Ummm, Professor? Do I Have To Know This?
When writing my last post, I spent some time reading Bill Keel’s Homepage where he had an interesting link entitled, Astronomy Students Say the Strangest Things.
Bill is a professor at the University of Alabama and apparently teaches introductory astronomy there. He posted some excerpts of things students have written in his class.
These are genuine, unexpurgated snippets from my introductory astronomy classes at the University of Alabama. This certainly demolishes my illusions of teaching effectiveness, but does give almost enough material for a “Universe according to Student Bloopers” collection. Usually I can tell what went in and became garbled, but some of these I can’t figure out at all.
At first, I thought it was hilarious, but then as I read it, I stopped laughing. I hope these students got better at expressing themselves as their education progressed.
I’ll post just a few, go here for the full list.
- Most impacts on the Earth’s surface are impact craters
- The incredible fascination with the Milky Way has become so great that poets have even written poems about it.
- The retrograde motions of the earth give rise to the seasons, as shown here.
- There is a bright side to being the first and only intelligent beings in our galaxy - we will have the chance to found the Galactic Empire! (I’m sure this is just an attempt at humor)
- When the Sun goes down, darkness illuminates the sky…
- Because of astronomy, the Greeks learned that they were not looking up to the Gods and realizing that they were looking up at the bikg dipper. If we had been here earlier, the Greeks would have known this all along.
I remember proofreading a few of my fellow students papers in college and being amazed at how poorly written they were. In many cases, the student just hadn’t had enough experience writing papers or they had some learning disability that prevented them from expressing themselves very well. In more cases than I like to remember however, it was due to the student not giving a sh*t.
Bill also has quotes from professionals in the field as well. This is a very illuminating section, equally hilarious (I like the one about unbridled speculation)…
- Conclusion: is left to the reader (see Table 2). Acknowledgements: I wrote this paper for money. [A.A. Chastel, A critical analysis of the explanation of red-shifts by a new field, A&A 53, 67 (1976)]
- The authors regret that their AAS abstract concerning this project… was composed at a premature stage and fails to state the present striking conclusions. It should be disregarded. [Djorgovski and King ApJL 277, L49 (1984)]
- Our conclusion is that we cannot satisfactorily account for the broad hump. Thus unbridled speculation is presumably in order. [Grandi and Phillips, “Large and small-scale structure in the continuum energy distributions of quasi-stellar objects and Seyfert 1 galaxies”, ApJ 239, 475 (1980)]
Thanks Bill, for posting these. I found them quite entertaining and, well, a little unsettling…
Photo Credit: joannapcc
Technorati Tags: astronomy education, student bloopers
Related Stories
POSTED IN: astronomy education, i am not a monkey
8 opinions for Ummm, Professor? Do I Have To Know This?
Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer
Jun 27, 2007 at 1:12 pm
When I was a TA in grad school, we had a lab class where we grad students on their spelling and grammar when they turned work in. This was always met with anger: this is a science class! they would say.
And then I would say, yes, it is, and if you cannot report your results clearly and well, no one will take you seriously. That sometimes would shut them up. I found that those who complained the loudest were the ones who never took the time to check to make sure that what they wrote made any sense at all.
Astrogeek
Jun 27, 2007 at 1:15 pm
eye allwus tri two writ kleerly
Astrogeek
Jun 27, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I like this obvious tongue-in-cheek:
“Nevertheless. we acknowledge that a few per cent of the 200 Earths that Kepler is expected to find may be erroneous, and we urge travellers to confirm their hotel reservations directly before setting out to visit one of them. [J. Caldwell and W. Borucki, Bull. AAS 31, 1077, 1999]”
Tony
Jun 27, 2007 at 3:12 pm
@AstroGeek: I know, even Bill couldn’t resist putting this tongue-in-cheek comment in one of his papers:
” Three out of four Seyferts surveyed prefer the brighter pair member. [Keel, Astronomical Journal 111, 696, 1996; I couldn’t quite resist]”
Still, there is some bad science presentations out there (both in paper form and in talks). I remember going to an AGU meeting and seeing a presenter put up a powerpoint slide of a graph, no axis labels, no units, nothing.
The graph was a scatter-plot with a line drawn through it. The line being a linear fit to the ‘data’. Clearly, there was no correlation between the fit and the dots, so I laughed out loud thinking it was a joke.
No one else was laughing and the presenter scowled at me. Apparently, he thought the data were well represented by the linear fit.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. No axis labels, no units, just dots with a line drawn through it.
@Phil: Excellent point about presenting ideas. The better you can do that, the more attention you’ll garner and the more seriously you’ll be taken.
Even marginal research, well presented, can get lots of serious consideration. Also, the better you can present your ideas to others, the more funding you’re likely to get to pursue them.
Good communication skills, I would argue, are just as important, and in many cases more important, than math or critical thinking skills.
Ed Minchau
Jun 27, 2007 at 5:57 pm
That second “professional” quote concerning the AAS abstract is absolutely unforgivable. The abstract should be the very last thing written for any scientific paper - and the fact that the referees accepted that paper for publication is astounding.
Tony
Jun 27, 2007 at 7:44 pm
@Ed: I couldn’t agree more. It really surprises me what gets past referees. I’ve even heard stories of referees letting a paper be published just so the author’s poor science would give them a black eye! I personally talked to one such referee. I was dumbfounded.
Astrogeek
Jun 27, 2007 at 11:22 pm
I’m disillusioned. Here I thought that the referee’s job was to bounce the crap so that the journal presented only the well thought out and well argued science.
Steve
Nov 30, 2007 at 5:53 pm
AAS abstracts have to be written months out, and are synopses of the content of posters or short talks that will be presented at meetings of the American Astronomical Society. They are not refereed. The quote about the AAS abstract presumably refers to some tentative results that were superseded by the refereed, published paper from which the quote comes.
The goal of refereed papers is always to “bounce the crap” and most referees do a decent job of this. They are only human though, and sometimes things get published that oughtn’t to be. Other scientists who read the journals are harsh critics though and the second stage of peer-review is when other people try to replicate the results (and publish their own papers). This is how science moves forward - you can’t take one paper out of context; it has to be seen in light of the entire scientific literature on a particular subject.
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: