If you read Pearls Before Swine with any regularity, you know that Rat doles out punishment of all types to every character he encounters. He even writes books for children that are so mean-spirited, the little ones are certain to cry. Antagonizing the world is his job in life. Last Feb 5, the tables were turned. Karma.
“Do not fear failure. Whatever happened in the past is past; do not worry about it happening again. Before you meet with success, failure is natural and necessary. As a baby learns to walk, it keeps falling down. Is this failure? Throughout our life we go through similar processes: going to school, pursuing a career, practicing Ch’an. After my first book, someone said to me, “Now you’re a success.” I said, “No. That book was a failure. I would write it much better if I had to do it again.” It is the same with practice; there is never a successful conclusion. When you are working hard, failure is natural. If you have never failed, you have never tried.” – Master Sheng-Yen, Tricycle magazine, Summer 1995
“To understand the necessity of change, we must consider not only our short-term personal advantage but also the long-range impact our choices have on others we will never know or see: on people living in remote lands, on generations as yet unborn, and on the other species that share our planet.
Students are attracted to science for many reasons: the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction that comes from making a unique contribution, the possibility of good, steady employment. The search for truth offers another potent draw. Students are repeatedly taught that truth can be found in scientific measurements and that scientists honor truth above all else.
So, given the importance that scientists attach to truthfulness, what can one make of the behavior of Columbia University and Professor Dalibor Sames in the wake of the Bengu Sezen scandal? The story, which has been covered in detail by ChemBark (and also by C&ENews), involves a massive fabrication of data by Sezen, a graduate student, and the subsequent publication of these data in multiple papers (later retracted) by Sezen and her Ph.D. adviser, Sames. The University has refused to comment on any part of the case. Professor Sames, for his part, published five more papers with Sezen after other members of his research group (and several groups outside of Columbia) informed Sames that Sezen’s work could not be reproduced. He even retaliated against some of the graduate student whistle-blowers by forcing them out of his research group. Is this how scientists reward the search for truth? Is this how institutions train and protect their students?
Unfortunately, episodes like this suggest that it may no longer be enough to teach our students respect for the highest ethical principles. We may also have to teach them methods for protecting themselves from institutions and supervisors that appear to care more about their reputation and advancement than about a student’s welfare. As Prof. Charles Drain of Hunter College (CUNY) eloquently wrote in C&ENews, “The blatantly unethical actions of Sames, tacitly supported by the Columbia administration by its blanket of silence, have dramatically altered if not harmed the lives of three quite promising young scientists. Pressures on untenured faculty to publish are not an excuse, and Columbia has tarnished rather than protected its image in the sciences. … it is clear that no one had their [the three students’] interests in mind and that even rudimentary checks and balances were not followed to protect whistle-blowers. How can the chemical community recommend students at any level to an institution wherein the quest for new knowledge is subjugated to mentor and university expediencies?“
Ainsworth et al. have asked the question, “Should science learners be challenged to draw more?” (Science, Education Forum, 26 Aug 2011, p. 1096). They point out that scientists “imagine new relations, test ideas, and elaborate knowledge through visual representations.” Despite this, science learners are more likely to be taught the skills that are needed to interpret the visualizations others have made rather than the skills needed to make their own. Ainsworth et al. list five ways in which drawing skills might contribute to science learning:
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Some lectures are spoken. Some are read. I suppose there’s something to be said for both. Here’s an observation on lecturing from Sir Lawrence Bragg (quoted in Science, 5 July 1996, p. 76):
“I feel so strongly about the wrongness of reading a lecture that my language may seem immoderate. … The spoken word and the written word are quite different arts. … I feel that to collect an audience and then read one’s material is like inviting a friend to go for a walk and asking him not to mind if you go alongside him in your car.”
I wonder what he might have said about lecturers reading the sentences on their PowerPoint slides to the audience?
My year-long sabbatical kicked off today and it feels great.* The sun is shining, I’ve got a long list of things to do, and I can devote my attention to them for almost an entire year before I have to return to the usual concerns of writing syllabi, prepping lectures, and grading papers. YAY – Thank you Reed!
