Author: Glen

How To Get Better Grades In Physics

Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)Ben Shank is a Ph.D. candidate in physics at Stanford, where he also serves as a teaching assistant (TA) for an undergrad physics course. At our recent Thanksgiving party he began rattling off advice to one of our students on how to get better grades in physics (or almost any technical course). Said student was amazed and beseeched Ben to make this information more publicly available, and so he typed it up and sent it to our Chi Alpha email list.

With Ben’s permission, I also share it below (emphasis is mine):

  1. From the first day of class, sit in the front of the room toward the center. At least one study has shown that students who sit in the front are 2–3 times more likely to get an A and 6 times less likely to fail than students sitting in the back even when seats are randomly assigned on the first day of class. We can debate why this is so all day, but it is so, so take advantage of it. (By ‘the front’ i mean the first ten or so rows of Hewlett 200.)
  2. Be sure to get plenty of sleep the two nights before the exam. Of all the bad conditions you could be in going into a physics test, being tired is probably the worst one that is legal. Studies indicate that the second night before the test is even more important than the night immediately before. A clear, thinking, creative mind is your single greatest asset for any physics you might encounter. If you have been keeping up with the class, getting two full nights of sleep is probably more important than any amount of studying you might do during those two days.
  3. That said you will probably want to do some studying. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend finding someone else in the class to study with. Go over problems together. Go into the later problems in each chapter and pick some that you’re not sure you can both do. Taking an exam well is very similar to teaching the grader how to do the problems, so even if you are teaching a friend how to do something you already know, you are preparing for the test. If you both (or all) get stuck on something, contact a TA.
  4. Read every problem at the beginning of the test. Your mind will continue to process problems you are not looking at, provided it is awake. (See Tip 2) Studies show that you are best served loading all the questions into your brain at the start to give yourself maximum time to contemplate. If you get really stuck on a problem, leave plenty of space and move on. Odds are you’ll have better insight when you come back to it.
  5. DON’T PANIC. Attempt every question. This sounds really obvious, but we occasionally get blue books that have a few scribbles labeled ‘Problem 1’ and nothing else. As best we can tell, these students are looking at the first question, panicking and staring blankly at the paper for forty-five minutes or just walking out. This is something worth practicing to avoid. If you find yourself in a panic: stop, look away from the paper while slowly counting to ten. If you are feeling calm, you can go back and draw a diagram or write down some possibly relevant equations. If you start panicking again, repeat Steps 1 and 2. If you are not feeling calm, turn a couple pages and start the next question. Things will look better when you come back to this one. Trust me.
  6. Now for a few tips on getting the most [points] out of your graders. Grading a midterm takes 4–5 hours. As much as we try to assess each of you according to all the knowledge of physics you demonstrated, we are going to get tired and eventually parts of our brains are going to go on autopilot. If your answers are in clearly marked boxes (preferably near the left side of the page) and they are right, there is a reduced chance of any error in your work being marked off. If an answer is wrong, but it’s in a box near the left side of the page immediately below the work that produced it, then it is very easy for us to find the one little error and give you most of the points. I know having all the answers in one box at the bottom of the page feels concise, but if one of them is wrong we have no idea where on the page to look for the mistake. On a related note, it is better if you work one part of a problem and then work the next one below it. Believe it or not, grad students can get confused if part c is to the right of part b instead of below it. It’s silly, but after a few hours of grading that’s the way we are, so you might as well not let it hurt you. As a general rule, each line on the page should only have one equation or statement on it. (pictures excluded) You may use up more pages that way, but there’s no shortage of blue books.
  7. Whenever possible, draw a picture. Not only will it help you think, but it also helps us know what you were thinking. If you are not absolutely confident in your solution, a minute spent drawing a decent picture is probably worth it in terms of partial credit. Too often I’ve suspected a student knew more than their answer indicated, but they didn’t leave a good record of their thought process so I couldn’t grant partial credit. And that makes me sad. (Organizing graphics are also great antidotes to panic, see Tip 5.)
  8. When you get an answer, check that it makes sense. Negative lengths and times are often indicators that you’ve made a mistake, as are e.g. megaCoulomb charges and kiloAmp currents. If this happens to you, go look for the error and fix it. If you can’t find it, let us know that you don’t like the answer and why. One of the easiest ways to tell that someone is lost is if they give you a non-physical answer and don’t blink. As a physicist, it is much easier to grade leniently if a student indicates that they understand why the result of their calculation can’t be right. If nothing else, the grading rubric often has a point designated just for having a result that could be true. You’ll at least get that.
  9. It is well known that having good handwriting improves the attitude of those grading your exam. What is less well known is that having tiny handwriting can hurt you. Often what is perfectly legible to you while you are curled up with your nose 12 inches from the paper makes our eyes hurt after the third or fourth hour of grading. Obviously this vastly reduces the incentive to hunt for that tiny little math error you made in part a. This is not a small matter. I, for one, tend to get a migraine when I bend over small text for too long. So imagine a three hour migraine and then gauge the incentive to just mark you off so I can stop looking at your paper. Find a test that you have taken recently. If you (or better, a friend) can’t clearly read your text at arm’s length, you might consider consciously writing larger on all tests from now on. Grading fatigue isn’t limited to physics TAs.

