I was honored to be asked to be one of the many speakers this year at the Highland Park High School Science and Technology Fest. HPHS is just about a mile from SMU. I had the pleasure of giving a peek at the life of a particle physicist on the […]
Faculty Life
50 posts
Course evaluations are imperfect (in a different way, of course, grades are an imperfect measure of student potential). Students evaluating professors is fraught with peril in both directions. That said, there is immense social value in course evaluations, and a professor who doesn’t read their course evaluations or, even better, […]
When I arrived at SMU in 2009, I was not a teacher. I was a researcher. Unfortunately, it has been common in our field to leave people unprepared for the teaching environment. When I was in graduate school, there either were no classes in, or no one advised me to […]
Four of us stood in the lobby of the La Fonda Hotel. The beautiful space sits just off the main square in Santa Fe. You could almost feel the ghosts of the Manhattan Project walk past as people now sat, perhaps unaware, reading papers, waiting for friends, eating in the […]
Any person with a minimum sufficient experience in life has been rewarded with failure. A subset of those people, with sufficient practice, will come to recognize failure, not as a friend, but as a teacher. A recent useful (and ultimately harmless) failure in my class became a key teaching moment, […]
Tomorrow, my spring teaching begins. Again, I am teaching “Introductory Mechanics” (PHYS 1303), our 1st-semester introductory physics course. Inspired by the Marvel Studios movies, the theme this semester is “ASSEMBLE!” Enjoy my little fan art below. Many thanks to my undergraduate teaching assistants, and course veterans: Chase, Lauren, and Andrew!
The summer of 2018 was both predictable and unexpected. As I began reflecting on this past summer, now that teaching is nearly upon me again, I came to find numbers that represented its many aspects. I want to share some of those numbers with you, and the meaning behind them. […]
Faculty often have a lot to complain about when it comes to course evaluations. A significant body of literature suggests that course evaluations tell us little, as instructors, about the actual effect a course has had in achieving its goal (e.g. imparting a subject to a group of students). However, […]
What an incredible week. Not only was the weather a strange cycle of “uncomfortably hot” and “beautifully cool”, but the sheer pace of work this week was blinding. There was time to relax a little, too, as when the weekend came I had dinner with an SMU alumna and […]
This was a glorious week at CERN. Being away from the United States for a little while, in place that is both host to the complications of international cooperation and a reminder of how things can actually be when people of different nations cooperate well, has been an out-of-body experience […]
I’ve decided to use my blog to reflect on my summer research activities as they unfold. I find such reflection not only useful for thinking about what is accomplished and what is not, but also to communicate to an audience some of the aspects of the research life of a […]
I’ve run silent for months. Why? I had the time and energy for only a finite number of things, and none of them were writing. This semester hit like a freight train. In addition to trying to maintain something resembling a home life, there was a fragmented faculty life with […]