Comps is a go

The public talks phase of Physics Comps (the Senior Integrative exercise) for 2010, or ‘Comps’ as we call it at Carleton for reasons unknown to me, launched last week. Those working in our Comps seminar any given Winter and Spring Term include all the Faculty, and usually all of the Staff, any major who intends to graduate that year, and — very rarely — one junior finishing up Comps early so that she can take the Comps in another major during her senior year (the two examples I know of who did this in the last decade are, indeed, female). Juniors also participate by introducing the seniors and by attending and asking questions. They are usually asked to attend the talks as an ‘assignment’ for their quantum mechanics class (and sophomores for their classical mechanics course). So you can see it’s a process we treat very seriously in the Department.

It’s structured as follows: The seniors write a long paper that goes through 3 iterations with feedback from two faculty members and a peer reviewer; between the 1st and 2nd written version they present a public talk. We heard from two of our graduating seniors this week; the first spoke on the resolution of Maxwell’s Demon’s Paradox through arguments about the physical effects of memory and erasure, invoking one of my favorite phrases ‘Information is Physical’. The second spoke on the physics of building giant structures such as stadia and skyscrapers, particularly when said stadia have retractable domes, for instance. I learned something from both of them, and enjoyed both.

I’m Comps Czar this year (first time) and got to kick off public Comps with a little intro on what we intend and expect from our students for Comps: For Physics Comps we ask our students to learn something (on a topic of your own choosing) that we haven’t taught them, and often, what we don’t ourselves know. We then ask you to educate us about what you’ve learned, through your written paper and your talk. We look for you to have explored your topic to a depth well beyond that of the first couple of years of Physics at Carleton, to have integrated material from more than one course or area of physics, and most importantly, to have mastered the material. I have been jaw-droppingly stunned by the wonderful job some of our students do. And look forward to the same this year as well.

(This, it turns out, is pretty much what I wrote here 2 years ago as well, so it’s nice to know that I’m consistent, if forgetful).

High school science teaching as a profession

As a physicist, I am keenly interested in secondary science education, which prepares the students I teach, and the ongoing discussions about increasing both the number of high school students interested in pursuing science majors and the number of qualified secondary science teachers. As the daughter of a public high school teacher and a public school district superintendent, I’ve heard many dinnertime discussions about the state of public education in the US, the immense amount of work expected of teachers, the pressures put upon educators, and the reduction of education to nothing more than student performance on high-stakes multiple choice testing. As someone who deals with a seemingly intractable two-body problem, I’ve occasionally thought high school physics teaching might be a possible, though challenging, alternative career that could help address the two-body problem; after all, every major metropolitan area has high schools who hire science teachers.  With all of these perspectives in mind, it was with great interest that I read Sheila Tobias and Anne Baffert’s on-line book from the Research Corporation, “Science Teaching as a Profession: Why It Isn’t, How it Could Be.” The report was developed primarily by talking with current and former science teachers, via on-line forums and in-person discussion groups, providing a look inside the thoughts of secondary science teachers. Additionally, the authors include case studies of successful programs to support science teachers in the US, as well as considering models in other countries, Finland being highlighted in particular.

“Science Teaching as a Profession” isn’t so much about how to attract new people into secondary science teaching as it is about how to retain those folks who have made the choice to be secondary science teachers. The report notes that teacher turnover costs our nation $4.9 – $7 billion per year, primarily in recruiting, hiring, and training replacements. The report also finds that teacher salaries are not the primary cause of people leaving the field, but instead it’s the quality of teacher work life that influences turnover. With this in mind, Tobias and Baffert set out to find what could improve the quality of working conditions for secondary science teachers. I’m not going to provide a summary of their findings (see James Gentile’s column in the Huffington Post if you want an overview), but rather comment on a few of the ideas that I found most interesting.