And that’s what Ben has to say about that. Hope it helps you out as finals draw nigh. 

The Most Amusingly True Sentence I’ve Read In A While

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire US government is forced to go through a full-body scanner (Evgeny Morozov)

I laughed out loud.

being a Christian in a sorority

PanhellenicA recent convert told me she’s struggling with life in her sorority, so I asked another sorority gal I know to give her some advice. 

Sorority gal emailed the recent convert and, with her permission, I’ve anonymized it and present her email for your consideration. I’ve trimmed off the beginning because it’s impossible to anonymize without making it useless (she identifies a specific Christian in the recipient’s sorority for her to connect with), but the rest of her letter is more broadly applicable:

I think [your sorority and my sorority] may be different in terms of their emphasis on partying and drinking, but I will definitely try to give you my two cents, and if you want to meet up at any point, let me know and I’d love to get together to talk and/or pray with you about it. 

I have always felt very at home in [my sorority] as a Christian. There are 10–15 Christian girls in [my sorority], and many more who aren’t into getting drunk/hooking up. My big is a Christian, as is my twin, and my twin’s little. I try to surround myself with these girls, rather than the partiers. I do still go out to the events where there is drinking, but I only drink moderately (if at all) and still always have a great time. Do you have a group of girls like this in [your sorority]? Are there other Christians in [your sorority] you can team up with?

Another thing that helped me ensure that there are enough events that don’t center around drinking/partying was getting involved on the sisterhood committee. If you guys have a committee like that, I would encourage you to get involved and make sure those kinds of events are happening. 

If you are feeling like [your sorority] is a place where you can’t be yourself or where you are encouraged to make poor decisions, deactivating might be the right choice for you. My biggest advice to you would be to pray about it and go with your gut. I do think there is room to be a Christian in Greek life, but I also think it varies a lot depending on the frat/sorority. Many of my closest friends aren’t Christian, and I think this can definitely make it more difficult to do the right thing at times. But, I think that as long as you have that Christian community somewhere, you can make it work.

I feel like I haven’t done a very good job giving you advice here, so please let me know if you want to talk about it over coffee or something!

I think that, on the whole, it is pretty good advice. What would you have said?

the NIV reloaded

Bible Study 2I sent an email to my students and it occurred to me that it might be of more general interest:

Chi Alphans,

You might be interested to know that the NIV translation of the Bible has been revised. You can’t buy it in stores yet, but it is available online at biblegateway.com

I think you’ll find the translator’s notes interesting. They include a section on language and gender and also have a list of key passages that have changed in the newest translation. http://www.biblegateway.com/niv/Translators-Notes.pdf

And while I’m on the subject of new releases of the Bible (which is a weird sentence), I should mention that there is a new, academically legit compilation of the Greek New Testament available at http://sblgnt.com/

Finally, remember that every translation optimizes some things at the expense of others. There is no “best” translation. It’s far more important you read whatever you have than that you engage in some fruitless quest for the ideal. In other words, your existing NIV will do just fine from now until you die.

