Updating my questions to students asking for letters of recommendation

This is not an original idea of mine, but I wanted to share what my process is for writing letters of recommendation for students. When a student asks for a letter, I send them a standard set of questions to fill out so that I can write the best letter possible. For many students, I don't need extra information, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find out that students I thought I knew well had additional things I could write about which I learned about through this process.

I'm sure that I stole the basic list of questions that I ask students to answer to help me jumpstart my letter writing process - but I can't seem to remember who I stole it from. If you're out there, let me know - and THANK YOU.

This year I'm explicitly putting in the top two required questions so that I can have a much better handle on the letter requests. Last year there were some letters that I sent way too late because I wasn't aware of the deadlines and I had assumed (mistakenly) that the students asking for the letters would at a minimum inform me of the deadlines.

This is the standard text I send to the student asking for a letter:

The following two questions are required, and I need to hear back on them as soon as possible:
 When does this letter need to be submitted?  (In other words, what is my deadline?)
 What is the method of delivery of the letter?  I need a web link, or email address, or a postal address to send the letter to.  I cannot hand the letter to you in most cases.
 The following questions are not required, but will be helpful to me in best writing a letter for you. Answer as many as you think are relevant:
 1.)  What do you think you have demonstrated in my classes that I should praise? (Think about your contributions/performance during class/lab – how did your contributions make the class community better?)
2.)  How have you demonstrated independence, initiative, responsibility and maturity in my class?
3.)  What is your intended field of study or work? What is your experience in your intended field? (Classes/workshops/jobs have you had related to what you are trying to go into?)
4.)  Was anything in my class or classes particularly challenging or eye-opening?
5.)  What was your favorite topic/chapter/unit/project that we did or discussed in class? Why?
6.)  Is there anything specific that you want me to address in my letter?

Slides and supplementary material from my CS-AAPT presentation

I presented the lab we recently did in class at the Chicago Section AAPT Spring meeting.  The lab was another one of my "single-sentence labs" which basically came down to:

"Measure the capacitance of a aluminum foil parallel plate capacitor as you vary the separation of the plates by using your textbook."

That may be more detailed than what I actually wrote on the board in class, or it might be less detailed.  I don't really remember.

All we did in this lab was make a capacitor by putting sheets of foil inside the physics textbook and measure the capacitance with multimeters that we had in the storeroom. The meters had the ability to measure capacitance. We were measuring capacitance in the nano-Farad range.

I thought the lab was a great learning opportunity for the students and for me, so I wanted to share that with other physics teachers.  I got a request for the materials and lab instructions that I used for the lab.  Since I do "single-sentence labs" there really isn't a set of lab instructions to share, but I put together my notes from what we did after the first time through the lab.

Here are the slides for my presentation with some extra notes added.

Here are the notes I used in class for discussing aspects of uncertainties in measurement.

Thanks to @DrDawes for the suggestion of the lab!  I'd love feedback from anyone who does this lab (or similar) since I plan to do this again in future semesters.

Traditional physics teaching is not always a virtue, but neither is being an arrogant physicist

(This turned out to be a lot longer than I expected it to be. The tl;dr version is that I agree that creativity in physics classrooms is important, but I disagree with much of the narrative of the Physics Today commentary by Ricardo Heras.)

In his Physics Today letter "Commentary: How to teach me physics: Tradition is not always a virtue" Ricardo Heras lays out all the ways in which he believes his first two years of undergraduate study have been a disappointment. He feels his professors focused too much on textbook problem solving, that he was overwhelmed with the workload which forced him to resort to memorize equations, and that the first two years had no room at all for creativity.

First, I'd like to say that it was pretty bold of Mr. Heras to characterize the entire University College of London department of physics and astronomy as a group of faculty which discourages students from engaging in deep learning and understanding of physics and to make that characterization in one of the most widely read magazines by physicists around the world. I wish him well in his last two years at UCL if he is intending to remain there. It's also a pretty bold claim to make that your creativity was stifled when in addition to the Physics Today letter, you had three manuscripts (1, 2, 3) published in the European Journal of Physics as well as one publication in a journal called New Astronomy. (I know nothing about the last journal.) I mean, every physicist has at one time in their life been accused of being arrogant, but you don't need to go out of your way to do so before finishing your undergraduate studies.

