Monthly Archives: March 2017

I knew I was in trouble when I started to listen to Rowan Moore Gerety’s story on WLRN (Miami’s NPR affiliate) about bills in the Florida Legislature to replace state university admission requirements in math, science or even foreign language … Continue reading →

If Representative Manny Diaz, the Florida Legislature’s leading advocate for the controversial Best and Brightest teacher bonus program, really wants to learn what it would take to attract more strong students to K-12 teaching, he should visit my classroom and … Continue reading →

During the weeks ahead, I will be posting ways in which graduates from university physics departments or other science or engineering departments can become teachers in our middle and high schools.   This first post was written by Connor Oswald, … Continue reading →

Florida’s legislators are desperately looking for some subject they can sacrifice to boost the ranks of high school students who are bound for careers in computer science. Last year and for most of the present session, it was foreign languages. … Continue reading →

Leon County’s Chiles High School and Okaloosa County’s Niceville High School lead Northwest Florida in preparing college-bound students for college majors in STEM fields, according to an index of enrollment rates in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus calculated using course … Continue reading →

FSU Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Sociology Lara Perez-Felkner will be giving next week’s Physics Colloquium talk titled, “Expanding the Net: Secondary through Postsecondary Pathways to Physics Careers”.  The talk will start at 3:45 pm next Thursday, March 30, … Continue reading →

In class this week, a biochemistry major shared that she felt badly that as a bachelor’s degree grad she could not make as much as her brother, who is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communication.  To inject some facts … Continue reading →

Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Education Committee meeting featured a testing policy duel between a bill (SB 926) pushed by the Foundation for Excellence in Education that promises fewer and better tests – but actually delivers neither – and a … Continue reading →

Florida’s Best and Brightest teacher bonus program is intended to be a way to achieve statewide policy objectives – including implementing performance-based compensation of educators and recruiting more talented individuals into teaching – while circumventing the district-level collective bargaining process. … Continue reading →

A few of the slides from my talk to the Downtown Panama City Rotary Club today can be found below.  At the very bottom is a picture of the attendees learning some atomic physics – I was using plasma discharge … Continue reading →