* Sticklers will point out that, as a practical matter, my sabbatical started at the end of May. From a psychological point of view, the summer didn’t feel like a sabbatical because I always get the summer to myself (and my sabbatical doesn’t involve a trip to Turin or Seville). It wasn’t until this morning when I rode my bike through the crowds of cars negotiating the filled parking lots, wove my way around the students and families grouped around the dorm entrances, and rode past the orientation tables with the green t-shirted O-week assistants that I could finally say, “I’m on sabbatical!”
The US women’s soccer team appear to have Hollywood on the brain. Their World Cup victories over Brazil (quarterfinals) and France (today’s semifinals) have followed almost identical Die Hard scripts. Each time they got a one goal lead early, they got outplayed and outscored for almost the rest of the game, and then, just when we had about lost hope, they got back on their feet and saved the day.
Although attention will get showered on the goal scorers, there are lots of heroes on this team. Although France played brilliantly, controlled the middle of the field, controlled the ball, and took 25 shots (8 on goal) and 10 corner kicks, the US defense made sure that almost all of the French shots were taken from long range. On the flip side, the number of unforced US turnovers was so large that it seemed to put scoring out of the question (perhaps tired legs from the Brazil marathon had something to do with that?), but score they did: 3 times on 11 shots.
Oh Ladies! You’ve got heart, and you can be sure that no matter what happens in the Cup final, we’ll be cheering for all 90 minutes of the game. The movie ain’t over until they roll the credits.
7-18-11 update: Once again the outcome was up in the air all the way to the final penalty kick shootout. 120 minutes of nailbiting. But Japan won the PKs. And you have to be ok with that.
A guest editorial in Science magazine (Jun 24, 2011) makes the telling point that “Education is Not a Race.” The author, Deborah Stipek, is in a position to know. She’s the current dean of Stanford University’s School of Education and she writes persuasively about the importance of “joy in learning.”
It’s impossible to read this otherwise fine editorial, however, without questioning some of the specifics. First, Stanford University boasts operates one of the most exclusive, credentials-based undergraduate admissions policies in the nation. Families compete hard, in some cases preparing their children for years, if not an entire lifetime, to win a coveted spot in Stanford’s freshman class. I would have liked Dean Stipek to make some kind of connection between her institution’s admission and marketing policies and the reason that K-12 education has become a “race” in some quarters of society. When it comes to contributing factors, the policies of Stanford, Harvard, et al. (and maybe even Reed), are at least as important as the teaching practices employed in any specific classroom.
Second, she frames our country’s educational problems with the following question, “how many potential Nobel Prize winners have written off science before
the end of high school because
their only exposure to the subject had been in test
preparation courses rather than in classes that delved into meaningful
questions?” This is grandstanding of an awful sort. First, I hope you have as much trouble as I did in imagining the path that a child have to take through the first 18 years of life so that his or her “only exposure” to science came through “test preparation courses.” All I could come up with was being raised by wolves and being educated via online Kaplan exam prep courses. The other end of the Stipek’s question is equally ripe. It conjures up an image of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of bright earnest children who are denied a Nobel prize by cruel teaching practices. This is a numerical fantasy. Only one to three people can win a Nobel prize in any topic in any year. Over the course of professional career, the number of deterred prize winners could be as little as zero, and not more than a few hundred. Certainly this editorial had a larger educational problem in mind?
A more realistic, and vastly more humorous, view of what it takes to succeed in science (and possibly win a Nobel) can be found in Adam Ruben‘s excellent article, “Experimental Error: Most Likely to Secede” (Science Careers, Feb 25, 2011). Learning to “put little stickers on several hundred vials” might be off-putting to a lot of future Nobelists, but it’s an essential part of doing good science. Think of it as a sort of test…
“She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman.” These were the reasons (see Newsmakers, Science, 10 June, 2011) offered by a top US university for denying Rosalyn Yalow (1921-2011) a place in their graduate program some 60 years ago. Overcoming cultural, religious, and gender bias, she would eventually go on to earn a Ph.D. in 1945 and follow that with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977. Dr. Yalow passed away on May 30.
