Pedagogy

Out in Australia, a dolphin who spent only a few weeks in captivity around trained dolphins appears to be teaching the females in her wild school to tail walk on water, a behavior that has previously only existed in captive and trained dolphins. Scientists have no idea why this is happening, but it sounds like Billie (the dolphin) came back from an exotic locale as a hipster.

Meanwhile, we are finding that, though apes are great at imitation they do not seem to have a human idea of training/teaching as a necessary activity. It is actually cats who seem to have the most human concept and practices in training the young to hunt and socialize through example and practice.

If you are interested in more literally human pedagogy here is a whole post about grade inflation related to the recent publication of Grade Inflation:Academic Standards in Higher Education.

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. ...

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.

The blog post also has a rant about Harvey Mansfield's whining about grade inflation that caused the web's most prolific blogger to share an awesome story:

I graded for Harvey. I'll never forget the day I brought my grade sheet in, handed it over, and as he looked over it, he glanced up and said, in his inimitable, mischievous whisper:

"Can we turn any of these B-minuses into C-pluses?"

Oh, and more homework doesn't seem to help much of anything, especially math.

Are female professors treat differently than male by their students (we already know departments are guilty of this)? This post is interesting, but I also recommend you read through the comments.