That is not to say that his experiences were not real or that his opinions do not matter. As an instructor of physics, I know full well the value of feedback that I can receive from students. I also know what feedback is meaningful and what to ignore. (Also, I know when students are hitting up the thesaurus to write a lab report. "Vicissitudes"? Really? Anyway....) But to address his points and taking them at face value, I would agree that:

1.) problem solving alone is not enough to learn physics and that
2.) we need to make more room in our curriculum for encouraging creativity

A surface reading of the commentary would yield little to disagree with.  Let's dig a bit deeper, though.

Mr. Heras quotes Feynman many times in this brief letter: five times he quotes Feynman by my count, he has two other quotes which are about Feynman and he has one quote from Noam Chomsky. Of the two main scholars he discusses (Feynman and Chomsky) both are sometimes put on pedestals, rightly or wrongly, as examples of the Lone Genius. This is not the first time that Mr. Heras has discussed his belief in the importance of physics as an individualistic pursuit. When that letter appeared in Physics Today, there was a bit of discussion online including this post at Scientific American and this response by Chad Orzel.  Both of the responses presented a more nuanced view of the history and present physics research environment; a nuance that comes, I will add, with the experience of being immersed in the physics community.

If he cares about physics education,  he should be engaging with the physics education community, which is generally not well represented in Physics Today.  Mr. Heras seems to care more about engaging with the physics community without bothering to learn about physics education reforms of the past ~40 years. On the one hand, he publishes in the European Journal of Physics (which has a mission similar to the American Journal of Physics), and he knows quite a bit about what he has published. I read the papers on the Lorentz Transformation that he authored, and there is little doubt that the physics contained within is solid. But, as evidenced by his reply to a critique of one his papers he does not show an awareness of the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach these topics to students seeing them for the first time. A real irony of all of his complaining about "traditional" physics instruction (with the rote problem solving methodology) is that the type of physics he is most interested in are the highly theoretical mathematical branches of physics, which lends itself naturally to solving some intense textbook problems.

For another example, see the special course he taught last summer on Classical Electrodynamics and Symmetry principles in Maxwell’s Equations. He claims that "Electrodynamics is a very exciting subject to learn. Unfortunately, Maxwell’s equations...are often taught in a rather dull manner, which usually involves solving a lot of mostly uninteresting problems without emphasizing the pivotal role symmetry principles play..."  The class is described as appropriate for advanced undergrads and beginning graduate students. The recommended textbooks include EM books by Griffiths, Jackson, and Schwinger, among others! And this is supposed to be a summer course? I find it hard to believe that this course can be successful in helping more

He points out that he learned more by pursuing a topic he was interested in than by calculating the electric field of a spherical charge. Yet he shows little awareness of WHY students are asked to pursue simple models such as spherical charge configurations. (It's baffling to me, for example that someone so enamored with special relativity would not see the usefulness of exploring the electric field of a charge configuration). In my classes I am constantly reminding students to ask themselves what they learn by doing the problems we choose.  Some of our best students are limited by what they are not even aware that they don't know - developing metacognitive skills is a critical part of a student's growth which does not show up in any physics syllabus, yet is important for reaching full potential as a physics major.

Mr. Heras is probably not a typical physics student. He spent some of his pre-college years teaching himself physics. I have no way of knowing how firm his conceptual understanding of basic physics concepts was before starting his university studies. But I have met several students through my teaching career who were honors students and had tried teaching themselves advanced physics before getting to college. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this, but occasionally the student has to un-learn some wrong ideas they thought they knew before getting to my class. It may be possible that the "time crunch of the heavy course load" Mr. Heras experienced was exacerbated by having to undo some misconceptions that he carried into those classes. But more importantly, students that have spent so much time before starting college learning physics do not represent the vast majority of college physics students. It is unreasonable to call out the physics professors for not tailoring their classes to a single student's preferred methods of learning on the

I have some additional thoughts about the context of a few of the Feynman quotes that he included in the letter, but I feel like I've already said plenty.

I feel bad for any student who has a disappointing experience learning physics. But every day is an opportunity to engage in learning and being creative. He has some valid points, but I feel that he is not representative of the vast, vast, vast majority of physics students in the first two years, nor does he have the experience or knowledge of current physics classroom techniques to be criticizing how physics is typically taught.

Calc III and me - still thinking about what I learned.

