice little example that uses the energy density of an electromagnetic "wave" to estimate the number of photons in a room coming from a particular light source rather than just calculating the number per second leaving the source.
• Going Deeper is another nice blog from Matt, although I am pointing to it here as a substitute for elaborating on my comments posted in that thread. I really like his pedagogy, and added my own suggestion for how to jump from the Balmer formula (not to mention Kirchhoff's rules for optical spectroscopy) past the Bohr model to real quantum mechanics. "Going Deeper" really is the theme of how lots of physics came to be. And not just statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics either. That is what Newton did when he connected gravity on earth to gravity acting on the moon.
• Astroprof's continuing saga about planets ... now featuring part IX!

On the more generic academic side, we have

• Advice to new t-t faculty at a Regional Comprehensive from "Dr. Crazy". This article fills a huge hole in my own jobs series, since I know little about the situation at the typical 4-year university that offers Masters degrees. Teaching intensive, requiring research for promotion without being research intensive, these make up the bulk of the openings in academia. It falls between parts four (tenure standards at an R1) and five (getting a job at a teaching intensive place like a CC). An earlier article giving advice for a new R1 professor by "Gay Prof" gives perspective on the R1 world from the Evergreen side of the fence. Looks like I need to update my "jobs" articles.
• How faculty are mentored at FSP's R1 gets some constructive support. That also needs linking from the "jobs" series as a reminder that how new faculty get brought into the system will change with time.
• The evils of salary compression also got discussed by FSP.
• Rebecca talks about Tennessee and fixing computers in a Q&A. I was glad to see that I am not the only computational expert who knows little about fixing computers because (1) hardware is someone else's problem and (2) Unix is an operating system. But I was particularly taken by the comparison between Illinois and Tennessee. The comments about TN reminded me of the small town of Lake City, just north of Knoxville, where we used to stop when driving I-75. (We discovered the Cracker Barrel there. It is store number 6, IIRC.) The fog in the rolling hills north of there make for a magnificent vista at every turn in the highway that always reminds us of landscape print by an artist with a name something like Shur.
• "The Little Professor" completely nails the entire topic of technology in the classroom. This article is the must read alluded to above. She gives a great take on how different AI forms would function in the classroom of the future.

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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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Dr. Crazy nails it ...

I really love teaching undergraduates hard stuff.

That is what I love about my job.

There are some really challenging subjects in the physics course I teach, ones that challenged me when I first encountered them. Ideas that blend math and science, often math they have not learned yet, or are also encountering for the first time. Its great to see students "get it", especially when it seems like the entire class gets it.

The entertaining part is that my students may never know that the really sweet explanation I gave them of a trick for remembering a particularly nasty equation (the Biot-Savart Law, for any physicists reading this) was something I figured out for the very first time this semester! It probably came across to them as a detail that was just as practiced as something I have explained the same way every one of the dozens of times I have taught this course, if I did it well.

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Book Titles

There is nothing quite like a good title. That was proved by "Baboon book makes award shortlist" in the BBC news feed today. The book in question, "Baboon Metaphysics", appears even more irresistible than the news story.

So I can't resist making an early nomination for next year: "Bunnies Made of Cheese: Quantum Physics for Dogs" by Chad Orzel, due out in the fall, although the latest draft table of contents suggests that the final title will lack that potentially Diagram Prize-winning first clause. But I suppose that is par for the course in a field where textbook titles are as creative as "Physics".

But who knows, just "Quantum Physics for Dogs" might be enough, and should certainly be enough to get Chad on the Colbert Show to get a bump for his book sales.

For a sample of Chad's work, check out slides from a recent talk drawn from the book, or the many blog entries on the general subject of explaining physics to his dog, Emmy, some of which were the genesis for the book.

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Happy Birthday ...

to Abraham Lincoln (200) and ... my paternal grandmother. As an immigrant, she was always quite impressed that the United States had a national holiday on her birthday.