Glen

P.S. There is no “best translation” but there is an option you might not have considered — you can learn to read the Bible in its original languages. It’s not for everyone, but just think of it: you can earn Stanford credits while growing in your understanding of God’s Word — it’s a twofer! 

Chutes To Gehenna

chutes and laddersI believe I have identified my least favorite part of parenting: playing Chutes and Ladders. My epiphany came about as I was playing the longest round that I’ve ever seen. It was all chutes and no ladders. Playing was like watching crabs in a styrofoam cooler: as soon as one character was close to escaping it was sent tumbling back down to the bottom.

While that most recent round was particularly tedious, I don’t like the game even when it takes ten minutes because it’s a game with no skill component whatsoever. I will confess to thinking — often — that we could determine victory by flipping a coin instead of through the interminable process of moving the game pieces in accordance with the dictates of the spinner and the requirements of the board. 

That’s bad enough, but there is one more factor that evokes dread in my soul when asked to play. It is this: children young enough to truly enjoy the game are usually unable to move their characters properly, so I have to do it for them. This means I am playing the game against myself. A game I don’t like. A game whose two-player version is logically indistinguishable from a coin toss yet which has the potential to endure until the heat death of the universe. Even if I win, I lose. I lost as soon as I took the box down from the shelf.

And yet I will play today and I know I will play again tomorrow. It’s like a torment from a Greek myth. Aaargh!

My heart goes out to thoroughgoing determinists who necessarily regard all of life as a complicated version of Chutes and Ladders. If that’s you, I suggest you arrange to be fated not to think about it.

Yikes — New Students Arrive Today!

In which I describe in great detail my panicked yet joyous feelings as the school year begins.

these are random freshmen from some other school... but you get the ideaNew students arrive on campus today. Yikes!

To Do:

  • Brush my teeth really well, including my tongue so my breath doesn’t stink.
  • Shave head. Carefully. We don’t want a repeat of that incident when I missed a patch and looked like a Who from Whoville.
  • Trim edges of beard. The difference between an epic prophet beard and a crazy cult leader beard is surprisingly hard to define, but raggedy beard edges have something to do with it. That, and neck hair. Say no to the throat beard.
  • Print literature for tabling: new student devotional guide, Why Jesus? essay, The Jesus FAQ.
  • Practice smiling in the mirror.
  • Double check on throat hair.

P.S. I don’t think I’ve publicized it here, but I put a new writing online. I mention it above in the “print literature” bullet point — it’s a ten-day devotional guide for new students called Thrive. It, along with all my other writings, is indexed here.

Look, Ma. I’m in the Stanford Review.

Stephen Colbert in IraqI was recently interviewed by the Stanford Review (a student publication) for an article analyzing the Supreme Court’s decision in CLS vs Martinez as it relates to Stanford (a case I have previously written about).

As is almost always the case with interviews, I said way more than they had space to include in the final article. Since the interview was via email, I have the full text of my remarks available. I should note that Autumn Carter, the interviewer, asked me several questions I declined to answer.

So here’s what I had to say:

SR: What is your opinion towards the Supreme Court’s ruling in general? With regard to Stanford?

Me: The Supreme Court’s logic would not apply at most public universities since the case at UC Hastings is so unique, and it will have no direct impact at all on private universities such as Stanford. And I hasten to point out that the case has been remanded back to a lower court for a closer examination of some factual issues. The Christian Legal Society alleges that UC Hastings enforced its policies unequally and in a discriminatory manner, something which the Supreme Court believes merits further investigation.