One clear message of the report is that secondary science teachers want autonomy over, or at least significant input into, curriculum, student assignments, and assessments. With the rise of high stakes testing and a one size fits all approach to these tests, teachers are rapidly losing the ability to exercise creativity and regulate activities in their classrooms. (I would contend such self-regulation and decision making is crucial to a sense of professionalism.) Tobias and Baffert note science is not simply a content subject; it is also a process subject. Unlike math, where there is a single right answer to any given problem, science often involves building models and making approximations, weighing competing viewpoints and evidence, and reflecting on complex problems with no clear answers. None of this lends itself well to multiple choice testing. Additionally, classrooms centered only on science facts do not adequately prepare students for “doing science,” nor do they help increase student interest in the subject.  Particularly challenging is the fact that few school administrators come from the ranks of science teachers so they often don’t understand the challenges of teaching the process of science and including meaningful lab activities. Thus when administrators encourage district-wide instructional approaches, they often don’t accommodate the particular needs of science teachers.

Much of the report addresses issues that are broadly relevant to secondary education, such as the push to use student test scores as a primary measure of teacher performance. Although proponents of standardized testing claim that the best way to objectively analyze the valued added to a student’s education by a teacher is to examine student test scores, Tobias and Baffert highlight several studies showing that teachers can be effectively, and reliably, evaluated in other ways. I was interested in the work by Harold Wenglinsky published by ETS (an entity deeply invested in standarized testing) that found teacher quality can be reliably assessed by direct observation of classroom practice, and this direct observation is particularly important for assessing teaching of higher order thinking skills and hands-on laboratory skills. However, in light of other topics discussed by Tobias and Baffert, it seems those doing the evaluating need to be peers — master teachers who are in a position to be able to evaluate both science content and pedagogical approaches. Based on my experiences in higher education, I know that I am much more comfortable having my teaching evaluated through classroom observations by colleagues than by other means, and I can see why evaluation solely by student test scores would be unappealing for secondary science teachers.

One suggestion that caught my attention is the development of a “teacher-scientist” model for secondary science teachers. The report highlights several programs that place secondary science teachers in local universities, national labs, or industry during the summer as members of an active research group. These teachers primarily spend the summer engaging in research, but may also participate in other activities, such as discussing how to capture the research process in the classroom or developing educational modules about their research topic. In the teacher-scientist model, science teachers assume a role more closely related to that of college science faculty than that of standard secondary school teachers. Such an approach brings high school science teachers squarely into the science enterprise, integrating science educators and research scientists in a collaborative, collective endeavor. Science educators can learn what types of science careers their students might pursue and what skills are needed for those careers, and research scientists can learn first-hand about the challenges facing secondary science classrooms and influence teacher development and, by extension, student development. In at least one of these teacher-scientist programs (Partners Project, sponsored by the Research Corporation), participating teachers produced students who were more likely to participate in science competitions and more likely to consider being science majors than teachers who did not participate. Shirley Malcolm (Director of Education and Human Resources at AAAS) wrote of these programs, “I don’t see this as professional development so much as profession development, reinforcing the view that as a teacher of science one has multiple reference groups–a critical step in recognizing one’s value within in the society.” I would contend such programs don’t just improve the development of the teaching profession but also the development of the science profession as a whole.

Giving secondary science teachers more opportunities for scholarly engagement, either by embedding in a lab or by taking an active role in educational policy (another suggestion of the report), might make science teaching more attractive to talented students. Of course, programs that develop a teacher-scientist model for secondary science educators do not address the challenge of overwork that is often faced by science teachers, nor do they address the increase in external regulation of the classroom due in large part to the emphasis on student testing. Nevertheless, the effort to ensure that secondary science teachers have connections with practicing scientists and are actively included in the community of science is promising and could help make secondary science teaching a well-respected professional career.

My alma mater is hiring

A little post, courtesy a near-contemporary currently teaching there (Bikram Phookun): St. Stephen’s College is hiring in physics after many years. More information here.

Apker winner has Anacapa member as advisor, again

For the second time in two years, a student receiving the prestigious APS Apker award for research by an undergraduate worked with a member of the Anacapa Society. One of this year’s winners, Bilin Zhuang of Wellesley College, recieved the award for her thesis on “The Thermodynamics of Ising Systems on the Triangular Kagome Lattice and Small-Model Approximations to Geometrically Frustrated Systems”. Her advisor, Courtney Lannert is a theorist and founding member of the Anacapa Society. One of last year’s winners, Byron Drury of Haverford College, received his award for his work on “Factoring Quantum Logic Gates with Cartan Involutions” and was advised by Peter Love, also a founding member of the Anacapa Society.