I have an idea for a series of posts where I write down all the stories that I end up repeating frequently to my students.  At the encouragement of @profnoodlearms on twitter, I'm writing down a story that I tell my students (and sometimes colleagues) based on an experience I had as an undergrad taking a math class at the University of Northern Iowa.  Here it goes:

Calc III was the first math class where I needed to copy down everything the prof wrote on the board. It was the second math class I took in When I got to class on the first day, the professor walked in and started to fill up the blackboards with notes. Seeing boards filled multiple times wasn't what was new to me. What was new was that I was in a math class, and the notes had as many full sentences as there were equations. In a one hour class, the professor probably filled four sets of full-sized boards at least three times.

That first week, I just wrote down a few things that I thought were important. I was trying to use the strategy of listening closely, paying attention to what I thought were the most important points and writing those down in addition to anything that didn't make sense. I felt that strategy was compatible with how I had previously learned math, so I figured it should work for Calc III as well.

There was a quiz at the end of the first week. I got the quiz back on Monday of week 2. When I saw how poorly I did, I thought to myself: “Message received!” I changed my note-taking and studying habits. I immediately started copying down EVERYTHING that the professor put on the board. My hand was hurting with the amount of writing I was doing. But, the changes I made in class and in studying paid off. I did much better on later quizzes and exams.

A week or two before finals I was waiting for class to start and I overheard two students talking behind me. “I haven’t been to class for awhile. What’s going to be on the final?” one asked. The other said, “I don’t know, I haven’t been here for awhile either.” I was blown away. I could not comprehend missing a single class and being able to keep up, yet somehow these other students felt they could miss several classes in a row.

By the end of the semester, when I heard that conversation between the other two students, I realized that I was thankful the professor had made it clear I needed to study from the start of the term. It forced me to keep up right from the beginning of the term.  I also learned (in retrospect -- I didn't appreciate it at the time) that sometimes you have to adjust your study and learning habits in order to be successful. The sooner you can make that realization the better off you will likely be.

When I relate this story to colleagues, I have two main points that I think are important:

1.) There is value in giving an assessment and getting it back to the class as soon as possible. Students will have a chance to realize they need to adjust their studying sooner rather than later.

2.) When colleagues talk about how students today don't study as hard as they did in their undergrad years, I point out that probably when they were in class there were more students like the ones I overheard than students who were as studious as they were. After all, we are the ones who became faculty.

So that's it!  Part 1 of N in a series of stories I often tell my classes or colleagues.  Now all I need is a catchy name for this series...

Day 11 - PHYS 201 and PHYS 110; A favorite physics puzzle

Last Thursday was Day 11 in Physics 201. We have wrapped up discussing vectors, so the next topic is projectile motion. To start this topic, we got out the ballistic cart apparatus and had the class investigate: traveling on a horizontal track vs. on an inclined track AND dropping the ball vs. launching the ball from the cart.

This is one of my favorite physics puzzles to explore in introductory physics. I heard at least two groups talk about how their trial "didn't work right" because the cart caught the ball when it was going down the incline.  So, they made the angle larger and then tried again - and again were surprised when the cart caught the ball. Great investigation technique here by the students - now we have to work on the analysis.

In Physics 110 we finished up talking about the first five conceptual objectives - including talking about homework questions and practice assessment questions. In terms of new material - we defined longitudinal and transverse motion of coupled oscillating systems. In the previous class we had the air table out (no photos) but this day we used the PhET simulation to explore coupled oscillators:

Click to Run

We also got out the snaky springs to discuss basic wave behavior.  Working as pairs, the class explored the following ideas:

• A wave pulse, showing the transfer of energy.
• Reflection of wave pulses
• Transverse vs. longitudinal
• Frequency
• Wavelength
• Speed
• Wave speed depends on the media.
• Interference.
• Standing waves.
• Generation of harmonics.

Day 10 - PHYS 201

Today in Physics 201 we finished discussing all the TIPERs related to vectors.  One of the questions involved considering the orientation of the coordinate system.  We had good class discussions about that question.

Also, I shared my version of the "Problem Solving Process" including this poster hanging in the front of the room:

I guess it is clear that I'm not a graphical designer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Day 9 - PHYS 201 and PHYS 110

What happened to Day 8?  I forgot and the Labor Day holiday happened, that's what. :/ (Last class was starting vectors, finishing the intro to coding, and doing the first assessment.)

Today in Physics 201 we started vectors in the 8:00 am section and got both sections going with the nTIPERs related to vectors.  I used the PhET simulation for vector addition to get the discussion going, then turned the class loose on the nTIPERs.

Here's one student's artwork with the sim:

I like it!

