Because Igor is now a tropical storm.
Igor is not much of a storm yet, and is showing no clear pattern of increased intensification. However, Igor’s current path will take the storm through a region where there will be very little to weaken it and a great deal of very warm water to strengthen it. There is a possibility that Igor will drift to the north, which would cause the storm to weaken. If not, there is a high potential of a large and powerful hurricane. Details.
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
Why does the wind blow, and why does it blow the way it does?
Continue reading Why the Wind Blows: A History of Weather
It happens. A very large percentage of life science teachers are creationists. In Minnesota, and Minnesota is not that unusual, about half the population or more are creationists, but among life science teachers, that number is reduced by almost one half. In other words, one in three life science teachers are creationists, although most, one would hope, only barely so.
This does not mean that creationism is being taught in the classroom. Some, perhaps many, life science teachers who are creationists know to not teach creationism in the classroom. But I find it difficult to believe that their creationism does not affect their teaching, at the very least by reducing the emphasis they place on the mortar that holds all the bricks of life science together: Evolutionary theory itself.
Continue reading Parents: Is your child’s teacher a creationist?
…. Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it’s early in the term. A student, on the way out of the room after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about “carbon dating.” This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you’ve gotten to the “evolution module”…
Continue reading What to do about Bible-thumping students in the science classroom