Monthly Archives: August 2019

Everybody wants students from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences to have the opportunity to succeed in college majors like engineering and the physical sciences. But whose responsibility is it to make it so? It’s mine. My colleagues in … Continue reading →

If you’re one of my regular readers, you know about the Nuclear Medicine and Science Camp (NMSC) for middle and high school students held during the last two summers at FSU’s Panama City campus. Thanks to FSU-PC’s STEM Institute, you … Continue reading →

Last Thursday, I attended a remarkable event at FSU’s Panama City campus – the celebration lunch that is part of the campus’s annual beginning-of-the-year symposium at which all of the faculty and staff come together for retreats and reflection. Even … Continue reading →

Let’s start with the math: Florida has about 200,000 instructional personnel in its public schools. If you give them raises that average $5,000 per employee, that is $1 billion. Now let’s go back to the beginning: Teachers are the most … Continue reading →

If Florida’s Education Commissioner gives his imprimatur to a law passed by the legislature and signed by Governor DeSantis last spring, the state’s high school students will no longer have to take and pass a geometry course to graduate. Instead, … Continue reading →

A paper published last month in Physical Review Physics Education Research suggests that all differences in student performance between demographic groups in introductory calculus-based physics classes can be explained by differences in pre-college preparation. Introductory calculus-based college physics provides an … Continue reading →

Perhaps it’s time for those of us who are worried about the decline of high school physics in Florida to learn something from the success of the AP Computer Science Principles course. AP Computer Science Principles was taught for the … Continue reading →

After I published two blog posts about the poor job that Florida is doing preparing high school students for college STEM majors – and that were really pessimistic bummers – Ryan Haczynski (author of the Teacher Voice blog who tweets … Continue reading →

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

If you want to identify the most reliable routes to economic security in the modern economy, look at a list of the twenty-five highest ranked college majors by salary for ages 25-59 as compiled by the Georgetown University Center on … Continue reading →