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Disclaimer: This is an exact replica of one of my final projects for my 220 Math and Science Pedagogy course last semester, which is a lesson plan I devised for a science class. I have offered to post it up on serendip and decided not to make any alterations to it as of yet. For my hope is, after my participation in the summer institute this year under Professor Grobstein, I will return to this lesson plan and make an much more profound change for its betterment. Please feel free to read this, critique it, and look forward to my second take on it at the end of this summer. Thank you.

Luisana Taveras
May 15th, 2008
Math and Science Pedagogies

Lesson Plan

"Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay" (NYTimes, 8 June 2008) touches on enough hot button issues that a deeper problem may get lost in the arguments about the specifics of the particular case at hand. Is bipolor disorder over diagnosed and over medicated in children? Perhaps. Have Harvard scientists violated federal policies and/or university policies designed to prevent confict of interest from impacting research findings? Perhaps. Does Iowa Senator Grasslie have some hidden agenda in publicizing this matter as he has? Perhaps.

What's important to keep in mind, though, as these and related issues are argued about is that this particular case is not at all a special one

Using Our Website

for the Science as Interactive, Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Brian Greene in the June 1, 2008 NYTimes makes some very important points about science education. Those in turn have some important implications for thinking about science and how scientists present it to the world, some of which Greene makes explicit and others of which warrant some amplification.

When I was shelving some journals today (yesterday, now), I stumbled across a special issue of English Language Notes (v. 45 no. 2, Fall/Winter 2007) entitled Queer Space (and there's a special issue of Social Text that I want to look at, too, called What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?). Richard Hornsey's piece "After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness" raises some interesting questions for me. As I start writing, I've read about 7 of 12 pages. I will put summarizations of Hornsey's points in regular text and my own comments and reactions in italics.

Epilogue, or, whatever you call it when a smart mentally-ill student who has issues with authority and with deadlines, and who is fed up with dragging zhirself along like this, totally cops out and doesn’t put nearly as much work into zhir final paper as everyone else in the class, because zhe’s pretty sure zhe can get away with it with this professor (just don’t tell zhir dean), but wants to justify zhir brattiness somehow (and how distracting were those third-gender pronouns I made up for myself?).

 

[this space represents the traditional academic paper which I am fully capable of writing, but which I simply could not be bothered to do.]

Spent a day trapped in my own head, relieved by one brief phone conversation, and no writing. It is extraordinarily difficult to care about tactics in academic writing, when one is so utterly self-centered. I’m in some kind of waiting room, metaphorically speaking, and only a very narrow slice of the rest of the world exists to me. Audience, what audience? The writer is alive and kicking (and crying, and going for walks at 3 am, and at 6 am, and spending whole days getting nothing accomplished, and playing with hot wax, and setting up a printer, and getting to the grocery store ten minutes before it closes, and fooling around with the Tarot, and