Jessica Watkins's blog

Improving education in the United States is no small task; articulating its importance and convincing the masses that the classroom is owed a much-needed makeover are chores no less great.  We owe it to our children to better the environment in which they grow and learn, squeezing themselves into tiny plastic chairs until they graduate to “big kid” desks and the wealth of knowledge that arrives magically with them.  Whether or not American education can squeeze out of its predicament (sinking test scores, a lack of dedicated teachers, students that are anything but inspired or encouraged) while maintaining a positive attitude about the future is up for debate—must we acknowledge the current status of education as a “problem,” or just something that can simply be improved?&#160

My experience working with Professor Grobstein, Wil Franklin and my two Bryn Mawr colleagues, Kate Gould and Jenna Pfeiffer, has been nothing short of unique and satisfying.  It's a delightfully strange feeling to be sitting a mere floor above where my biology class met three times a week last semester; it's even stranger that I'm sitting here learning at my own pace, deciding what I find interesting and making connections between topics that I've never thought about before.

Below is an article I wrote for my college newspaper, The Bi-College News, about religion/spirituality and its impact on professors in a liberal arts college environment.  The article was part of a larger pullout section on religion and spirituality in general on Bryn Mawr and Haverford College's campuses. I cannot link to the article because the newspaper's website is being renovated, so I will copy and paste it from a word document. This is the pre-editing version, so it has changed slightly, but the vast majority of it is the same.

“Outside the Classroom: A Look at Professors and Religion”

We've been distinguishing (or trying to break the distinction) between "science" and "English" minds, assuming that these are the two main categories when it comes to learning and thinking.  Religion has the potential to be lumped into the "English" mind category because it is seen as the opposite of what is traditionally considered "scientific," or logical.  Religion has stereotypcally been considered the antithesis of science, placing beliefs in gods that cannot be readily seen or measured, put under a microscope or processed in a mass spectrometer.  As a religious person the deeper I look, the more I begin to associate religion with the "science" mind.

The concept of "getting it less wrong" is prevalent throughout Serendip, and apparently has been of interest outside this forum's world as well (thank you, jpfeiffer, for the website!).

Having taken a class where Serendip was used extensively, I see many parallels between it and this course.  My Serendip experience began in a Literature course (much different than this Neurobiology course--or is it?) and consisted of many of the same features as Professor Grobstein's class: extensive discussion on the Serendip forum, online class notes with contributions by students who had commented in said forum, and web papers commented on by the professor himself.

‘The Three Doors of Serendip’ invites ideas about much more than its designed purpose, to explore the Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD).  The visuals used in the exhibit are thought provoking; the applets are a wonderful way to bring readers into the world of thinking, guessing and understanding (however, the applet found on the Achieving Broader Understanding page does not work, a logistical glitch that overall doesn’t affect the quality of the exhibition or its message).
    

Playing at this website.

Playing at the "Easy" Level:

5/24/10

Spent 27 minutes on one puzzle. I found myself having to focus very hard on what I was doing, and once I got distracted (even if just for a second) it was very hard to get back into the game.  Not sure if this is because I am a Sudoku newcomer or my attention span is waning.  Time will tell!

5/25/10

29 minutes?? I blame lack of sleep. But such a satisfying win.

 5/26/10

3 puzzles, all solved: 12:37, 9:53, and 14:19 minutes! Much better than previous days.

5/27/10

My experience with education has been very little—and by that I mean the size of the actual schools.

I’ve never been one for large institutions where it is easy to slip through the cracks.  I started small and stuck with it.  First a tiny Catholic school with an eighth grade graduating class of almost thirty.  Then, a private college preparatory high school with almost sixty graduating.  And here I am now, at a college boasting less students than most large high schools have in one grade level.  In terms of numbers I’ve progressed, but I often wonder whether I paid a big price for these small favors.  
    

After reading through four papers from the Bryn Mawr College Biology course Neurobiology and Behavior (found under "Starting Points"), it struck me how much humans and human interaction has to do with the world of science, particularly that of neuroscience.  Science is largely seen as a vast expanse where cold, hard facts and calculations reign supreme while creative juices dry up.  Scientists are not perceived as human, or even capable of feeling emotion regarding what they are studying. However, these papers demonstrated that science can apply to infinite numbers of traditionally "nonscientific" fields. Language, religion and racial profiling are just a few.