The LeRoy Apker award is given annually by the American Physical Society “(t)o recognize outstanding achievements in physics by undergraduate students, and thereby provide encouragement to young physicists who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment.” Usually, one award is given to a student from a PhD-granting institution and one to a student from a non-PhD-granting institution. This year, both awards went to students from non-PhD-granting institutions, the other going to Kathryn Greenberg of Mount Holyoke College.

You can read more about the APS Apker award, including a list of previous recipients here. To learn more about how the Anacapa Society promotes the careers of theoretical physicists at primarily undergraduate institutions, click here.

My inbox is my to do list

I juggle plenty of hats and responsibilities, and sometimes do get asked to talk about how I get all done.

I shared one trick/technique with my junior colleagues a couple of years ago, and gather that at least one of them uses that technique better than I manage, most days. It’s a simple rule: Schedule it. Put everything on your schedule: Class prep, research, down time, exercise, schmoozing with colleagues, everything. Put it on your schedule. Then you don’t fool yourself when you do something, and don’t fool yourself into accepting more than you can manage. If there’s a spot on your schedule to write it down, then accept the new responsibility. If not, don’t, unless you make room for it.

A second technique that I swear by: My inbox is my to do list. My email inbox is almost always *clean*. That is, even in horribly crowded times, the ‘steady-state’ of my inbox is fewer than 10 messages, and every message in there is something I expect to act on in the given work week. Everything else is filed away — either in a specific folder associated with a project (I have one called ‘QSD-chaos, for example, for all my work with Arik, and equivalents for everything else I do), or in a folder called ‘Pending’. I check ‘Pending’ every Sunday night, and move anything in there that I can deal with that week into my inbox. If something sits in ‘Pending’ for over a term or so, I delete it (though not always, but I don’t sweat it). This works for me. It may not work for you. But I don’t get the point of an email inbox where you have no idea what’s beyond the first page. And those who have pages of inbox email, most of it unread … I don’t get that at all. ‘Cos out of sight is usually out of mind.

Let me be clear: I have a messy enough office, and a messy enough home office, and so on. But my inbox (and my folder hierarchy for research, but that’s another post): Impeccable.

Research kick-start

Last Wednesday three of my colleagues at Carleton made short presentations on their research: Dwight Luhman talked about the lab he is building dedicated to looking for the effect of disorder on phase transitions in liquid helium, Melissa Eblen-Zayas on her work in understanding correlated electron materials, and Nelson Christensen on ‘listening’ for gravitational waves as a member of the LIGO collaborative. We will all be doing this over the next couple of weeks, at the request of the students, and I have a high bar to jump to meet the standards of the ones we’ve already heard.

I’m looking forward to it, even though I don’t need to recruit kids to my group quite as much as I usually have to around now. In fact, not at all. A funny thing’s happened this year, and more particularly this term: I have possibly too many students showing up wanting to work with me. In general I’ve had reasonable luck with research students, and enjoy the collaboration. But rarely do as many show up as the six that did in the first 4 days, and some of these have been talking physics with me for a few weeks or even a few months by now.

We should be able to make some headway into the projects that I currently find most compelling, which are all related to trying to understand what happens in the land between a system behaving completely classically and one behaving completely quantum-mechanically. This is a fundamentally fascinating question from me. That’s because those two kinds of behaviors can be totally different particularly when the system is nonlinear. For example, the classical system could be a chaotic ratchet or have persistent patterns, the quantum system could be a completely different kind of resonant ratchet, and how we get from such classical behavior to the corresponding quantum is not at all clear.

Does the change happen smoothly? Non-monotonically? Are there hills and valleys? What is the parameter landscape? We know it’s affected by the size of the system, the temperature and environmental effects, and by the nonlinear dynamics, so it’s a multi-parameter landscape. What sorts of possible ways are there are navigating in this landscape?

