Brain hurts

[a_t_rain]

Hypothesis: Sexual orientation is influenced by environment; thus making it a choice as opposed to being a genetic disposition.

... Well, all right, I guess the student didn't say whose choice she thought it was, but I don't think she meant the parents. If you're gonna come up with a hypothesis that spectacularly fails the "specific and falsifiable" test, you might at least strive for a bit of internal logic...

Have I mentioned yet how much I HATE the "Writing in the Sciences" unit?

Comments

[neigedens.livejournal.com]

Have I mentioned yet how much I HATE the "Writing in the Sciences" unit?

It doesn't sound very nice. I'm in the Average/Stoopid Science class, and as a sophomore we had to write one (!) essay all year. (It was about chickens, which are just fascinating creatures, you know.) I've a feeling when I get to college I'm going to have hell with the subject. And I bet teaching it is about as fun. Ugh.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

It's idiotic. First of all, 95% of the people who teach this class are ENGLISH grad students (with a smattering of refugees from the comp lit, foreign language, and communications departments). We don't KNOW anything about science. We haven't received any special training in preparation for this class. The vast majority of us are not qualified to teach it. (Well, all right, I do know your hypothesis shouldn't look like that, and experiments are supposed to have controls, and you're supposed to describe your methods in enough detail so that other people can replicate them. After reading some of these papers, I'm confident that this is more than the students know -- but since we've been going over this stuff in class for two weeks, I'm evidently a total failure at teaching it.)

And "Writing Across the Disciplines" is a required course for all freshmen, which is doubly stupid, because most of them are never going to have the slightest reason to write about anything in the sciences in their lives. Sure, there are course distribution requirements*, but I took Bio for Non-Majors once too, and I don't remember having to do any writing.

* While I'm ranting, I would like to say that distribution requirements are equally idiotic. If you're eighteen years old and in college, you should jolly well be able to decide for yourself what you want to study without spending two years sitting through a bunch of dumbed-down-for-the-lowest-common-denominator classes in subjects you have no aptitude for. If you can't manage to figure out which subjects you care about without following somebody else's arbitrary rules, maybe you need to spend some time OUTSIDE of the educational system.

Had better stop before I rant myself out of a job and the university out of two-thirds of its students. (Please, nobody ask me what I think about grades.)

[origamist.livejournal.com]

I am suddenly very grateful that, whenever I will be asked to teach for the benefit of another discipline, I will actually be teaching calculus or linear algebra or DEs, and will not need to know economics or chemistry. I am very sorry this is not the case for you.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear. I almost fell off my chair when I found out American universities had required classes outside of your major. We do have a science writing test that is mandatory, but, oddly enough....only for the science students.

Must say, though: biology does usually require a fair bit of writing.

As for the hypothesis, well, since I'm doing the behavioural ecology unit in my bio class right now I feel qualified to note that many, many behaviours have environmental and genetic components - in fact, most - but no one calls handedness a "choice". Or speech patterns.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I'm actually OK with universities requiring students to take classes outside of their majors. A literature student who has no knowledge of history or foreign languages, for instance, is going to be screwed if she decides to go to grad school. What I really object to is the way first- and second-year students are required to take classes from all over the curriculum, regardless of aptitude, interest, and relevance. I don't see the point of requiring a political science major to take a random fine arts course, a random literature course, and a random lab science merely because it satisfies some administrator's idea of "well-roundedness." Let them choose their own out-of-major courses, and they're far more likely to come up with something that is interesting and useful to them.

I thought the system that we had at my old college was good (although they've sadly changed it now). There were a couple of general distribution requirements, but they weren't burdensome and you could easily get them out of the way in one semester. There was also a "sequence requirement," which meant you had to take a couple of introductory courses and two higher-level ones in a subject outside of your field -- e.g. four courses in one of the social sciences or natural sciences if you were a humanities major. That sort of system lets students pursue a subject that genuinely interests them, and it gives them some continuity and something to build on.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Possibly I misphrased myself; we can't only take subjects from our major, and it's encouraged to, say, take a couple of arts papers if you're a science major, but your major classes are the only ones you _have_ to take. Unless you're an engineering student, in which case all your classes are mandatory and your education is incredibly narrow.

The continuity thing is sort of mandated into degree structure - you have to take a certain number of papers above first year, which pretty much guarantees you will have a secondary major or a minor. For instance, I know a lot of people who are majoring in bio and minoring (doing second year and maybe one third year paper) in geology. But Kiwi unis have a general dislike of mandating more than the minimum. Not sure why.