In the 10:00 am section we had a bit of time to discuss misconceptions from last weeks assessment.  I showed some photos of answers given by students on the assessment.  Surprisingly to me, the students self-identified their own work.  I hope the discussion was positive and productive.

In Physics 110 we looked at coupled oscillators, including getting out the air table for looking at pucks and springs coupled together.  We also finished the work with the IOlab devices and measuring the spring constant with them.  We finished up class by doing some end-of-chapter problems from the first two chapters. First assessment in this class will be next Tuesday.

Onward!

Day 7 - PHYS 201

Today in Physics 201 the 8:00am section finished up the TST activities and then did some nTIPERs related to the 1-D motion.

In the 10:00am section we looked at python for the first time.  I stole material from Rhett Allain's introduction to coding - starting with the class looking at constant velocity and constant acceleration motion.  We used trinket.io, which I think I'm going to stick with as long as possible.  Here's the code we started with:

One note - there was a bit of trouble running the code on the classroom laptops. I'm not sure if it is becuase we use Internet Explorer or because I chose to use GlowScript instead of straight python. I'll need to look at this more.

Day 6 - PHYS 201 and PHYS 110

Today in Physics 201 we continued with the TST activities from yesterday.  The 8:00am section started them, and the 10:00am section finished them.  In the 10:00am section we did a few more TIPERs after completing the lab activity.

In Physics 110 we looked at the data from the PhET simulation. Students were shown how to plot force vs. stretch distance. The goal I was heading for was developing the idea of a spring constant and Hooke's Law  I wanted to try to make the analysis more real to try to illustrate what we are trying to measure.  So I had this set up (thanks to our awesome lab prep staff!) in the lab:

Springs with identical hanging masses.

The springs all had the same masses hanging from them, thus the same force.  Students easily understood that the spring with the least amount of stretch was the hardest (in terms from the PhET simulation) and the spring with the largest stretch was the softest spring.  We will follow up on Thursday to see how the understanding is progressing.

Day 5 - PHYS 201

(Day late...oops.)

Today in Physics 201 we got the 8:00 am section caught up with the calculus-based derivations of the kinematic equations.  The 10:00 am section asked some questions from the homework which led right into the "Tools for Scientific Thinking" activities which involve students walking in front of the motion detectors.  We only do the first 3 of these activities.  With some encouragement and bit of pushing, most of the groups got through the first two activities in a little over an hour.

Students working on the "Tools for Scientific Thinking" activities.

A better way to give practice problems?

Is it better to do traditional physics problems...or would there be value in structuring problems so that the answer is stated in the problem?

For example, when I think of a "traditional" physics problem, I think of something that looks like this:

If air resistance is negligible, determine the maximum height (above its release point) of a ball that is thrown straight upward which is in the air for a total of 3.0 seconds. 

But, what if the problem were stated more like this:

Show that when air resistance is negligible, a ball thrown straight up that is in the air for 3.0 seconds reaches a maximum height of 11 meters above its release point.

In my mind, the second version explicitly puts emphasis on the process and the reasoning behind the process, whereas the traditional problem naturally emphasizes the answer to the question.  I can see this way being done in the classroom setting, for homework practice as well as assessment purposes.

What am I missing here?  Why isn't this done for intro physics classes?

Embedding PDFs in a LaTeX file

Have you ever wanted to embed a PDF inside a larger LaTeX document?  For my "Book of Infinite Learning" I wanted to embed a copy of two different journal articles.  I didn't want to just grab the text and redo the layout of the articles.

Fortunately, there is a LaTeX way to do this.  Here are the commands I used:

\newgeometry{left=3cm,bottom=0.01cm,right=0.01cm}
\includepdf[pages=-, fitpaper=true]{filename.pdf}
\restoregeometry

The heavy lifting is done by the \includepdf command from the pdfpages package.  Read up on the options for that command if you don't want to use all the pages in the file.

What really made my day was the ability to change the margins for my LaTeX document for just the PDFs I wanted to embed.  Using \newgeometry I can specify smaller margins for these pages, since the PDF already has plenty of margin spacing.  Then \restoregeometry reverts back to the document margins.

I'm very happy with how this turned out.

Do you know about booklet printing?

I need to make a confession. I may have a problem.

I'm addicted to booklet printing. 

 

Last Spring at the start of the term I was fretting about whether to give paper copies of my syllabus or stick only with the online version. 

