Monday 27 June 2011

Q2. When is a PhD student like a 3 year old?

My 3 year old is going through a phase where he will argue about everything - insisting that he is right about everything, even when demonstrably wrong (e.g. your brother is smaller than you.. "no, I'm smaller than him", or "it's tuesday today" -"no, it's thursday", or "I won that game" when mummy clearly has all the pieces on the board and he has none". Whilst friends reassure me he's only "being 3", it struck me that I have come across this before in one of my grad students.

This student hangs on to a theory or hypothesis that they have proved to be wrong via experiment and observation, just because they can't conceive of being wrong. How long do I go on helping the student devise ways of proving himself right, knowing that they, and acres of past literature will prove him wrong and that he won't accept the answer?

And who will grow out of the exasperating phase first????

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Q. When is a grant proposal like a toddler?

A. When you think you've put it safely to bed and then something (a co-investigator who has previously been silent or an administrator) wakes it up and it stands up in the cot and starts screaming at you...

Unfortunately, in both cases I have real trouble taking the "check it's ok and not in serious trouble and then leave it for a while and it will go quiet and then not trouble you again" approach - hence I am getting absolutely nothing else done at work, and very little done in the evenings at home.

Aargh...

Monday 20 June 2011

Marking schemes

Having spent much of the past week marking exam papers, my colleagues and I have developed a new marking scheme that both extends the range of marks and feedback available, and is couched in a user-friendly language and is largely relative to the individual students potential, thus doing away with set boundaries. The new scheme is as follows:

"Awesome" Spectacularly good - so good you suspect they have seen the paper in advance
"Sweet" anything similar or greater than the mark that particular student expected or was expected to get
"OK" roughly what they expected or you expected or a little lower
"WTF?" answer incomprehensible or student directly contradicts themselves in the same sentence.
"Epic" as in epic failure i.e. didn't turn up to anything or turned up to everything and still managed to score less than 10%

We decided that "OMG" was too ambiguous to use.

I am looking forward to explaining this at our next examiners meeting.

Monday 13 June 2011

Marking depression

Sometimes I wonder whether there is any point in me teaching at all...

It's exam script marking time. This year I have taught two different modules: a final year undergraduate optional module in a specialised topic of our general field (but one which receives a lot of attention in the media and scientific press) and a first year compulsory (for students taking a degree in our subject) introductory module covering a very very broad range of subjects. Let's take the first year module first. All our students are required to have good grades in maths and physics at A-level. The module uses some maths and a fair bit of physics, but is a mix of coursework done in class (calculations and analysis), on-line quizzes that also revise the material covered in lectures, and a longer assignment (students could choose from 3 options). The coursework counts for 50% and the rest comes from an exam that they sat on Thursday last week. Most students have passed on the coursework. However, I got to the point in marking the exam when I couldn't work out whether I was glad they hadn't written anything because I didn't have to plow through pages of brain-dump gibberish that directly contradicted itself trying to award marks for at least recognising which part of the course was being addressed, or depressed because they clearly had learnt/understood very little. I guess I will have to mark the resits so it's just delaying the inevitable. I hate to think how they will do in year 2 if they have just scraped through, but at least those who have failed will have to retake and pass it before they can progress...

The final year course was a little better - the usual bi-modal distribution of those who "got it" and those who didn't. However, here there is a different problem - these students will in all likelihood graduate from our programme despite doing very badly in a module that is more relevant to everyday life than most and on a topic which we would hope they could lead on in the outside world. And yet a significant number of them cannot reproduce the basic mechanisms in an exam. Now, whether it is merely the exam process that is an issue, and they do really know the answer I can only hope. Should I be asking our institution to change the graduation rules so that they HAVE to pass every module (rather than a certain % of credits)? Of course every student can have a bad day, and if a module (unlike mine) is based 100% on exam this could be a problem. But surely we shouldn't be allowing students to graduate who have failed one or more of their final year modules???

Thursday 9 June 2011

Science Festivals..

Yesterday was more fun that most work days!. I spent yesterday at a large science festival with our Dept exhibit which aims to get people interested in our field, and to explain that to study our field you need to study science and maths to high level - at least to A-level in the UK (without revealing too much we often get people who have been poorly advised and think that geography is sufficient). We had some hands-on competitions and some demonstrations from our laboratory analogues of natural systems. Also in the "Discover Zone" were demonstrations about x-raying archaological finds, heat exchange, "dry water", nuclear technology, code breaking, microbiology yeast balloons and a whole host of big theater events. There was a lively bunch of (generally young) scientist presenters and lots of freebies. The attendees were mainly school groups aged 8-14, and some individual children with their parents. I spent my entire day on my feet just talking about our subject and interacting with a group of people I don't normally get to talk to. I returned home pumped full of adrenalin, enthused for our subject and convinced I should now go and work in a science engagement role rather than my current position... I should probably sleep on that decision.

I would say, if you get the chance to do something similar for a day, go do it - even if you feel nervous. Be prepared to be mentally challenged by the unpredictable nature of the interactions and physically exhausted, but to regain the motivation that led you to the subject in the first place. Oh, and it might even look good on your CV too :-)

Thursday 2 June 2011

staff meetings

I have just returned from our weekly "informal" staff meeting where there were two topics of discussion:
1) Whether to make the whole building WiFi (currently only some of the public shared rooms have a secure WiFi) so that visitors and meetings could access the internet more easily.
2) Whether to replace our Dept coffee machine (grinds coffee, makes espresso) which broke some time ago.

It took 40 mins and a lot of prompting to get any kind of decision on topic 1 - a vote was taken. Topic 2 was agreed in 3 mins with no vote. Enough said.

Wednesday 1 June 2011

A blogging first

Thank you thank you thank you to GMP for finding my blog and leaving a comment. Yey!!!

why "Science Professor Mum"?

I spent quite a while thinking about the name for this blog. As I intend to use it to talk about issues relating to academia, science, women in academia and women in science, and mixing parenting with academia I wanted something that reflected all those things. So, Mum covers the parenting and female part. Professor is what I am, and it makes sense to use science to better define this so it might be more relevant to people. The combination is inspired by the brilliant "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" book by Lynne Truss which is recommended reading for all my PhD students when they start writing. My blog title could read "Science, Professor, Mum", "Science Professor, Mum" or less legitimately since I can make no claim to expertise, only to experience, "Science, Professor Mum"!