But to get bogged down in the legal maneuvering is to miss the essence of the case. For a university to force a Christian ministry to accept leaders who do not share its beliefs is as absurd as China’s plan to choose the next Dalai Lama, and I would suspect such a university of having similar motives: to control and to undermine religious belief which the authorities disapprove of.

Universities must decide what they believe tolerance looks like. Are they willing to become intolerant in the pursuit of tolerance? Are they willing to achieve their goals through coercion rather than reasoned discourse? UC Hastings appears to have decided that it is. It remains to be seen how many universities will embrace their folly.

SR: As you mentioned, Stanford is a private university and is therefore unaffected by the ruling directly. But do you anticipate any moves by Stanford to tighten its own group membership policy either independently or as a result of being lobbied? Or will Stanford likely maintain the looser policy that it currently uses?

Me: Should such lobbying arise I hope that Stanford will prove wiser than the Supreme Court. 

In retrospect, I’m surprised the Stanford Review chose the quote they did. Some of my other sentences seem so much more… lively.

Get Better Grades By Understanding How Your Brain Works

Studying for last law school examOne of my favorite blogs is the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. It summarizes current research in a way interesting to non-academics. I eat that kind of stuff up.

Their most recent post is a real winner for college students: 9 Evidence-Based Study Tips. You’ll receive a lot of advice in college — but these principles actually have experimental support.

  1. Adopt a growth mindset: believe that your brain is capable of getting smarter. You’re not stuck where you are.
  2. Sleep well: internalize that all-nighters hurt more than they help.
  3. Forgive yourself for procrastinating: as a minister, I was quite taken by this one. It’s a beautiful illustration of a more general lesson on grace as the primary catalyst for growth in life.
  4. Test yourself: don’t just review the material — turn it into a quiz.
  5. Pace your studies: review the material once 20% of the time elapses between the day you first learned it and the day of the test. Combining this with the previous tip will revolutionize your study life.
  6. Vivid examples may not always work best. This is more of a tip for teachers, so here’s the student version: don’t assume that the charismatic teacher will help you understand better simply because they entertain you more. Be suspicious of vivid illustrations because they can make it harder to learn the abstract principles you must master.
  7. Take naps: lie down and rest for 10–30 minutes. It will help more than you think.
  8. Get handouts prior to the lecture: the evidence for this one seemed weak to me. Read it and judge for yourself.
  9. Believe in yourself: confidence matters. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.

Each tip has a brief paragraph explaining the principle in more detail including links to the research upon which it is based. Go read it now!

You’re welcome.

Notes From God Is Not One

Interfaith BannerI recently read/skimmed Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University who was raised Episcopalian but has since rejected Christianity. He now describes himself as confused. Be that as it may, he makes some true but unfashionable claims in his introduction. Here are some bits I was particularly keen on:

The book is well summed up on the inside front dust jacket: 

To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example:

  • Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission
  • Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation 
  • Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order 
  • Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening 
  • Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God 

In a section called “Allergic to Argument” he described a frustrating reality that I see almost every day as a minister to college students:

In my Boston University courses, I work hard to foster respectful arguments. My students are good with “respectful,” but they are allergic to “argument.” They see arguing as ill-mannered, and even among friends they avoid it at any cost.… Especially when it comes to religion, young Americans at least are far more likely to say “I feel” than “I think” or (God forbid) “I believe.” (4)

I liked this bit, too:

All too often world history is told as if religion did not matter. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world. (8)

I first heard the following observation from Joe Zickafoose years ago, and the longer I reflect upon it the more convinced I am of its truth:

What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.… Religious folk worldwide agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Christians see sin as the problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in their tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem, and liberation from suffering as the religious goal. (11)

And I think his four-part analysis is one of the more useful ways to summarize religions:

At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates:

  • a problem;
  • a solution to the problem, which also serves as the religious goal;
  • a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and
  • an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.