To attack all this you need just enough understanding of a handful of fairly tricky mathematical models of physics: Possibly Stratonovich calculus for noisy systems, Hilbert Space manipulation facility, familiarity with density matrices, dynamical systems theory. Once you got that, you should be able to either analytically or numerically solve for the dynamics of a particular open nonlinear system via the stochastic Schrodinger equation and/or the Lindblad formulation.  My putative student has to be good enough at all this that I trust what she reports, but has to get through the relevant background material fast enough that some sort of big project can be tackled over the summer.

This year I’ve got what seems like a handful who I think could easily get ‘just enough’ of the above by this summer, and I’m pleased as punch. There are enough of these gung-ho students that I’m going to have to arrange a group meeting rather than meet with them individually.

Apart from long-term projects, I also have a very immediate deadline. I’m scheduled to give a talk at the University of Toronto at the end of February and there are some ideas and results that I’d love to wrap up and present there. Given everything else that is going on with teaching and administrating, this is going to make for a very full term. Onward!

Falling off a cliff

The adrenalin rush and acceleration of time in how we went from the December break, with its enforced long weekends at Christmas and New Year, to the intensity of Winter Term at Carleton, can only be described by the phrase ‘falling off a cliff’. This term I’m teaching junior Quantum Mechanics in precisely the same formal way as I’ve taught it for the last 5 years, using a 3-stage process that I’ve seen work wonderfully: (1) Assign readings, and ask students to email questions to you (worth 15% of their grade) (2) present a lecture in class that responds in weighting and approach to their questions and encourage questions and discussions (another almost 15% of their grade) (3) pause often to work together on problems, including as much as an entire class day.

I trust a lot about this course now: The above format, the difficulty level, the approach (plunging students into Hilbert Space instantaneously). There are some problematic stretches still — how and when we reconnect with the position-based Schrodinger equation approach they’ve seen before in Modern Physics (I am never entirely sure how much time to spend on deriving the transmission and reflection rates from tunneling theory, for example) and on how we finish the course finally (I have them vote for special topics, and we might land up exploring entanglement (EPR) or identical particles or quantum field theory, but its not clear to me whether that time might not be profitably spent in reviewing everything we’ve learned).

But it’s always a hard ride, particularly the pre-class sessions reading the questions and trying to figure out how to address them. And the issue grows with class size, of course. This year I’ve got 26 kids registered, mostly juniors, the largest yet. I am anticipating many freezing early mornings with coffee, laptop, class notes, and quantum textbooks. I’m kinda looking forward to them, actually :-).

The floodgates of administrative work have opened, as well, and well, here goes.

Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man

During the Fall, I taught a Cross-Cultural Studies first-year seminar called “Growing Up Cross Culturally”, which looks at the birth-to-death arc in the United States, compared and contrasted with other cultures around the world. As part of this class we used films and extensive clips from the remarkable Seven Up series by Michael Apted, where a set of children are filmed and a snapshot of their lives recorded every seven years. I had seen one of these films (35 UP) as a graduate student in Austin, and it was unforgettable. I was thrilled when my co-teachers (there were 4 of us teaching different sections of this seminar this year,  it’s a team-built syllabus) were also very struck by the films and made room for them in the course.

The premise is a quote attributed to St. Francis Xavier “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”. The specific context for the series was strong class boundaries in the UK — the film-makers thought they would be able to show how class origins determine the possibilities of your life. Whether they succeeded in that or not, they certainly made a compelling sociological study as they track the subjects over their lives (they are now over 50 years old). I’ll let you discover the movies for yourselves (and you can watch pretty much the last one and ‘get’ the full series, so it’s not a massive commitment) and/or follow the links above, or read this essay.

What brings them to mind for me today is that my child is turning seven shortly. And I can’t help but wonder if I can see the woman she is going to grow up to be in the child she is now — precocious reader as she is, for example (show-off/startled dad data-point: starting in late Oct and lasting through early December, she blitzed through the entire Harry Potter series, and in the last week, has read Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Kipling’s Just So Stories among others).

Coincidentally, my brother just sent me a copy of a family photograph taken when I was about seven years old, and I keep looking at that as well to see if I can see my present self in there. If it’s personality I am looking for, I think yes — I am just about as nerdy, bookish, shy, absent-minded as I used to be. And my brother, even at 4, has that familiar fierce squint.

The up-coming term, starting Monday: Quantum Mechanics. Yay!