I may be kidding myself, but I am trying to use a well-formatted layout for the syllabus so that it is easy and welcoming to read. I know not all students will read it, but I want to remove as many barriers as possible. 

The real issue was the page count. I had 80 students and an 8-page syllabus to hand out. Even double-sided, that's a lot. 

Enter booklet printing. 

It's an option on Adobe Acrobat to print foldable booklets. That puts four pages on a single sheet of paper. What's that? You don't want to hand out super small booklets made on standard sheets of paper? Print on legal paper - then each page is 8.5" by 7". 

I do TIPER packets this way and other random handouts that I create for my classes. Now practically everything is booklet printed. We save paper and the multiple sheets are easier to keep together. 

What do you booklet print?

Day 3 - PHYS 201 - No class

(This was supposed to be published yesterday, but I wrote it on the plane home and the on-board wifi wouldn't let me publish it, so it was shoved into a drafts folder.)

We did not have class today because I was at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Technically, the meeting was at the Eisenhower building - which is where the majority of the President's staff work every day.

 

Day 4 - PHYS 201 and PHYS 110

Today in PHYS 201 we connected the motion diagrams to graphs and introduced concepts: position, displacement, average velocity and average acceleration. We also discussed the connection of the slope of a graph and that taking a limit as the time interval becomes small leads to an instantaneous velocity or acceleration. The 10:00 section was able to use calculus to go from a constant acceleration back to an expression for position as a function of time.  That section also got the first packet of nTIPERS.

The PHYS 110 class started by looking at the class data from the previous mini-lab. It was not as clean as I'd hoped, but we talked a bit about variance and uncertainty in data and how to improve that.

Then we followed that discussion up with one of my favorite demos - taking a set of 5 balls of various sizes and masses and challenging the groups to order them by weight.  The key to this demo is that there should be a small steel ball which weighs LESS than a larger foam ball.  Most groups will say the metal ball is the heaviest.  Today there were two groups that said the foam ball was not the lightest, but the other four groups said it was.  Students are amazed to learn the foam ball is the heaviest and the steel ball is less massive than two of the balls (at least) in the set.  It is a dramatic illustration of the body's sensitivity to pressure.

After finishing up the intro to basic physics, we started on Simple Harmonic Motion and got through part of the PHeT demo on Masses and Springs as a mini-lab

Click to Run

The physics of steadicams - a lab idea?

I recently heard a podcast on the design and operation of steadicams by the excellent Stuff You Should Know podcast. The podcast took much of the information from this article: How Steadicams Work | HowStuffWorks.

The part of the article that caught my eye the most was this:

Increasing the object's moment of inertia makes it harder to shake the camera unintentionally. One way to increase the moment of inertia would be to add more weight to the camera system, but this would make things harder for the cameraman. Instead, Garrett Brown decided to take the existing components of the camera and spread them out. This increases the distance between the axis of rotation and the mass of the total camera assembly, making the camera more resistant to rotation.

I wonder if it would be possible to develop a physics demonstration, or better, a lab based on the physics of the steadicam.  I know there are some consumer-grade steadicam mounts, but I'm not sure if those would be useful for a physics lab.

I'm just brainstorming here, but what if there was a lab where students had a goal of developing a steadicam mount for either their phone or a camera that we have in the lab. There might be constraints on the construction or mass of the mount and/or some sort of guidelines on the assessment of the effectiveness of the mount.  Or maybe what would be even better is if students developed their own methods of assessing the effectiveness of the mount.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas related to steadicam physics.

Day 2 - PHYS 201 and PHYS 110

 

Today in Physics 201 we looked at the motion diagrams posted on the New York Times website as an introduction to 1-D motion. 

Then I challenged the class to make their own motion diagrams using a blinking LED on an arduino captured with a long exposure photo. My idea was to use the exercise as way to have a goal, try something out, analyze the results and iterate until reaching the desired outcome. I think it worked all right, but I wish we had more time. 

In Physics 110 we introduced ourselves to each other and then started getting into the basic physics material. I passed out the syllabus and went through that. 

We got all the way through the first "mini-lab" I had set up, which was finding the acceleration of the IOLab carts going down a small ramp. I realized as the class was doing the lab that I have no idea how to save the data. Oops. Going to need to figure that out!  

Day 1 - PHYS 201

Today in PHYS 201 we did this excellent activity which was linked to on twitter.  I'm glad I saw it and tried it out with the classes, because I had run out of time after having the class do the FCI and handing out the syllabus.  Having only 90 minutes each day is going to make each day seem tighter, but I think overall it will be better.