Now, of course, two holidays (Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday) have been combined into President's Day to free up a holiday for MLK in January.

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How you can tell that ...

... retired NASCAR drivers aren't exactly rocket scientists.

After blaming a full moon for the crazy events in tonight's Shootout at Daytona (which proved to be a really good race), Darrell Waltrip said "I sure hope there isn't a full moon next Sunday!" (for the Daytona 500).

(Howling laughter is heard through the Pion household.)

No, you don't have to worry about that, Darrell. In fact, I'd say there is a pretty good chance that there will be a half-moon that day.

Just as I am pretty sure that there will be lots of comments this Sunday (during qualifying) evincing surprise that the second lap of a qualifying run is faster than the first lap ... on a track where the drag-limited top speed of a "restrictor plate" race ensures that the cars take more than two laps to reach maximum speed.

When your car approaches its top speed asymptotically, you have to be a really bad driver to keep from going faster on that second lap.

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Female Mathematicians during WW II

Check out this 8 minute trailer for an up-coming movie "Top Secret Rosies", where "Math may be the most secret weapon of all". (Hat tip to Sherman Dorn.)

I'd take a bit of an exception to the claim in the intro that this is an untold story, since there wasn't a single thing in it that I didn't already know from histories of the projects those women worked on (or the history taught in conjunction with learning "numerical analysis"), but it is great that it has been assembled into a coherent story with a central focus on the role of mathematicians, mostly female, in winning World War II.

I hope that people who see this movie do not interpret the presence of electromechanical "adding" machines as an indication of mindless labor. That was not the case then, any more than the essential skill of entering the correct numbers into a calculator or computer program is simply clerical labor today. It still takes a person who knows what they are doing to put the right numbers in the machine and verify that the numbers that come out are not wrong.

What people today don't realize is that digital computers with the capability of doing sophisticated engineering (or physics) calculations were too expensive for a small or mid-size company until relatively recently, and you didn't have time (and could not afford the risk) to explain the task to a low-paid clerk. Your engineering license hung on those numbers being right, just as lives depended on whether a 155mm Howitzer shell landed on the enemy rather than your own troops during WW II. This was a job for experts.

One place my dad worked had a "programmable" desktop calculator, where the key sequences could be stored on a magnetic card in much the way that a program is written on a TI-83. This was in the late 1960s, when that device cost thousands of dollars, and it was operated by the engineers. A company he joined in 1969 had an in-house computer for payroll and billing, but only a few engineering tasks were done on it. Everything else was done with an electromechanical calculator like you see in this movie clip, plus lots of log and trig tables. One of the engineers bought one of the first HP-35 calculators (at a price that would be several thousand dollars today), explaining that it saved the cost of the books of log tables that he wore out every year. Highly efficient algorithms for computation were really important when you were doing it essentially by hand.

Even before the war, many women worked as mathematicians or computers who applied mathematics to engineering or physics problems. Many engineers and physicists also did this work. That is what Feynman and Teller and others did at Los Alamos, working side by side with women like the ones in this movie. Although one woman mentioned her background with business calculations on an adding machine, the complexity of the work often required someone who knew what was being done, someone who could spot a computational error because s/he knew the math or physics behind the correct answer.

[Perhaps it was inevitable that histories in the 1950s would put the focus on the men (much in the way Feynman put the focus on himself) and that female mathematicians would be expected to go back to "women's work" after the war. What is disturbing is the degree to which young women still have to fight stereotypes imposed by their fellow students. One great thing at our CC is that we have a number of highly capable women teaching mathematics, and they have served as role models for young women who never realized they could have a technical career.]

