Let me tell you 'bout the school cafeteria

[austin_dern]

Taking up some of the space at the canteen in the morning was a group of people practicing their lion dance. There was lots of percussion, a giant mask being waved around, absolutely no attention given by the people sitting in non-dance rehearsal parts of the canteen. That's the sort of thing that makes me love city life. I don't know why they were rehearsing after the Lunar New Year got started, but it might be something for the Chingay Parade of Dreams, which I think is coming up.

My student evaluations from last term came, and in the tiny class I did superlatively well, as I'd expected. In the larger class -- and this really gets me -- my scores came out below the department average, for the first time ever. I'm stunned and, of course, this could only barely have come at a worse time. However, at least one student must have had irrational expectations, as she or he commented that my digressions explaining the history of subjects, or the biographies of the people who worked out methods, were wastes of class time and should have been left in lecture notes if at all. If I had to explain the scores I'd hypothesize that student gave me all zeroes; take that out and my scores jump comfortably up above all the department means again. Besides, I've got many great comments about my dedication, friendliness, patience, approachability, and teaching skill; and those should count more.

Channel NewsAsia's web site a story headlined ``Singapore youths still downloading illegal MP3's: Survey.'' One can almost hear the author's eyes rolling. A Singapore Polytechnic survey of 800 students turned up that 99 percent had hand phones and communicated mainly by text messaging; only eight in ten had MP3 players. ``5 percent paid for the songs they downloaded from the Internet, while 61 percent did not,'' which seems to reinforce Intuitionist beliefs about the excluded middle.

Trivia: James Lancaster, captain of the (English) East India Company's Red Dragon in 1601, had his crew drink a bit of lemon juice every day, avoiding the scurvy that plagued the other ships bound for the East Indies that year. Why this treatment was overlooked for the next 170 years is unknown. Source: Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Giles Milton.

Currently Reading: The Wreck of the Penn Central: The Real Story Behind the Largest Bankruptcy in American History, Joseph R Daughen, Peter Binzen.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Bah! Fire that student! ^_^

I could scarcely disagree more. I still recall one of my old biology tutors spending much of one lesson a week reading from books like Gerald Durrel's "My Family and Other Animals" - and thereby giving a context to all the scientific learning we were embarked on. Surely that should be considered an essential part of a well-rounded education?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, even more, it's just that the people in mathematics and physics tend to be somewhat nerdly and those whose names are remembered a century after the fact are more likely to be obsessively weird even for mathematics and physics people. So it's hard not to treat these interludes as the entertainment part of our program. And it's a lot easier to be interested in Adams multistep integration methods if you know John Couch Adams used them to discover Neptune, only to be cheated of the prize.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that I'm sure the student thinks of herself as being practical-minded. In the real world it's essential to know the background to one's discipline, and how it relates to other fields of knowledge. One never practices in an ivory tower.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Even if one doesn't care for hearing tales of mathematical and physical folly -- like how Lewis Fry Richardson single-handedly set back analytical meteorology by thirty years -- it also has the practical benefit that I can talk about that for a minute or so, and let students catch up on copying notes from the board, without uncomfortable dead space, and it gives the quicker students something engaging to think about.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Some students hate anything that they suspect won't be on the test. That attitude drives me crazy.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Remarkably, for all that Singaporeans have a reputation for being bottom-line, no-nonsense, business-oriented personality types, this is the first time I've encountered someone who disliked such diversions, at least disliked them enough to say something. Most of the students are delighted to learn stuff that isn't tested, but just makes their intellectual worlds a bit broader and more eccentrically connected.