(14)

And in one of his many non-PC moments:

While in Jerusalem researching this book, I struck up a conversation with an elderly Muslim. When I told him I was writing a book on the world’s religions, he looked at me sternly, pointed a finger in my direction, and instructed me to be honest. “Do not write false things about the religions,” he said. Religious Studies scholars are rarely honest enough to admit this in person, much less in print, but we all know there are things that each of the world’s religions do well, and things they do poorly. If you want to help the homeless, you will likely find the Christian Social Gospel more useful than Hindu notions of caste. If you want to find techniques for quieting the mind through bodily exercises, you will likely find Hindu yogis more useful than Christian saints. (20)

The rest of the book is fine, I suppose. If you need a summary of the global religions you could do far worse than this one, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of the introduction (hence the skimming alluded to in the first sentence of this post).

That notwithstanding, I must confess that I liked one image from his section on Pentecostal Christianity:

U.S. president Abraham Lincoln once remarked that, when he sees a man preach, he likes “to see him act as if he were fighting bees.” Pentecostalism is replete with bee-fighting preachers. (87–88)

That’s my tribe — the mighty bee-fighters.

A Professor’s Advice to Christians

final examIn Christians in Academe: A Reply, former evangelical Adam Kotsko minimizes a very real problem (recall that one study shows that 53% of faculty disdain evangelicals), but he nonetheless says things worth listening to.

A few bits stood out to me:

Above all, parents and pastors need to stop giving a blank check to anything that professes to be “Christian.” Conservative evangelicals have long been skilled at sniffing out what they consider to be pseudo-Christian liberals — developing some discernment on the other end of the scale would be a welcome shift.

I think he and I would differ considerably on the application of this point, but I like the fact that he brings it up. The truth is that there is a ditch on both sides of the road, and it matters little whether you wreck in the ditch of being too insistent on irrelevant details (theological conservatism) or whether you wreck in the ditch of being too unconcerned about important details (theological liberalism). Both will mess you up, yet most evangelicals practically ignore the ditch of being too theologically conservative.

He goes on:

For instance, if the professor Larsen describes in his opening paragraphs didn’t realize that he would get a paper like Larsen’s student handed in when he assigned an opinion piece on “traditional marriage,” then he or she was incredibly naïve. Personally, I would never assign a paper on abortion or evolution in an intro-level class, because I know doing so would basically mean condemning conservative evangelical students to do poorly. Many of them would simply parrot the stock arguments they’d heard from their leaders with very little reflection or fresh argumentation of their own — and the inevitable bad grade would only feed the persecution complex, turning me into yet another “secular indoctrinator.”

All I have to say in response to this is that I wish more professors were as wise as he. I’d like to order that paragraph to be read to every professor in America once a year.

But the part I like best is this:

More immediately, though, if conservative evangelicals are not willing to abandon their siege mentality, I would urge them to at least adopt the practices that the New Testament authors recommended to persecuted communities: live quietly, seek to be at peace with all, respect authority, work hard — in short, keep the moral high ground. The sober advice of the Apostles has stood the test of time and will endure long after whatever radical preacher is in the ascendant now is forgotten.

This is Biblical and good advice and should be the baseline for Christians at secular universities. If a university actually prevents you from obeying Christ, then by all means take a stand and deploy every peaceful tool in your arsenal to stymie them (this is to follow the example of the apostles — Acts 5:25–32 and Acts 16:36–39). But if a university is merely teaching you things you consider to be untrue, then suck it up, master the materials, and excel academically (this is to follow the example of Daniel and his friends in Babylon — Daniel 1:17–20). In the long run you will accomplish far more for the faith by getting good grades than by causing lots of disruptions in class.

Kotsko’s essay is worth reading and pondering (and so is the piece he is responding to, No Christianity Please, We’re Academics).

As I said, he minimizes a real problem. Anyone who thinks that some professors do not seek to destroy the faith of students is simply uninformed, and anyone who doesn’t realize that huge swaths of university culture are hostile to evangelical sensibilities has not been paying attention. But Kotsko is right to point out that evangelical students often create their own problems by allowing the evangelical subculture to define their relationship to the university rather than allowing the Bible’s teaching to prevail.