The mathematical problem being solved by the women mentioned in this clip was the solution of sophisticated equations for the flight of a bomb or shell, such as the shell fired by a 6" gun or 16" cannon. Models of the many forces acting on an object, most never even mentioned in an intro physics textbook, were used to predict where the object would land if released at some specific angle, velocity, and altitude. The models were verified against experiments done with the actual, specific ballistic projectile, and then used to construct extensive tables that filled in all the gaps between the experimental results they had available. Gunners could reverse the process, looking up the firing angle needed to get a particular shell to land at a particular distance away for given cross winds, etc.

The ENIAC, actually the second electronic computer built rather than the first as stated in the film clip, was built to replace the labor of a room full of people working with calculators. Naturally, the people (women mathematicians) who had organized the work on the hand calculations were tapped to do the same for the new machine. This was not an uncommon occupation. One of the first computer programmers I knew was a woman who wrote code used for accelerator design in the 1950s. She was old enough to have done war work, but I don't know if she did.

But she (like the women featured in this movie) would not be the only person who might have done hugely significant work during WW II without anyone knowing what they did. Until the classification rules were lifted in the mid 1990s, all I knew was that my thesis advisor had "given orders to Admirals" during WW II. It turns out that he worked at Bletchley Park, breaking German codes, and knew John von Neumann, among others. Another person I knew had been in the plane that followed the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, taking pictures of the effects of the bomb. I didn't know that until I read his obituary.

Side note:
The first electronic computer ever built, Colossus, was so secret that its mere existence was classified as part of the "Ultra" code breaking work done at Bletchley Park in the UK. It was only after the classification of that project expired that it became known that the ENIAC was not the first programmable computer.

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Physics Teaching and Retention ...

I'm posting this as basically an open thread, triggered by this comment on Dean Dad's blog.

I'll quote the comment below the fold:

My fiance teaches physics full-time at the local CC. He's very concerned about maintaining standards, so students transferring to study engineering at the local mammoth midwestern u (MMU) can hold their own in the cattle pens they call classes there. I teach at MMU, and I know what he does is effective. A student we've both had in common told me that when MMU eng. classes are tough, my fiance's former students get together and use the methods they learned from him to figure out how to understand the difficult topics.

Here's the dilemma he's in right now: how to deal with mixed messages from CC administration emphasizing 1. the importance of student retention (hint hint) 2. bringing this CC to back above average for its size in terms of student math performance. On the whole this CC has a very good reputation in science and eng. prep. Still, I hear from my fiance (a LOT) about his frustration with what he perceives as instructors lowering their standards. It's hard to know how to read this. But if you get a student in your calculus based physics course who doesn't remember how to do derivatives 1 month after taking calc, what's going on? Also, if the physics instructor at a satellite campus of this CC regularly has an A- average in his classes (my fiance's is more like C, and that's in step with chem/bio/otherscience instructors there), how do you respond? This calculus student isn't an isolated case.

There's a lot going on here, but even without identifying all the causes for it, it's important to know. To what extent are standards already shaky here? What are the true priorities?

This CC isn't in immediate trouble, but like everyone else, is looking at major economizing. They're also in the position of getting much less funding from the state than MMU, but charge about 1/2 the tuition MMU does.

Yes, there is a lot here, and some of it has been touched on in past articles that might be filed under "teaching" or "education". Here I will quickly single out two of them for possible future discussion in more detail.

1. Increasing retention (of students) by lowering standards: I am fairly direct when dealing with this. By direct, I mean I have publicly asked the Provost and President what they want. Do they want me to pass students who cannot do the work at the level needed to succeed in engineering school, thereby increasing my "success" rate at the expense of students who will fail after they transfer? Their answer is an emphatic "No" because we measure learning by success after transfer in our internal re-accreditation studies.
2. Not remembering material from a previous class (retention of knowledge): Some of this is to be expected. Fighting it is also something that I actively (and I mean REALLY actively) push. I alluded to this issue in my John Updike article, and so intend to blog about it 'soon'. Our math department is taking it on as well.

By the way, like your husband, I revel in the stories my former students tell about kicking butt at Big Dog U. Their stories are a big part of how I sell item 2 to my current students.

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