I spent the past few days perusing various message boards on ballet and found some interesting ideas on practice. Some beginning adult ballet dancers were advised not to practice by more veteran dancers/teachers. Why? The more experienced people felt that practicing can instill bad habits or poor technique ingrained in muscle memory; going to class [...]

Things were going well with my Daily edition, until one day, I saw the above mark on it. I turned it. It was still there in off mode. There was only one thing it could be: hardware failure. The hardware failure is, as far as I know, not on my end, e.g. it isn’t from [...]

While I am not required to have a quantitative, e.g. statistical component, to my dissertation, my advisor has told me that he thinks it’s always a good idea, particularly for the audience I’m hoping to influence: physicists. My main issue is that I’ve come up with what my advisor has thought were some interesting questions [...]

Being in Boston means living in the thick of graduation territory this time of year. At least one university is having its graduation this weekend, and we have seen signs of other graduations in previous weeks. If I had to give one piece of advice to these students, I would tell them to bring safety [...]

Because I’m almost 100% sure it is covered, I am taking one summer class through the education school. It’s partially because the topic is interesting (international education), partially because I want to experience taking an online course and right now, it makes the most sense to do an online course; I have a conference that [...]

MassRaqs registration is open! Volunteering for MassRaqs is one of my big activities here in Boston. I’m really excited to have reached this stage in the process of the event. An incredible amount of work from many people has been involved with getting the event to this stage. It’s incredibly rewarding to meet each milestone. [...]

I had originally thought that I was finished with my finals yesterday, but the professor granted extensions to the class. Because writing can almost always be improved upon, I will edit the paper again tonight and tomorrow before submitting it Monday. Two of my grades are up already. As an addition to the whole “arguing [...]

Even if I were not in school/aware of the academic calendar, I would always know it’s college finals time as long as I have this blog. Why? My entries on arguing grades receive more hits at the end of the semester. I hope people find what they’re looking for, and they approach their instructors cool-headed [...]

Last week, my students did poster presentations on their teaching experiences. They all did amazing jobs on the presentations and sparked many good discussions. Towards the end of the poster presentation, they and other members of the audience began a discussion on the general chemistry class itself. A few of us agreed upon doing a [...]

This year is the first year ever I have had a strictly “final papers” kind of finals period. I have always had exams for physics and never had a semester in undergrad where I only did non-science/math courses. I love writing, don’t get me wrong. That’s why I keep a blog, after all . I [...]