[(Anonymous)]

The system in England is very different. Pupils do perhaps 8 or 10 subjects to the age of 16, then specialise to 4 at 17 and 3 at 18. Then off to university.

When I was at university [which was, to be fair, a long time ago], you did only the one subject and nothing else. So if you were reading physics, that was it. Nothing else. There might have been classes in say maths, but only the maths essential to your course. I think things have changed a little, but not that much in the interim.

Easleyweasley

[ressie-noldo.livejournal.com]

Came here for the fanfic and ended up sniggering helplessly at some of your students.

If you're not a science person, it might be a bit...odd trying to write in it, but one is meant to have the rudiments of brain cells...

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the saving grace of the science unit is that much of it does involve common sense and transferrable skills, like reading sources with a critical eye. On the other hand, I have yet to figure out how to teach common sense.

[dharmavati.livejournal.com]

Oy. I pity you. I'd hate to see what these students would be "hypothesizing" about evolution....

[catkind.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm being stupid, but I don't see what's so heinous. They've made a couple of obvious mistakes, in particular the word choice (though I don't entirely see what I'd substitute for it). I'd turn the first sentence around and have "uninfluenced" as the null hypothesis, and scrap the second. You'd need to track down an awful lot of identical twins separated at birth, but I guess sociologists have databases of these things.

I always think you learn best by making mistakes. As long as they understand what their mistake was when you tell them...

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Well, to my mind, the idea that sexual orientation is a product of the environment and the idea that it's a choice flat-out contradict each other, but perhaps that's in the eye of the reader, I don't know. It's also possible that my perception of her hypothesis is colored by the rest of her paper, because...

You'd need to track down an awful lot of identical twins separated at birth, but I guess sociologists have databases of these things.

Unfortunately, that wasn't what the student was planning to do. Her proposed experiment involved recruiting 90 randomly selected people, giving them a survey that consisted of about ten questions along the lines of "What sort of toys did your parents give you when you were a child?" and seeing if there were any significant differences between the responses from gay and straight people. (It seems not to have occurred to her that you'd be lucky to get ten non-heterosexuals in your pool of subjects with this procedure, or that every set of responses would probably be unique.)

[catkind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the word choice is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what you would actually use as a converse for genetic. Choice is at least one of the other alternatives, not diametrically opposite. (Apparently one of the latest theories is that it is in fact connected to pre-natal environment, so my experiment wouldn't work either.)

It does rather sound like your student is trying to gather some anecdotal evidence not conduct an experiment. Also, on the assumption that parents are going to give their kids the sort of toys they're going to like playing with, indeed, bad plan.

Though I guess it would be interesting to know whether people's taste in toys is different if they're going to be gay in later life - not convinced it would be.

It's depressing that there are so many toys that can be clearly divided into "for boys" and "for girls" - I think it might even be possible to formulate that question properly and get a statistic of some kind.

I guess having spent the last semester trying to teach stats to among others student sports teachers I'm accustomed to expect not only logical nonsense, but also logical nonsense without any thought or originality applied, copied off their mate. /exaggeration

[snorkackcatcher]

I intended to comment, but happily catkind said most of what I was going to say much more succintly than I would have. :)

The survey proposal you mention is unfortunate, but I suspect most arts students wouldn't have a very good grasp of the numbers (yes, that's my prejudices coming out, I suppose). And to be honest, you see reports in the newspapers of equally crap methodologies from professional researchers!

I presume the "environment => choice" thing is the same sort of idea as "does poverty make you more likely to choose to be a criminal?". In both cases, the common-sense answer is "well, duh". In fact, if you adopt the position that "sexuality is a spectrum and no-one is 100% straight or gay!", it's true almost by definition. I'm not sure that argument would please partisans of either side, mind you.

The course balancing system you mention sounds unfortunate - in the UK I'd say it's not so common at university level (or even in the last two years of school, although that I think i changing). Generally it's a three-year degree and you specialise right from the start, and although you get a choice of courses, they're generally courses within your speciality. We had to take one compulsory course outside of computer science when I was an undergrad (second-year, out of 12 courses, that year only counted for 25%), and although you could take another elective in the final year few people did. (I cheated slightly by taking a maths course in second year which I reckoned I could do pretty much on what I knew from school, although it turned out to be more work than I expected!)