Strings, Rings, and Other Things

I meant to share this earlier (and I don't think I already have), but I've been swamped. I'm still swamped, but I want to close some browser tabs. So here's my fifteen five three and a half minutes of fame in the Alma College student newspaper: Physics professor Jensen receives special recognition for effort inside, outside of classroom; students concur.

This was an award from one of our campus sororities, and I was truly touched when the student who nominated me repeated her nominating speech to the assembled group. She had good things to say about my physics teaching and my dedication to helping her and other students learn the subject and be successful, which was great. But the thing that she really appreciated most was the attention that I have given to women's issues in the classroom: I don't do a whole lot (and for the most part I don't even devote class time to it), but she said that I'm the only male teacher she's ever had (here or at her previous college before she transferred) who ever commented on those topics at all (without it being his actual academic specialty, anyway).

It's a shame that "this guy pays the slightest bit of attention" is enough to merit an award, but if doing my little bit is appreciated that much then I'm awfully glad to keep it up.

On a side note, I have no idea why there's a black and white photo accompanying this online article while the printed newspaper had a color one.

Quite a while ago, I mentioned the "#WowGood2Know" facts that I'd started including with the homework assignments in my intro physics classes; folks seem to like them. Well, this semester I mostly ran out of my existing list of those, and I decided to do something a little different: I shared a slightly longer discussion inspired by a (linked) blog post. That went over pretty well: according to my anonymous midterm course feedback survey, most people were at least a little interested and read what I'd written (even if they didn't usually follow the links), so I kept it up sporadically throughout the semester as I found more relevant links to share. I've now collected all of those discussions onto a web page: "Important Stuff Nobody Thought to Tell You (probably).

If you have a look at that list, you'll find that I wound up focusing on a specific theme: broadly on our social attitudes toward women, and more specifically on sexual violence. I might go further and say that the topic was fundamentally "rape culture", except that I made a point of not using that bit of jargon anywhere (though of course some of the articles I linked to do). I think that every single week that I included one of these discussions on the homework, I had at least one student stop by either after class or at some other time to thank me for drawing attention to these issues and for sharing such thought provoking reading. (A few became downright enthusiastic about what I was doing.) That made me feel awfully glad that I was doing it... and kinda cruddy that the bar was so low.

Not surprisingly (but disappointingly), every single person who gave me that sort of feedback was a woman.