   

Acoustics videos by the Smithsonian's American Museum of Natural History

I only recently discovered that the American Museum of Natural History has a few videos on acoustics.  These videos are short and pretty good. They all have native captions in the videos, which is a great feature.



The above video shows off quite a few historical scientific devices for studying acoustics, but other than mentioning a wave machine, does not really discuss much about the specific devices. My question: how many examples of the devices shown are still being used in labs and classrooms around the world?



The second video in the series is about the concept of waves and the propagation of sound as a wave. Again, the video is short, but the science is solid.


The third video is all about tuning forks. I think the science here is a little less well done, although it is passable for introductory level acoustics.  That said, there's not a whole lot of interesting or relevant science being conveyed in this video. Some interesting history, but that's about it.



The fourth video is about Chladni's demonstration of mode shapes of vibrating plates. This video is really short.


The last video in the series is an introduction to the idea of resonance. Here, I think the science is not great. It's not exactly wrong, but there is no solid explanation or definition of resonance given which gives the impression that the examples cited are two distinct types of resonance. I think I would show this video to my class after our resonance discussion and ask them what they like and don't like about the video.

There are more videos, but they are all demonstrations of the artifacts shown in the above videos. See the playlist here:


Finally, if you want to see more about the devices shown in the videos, there is information on the museum's website.

All my students are getting a book on learning this term

From this past summer's physics teacher camp website, I caught this excellent list of readings on teaching and learning:

https://sites.google.com/site/physicsteachercamp/readings

There was a bit of overlap between this list and a series of articles, infographics and other material that I have compiled into a booklet I am affectionately calling the “Book of Infinite Learning”.  The learning is what is infinite; the book is not.

I compiled all the articles together and printed them in booklet form.  Of course, I have no rights to these articles, so I can't share the books beyond my classroom, but I can share the links to the articles that went into this booklet.

Here’s a partial list of all the articles I’m giving my classes this Fall:

1. How Does the Brain Learn Best? Smart Studying Strategies -  http://bit.ly/brain-learn-best
   This article is from the Mindshift blog on KQED’s website.
   
2. The art of back-of-the-envelope calculations -  http://bit.ly/back-of-envelope
   From FermiLab’s Symmetry Magazine.
   
3. Bigger Gains for Students Who Don’t Get Help Solving Problems - http://bit.ly/bigger-gains
   Another article from the Mindshift blog.
   
4. What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math - http://bit.ly/bad-at-math
   This article is from the incredibly brilliant Math with Bad Drawings blog.  Check it out!
   
5. Failures, Mistakes and Other Learning Tools - http://bit.ly/failures-mistakes
   This is a post from the Adventures with the Lower Level blog. It really spoke to me when I first read it.
   
6. Learning goes through The Land of Confusion - http://bit.ly/land-of-confusion
   Great short piece by Rhett Allain.
   
7. The Key to Science (and Life) Is Being Wrong - http://bit.ly/key-to-science
   From one of the Scientific American blogs.
   
8. Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory - http://bit.ly/divided-attention
   An article from Slate.
   
9. The Big Lie About Student Achievement - http://bit.ly/big-lie
   From Huffington Post.
   
10. Telling You the Answer Isn't the Answer - http://bit.ly/rhett-telling
    Another piece by Rhett Allain.
    
11. Two Common Misconceptions About Learning - http://bit.ly/learning-misconceptions
    Yet another piece on learning by Rhett Allain.
    
12. Confuse Students to Help Them Learn - http://bit.ly/confuse-students
    This piece is from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It highlights Derek Muller’s physics education research work.
    
13. How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning - http://bit.ly/deprogramming-kids
    Another piece from the Mindshift blog.
    
14. Re-reading is inefficient. Here are 8 tips for studying smarter. - http://bit.ly/studyingsmarter
    From Vox.com.  Out of the 8 tips, there are a couple I don’t fully agree with, but the others are really good. The article as a whole is a great discussion starter.
    
15. O Adjunct! My Adjunct! - http://bit.ly/o-adjunct
    From The New Yorker.  Our students need to know about precariat faculty.

As you can see, I have a few favorite sources that I have drawn from over the years - Rhett Allain and the Mindshift blog, especially.  All the articles are things that others have shared with me on twitter over the years.  I'm always excited to get to share them with students - bring on this new term!