You may be aware that November 1-6 is ‘Vaccine Awareness Week’ (a reminder from Darcy, over at SciBlogs, prompted my previous post.). Those who originally gave the week this label are actually strongly-antivaccines, so all the more reason for some science-based discussion around it as well 🙂
Continue readingAs a child, in the 1920s, my mother contracted polio. It left her with little in the way of the muscle at the base of her right thumb, and her right calf muscle was much smaller than the left. At about the same time my friend Dorothy (who fairly obviously wasn’t my friend at the […]
Continue readingI spent yesterday up in Auckland, running a schol bio preparation day. (And thanks to Mike, Cindy, BEANZ & the Auckland Science Teachers Association) for setting it up.) I do enjoy these sessions (& hopefully the students do too!) as I like the interactions with students & they always ask nice, challenging questions. Anyway, after we’d finished the […]
Continue readingProminent creationist Ray Comfort once (in)famously commented that the ‘design elements’ that make up a banana, including its so-convenient shape, are evidence for the existence of a Designer. A comment that has been pretty resoundingly debunked – unsurprisingly, since the banana-as-we-know-it is due in large part to the hand of man, selecting for those features […]
Continue readingI rather like the way music & science seem to come together quite often these days 🙂 That thought bubbled to the top after I ran a pre-exam tutorial for my first-year bio students. After a couple of hours we’d all pretty much run out of oomph, so I thought that a bit of light […]
Continue readingBecause I used to be a secondary-school teacher (rather more than a few years ago now) & also because I interact a lot with school teachers, I’m following that sector’s current pay negotiations with quite a bit of interest. One of the conditions that the teachers’ unions have placed on the table is the issue […]
Continue readingI had a great time down in Hawkes Bay over the weekend, running a Schol Bio workshop for teachers & students from the local schools. I really enjoy these sessions as I get to catch up with the teachers & to work with some very talented young people, who can be guaranteed to ask me […]
Continue readingA couple of days ago I was sent a copy of Inspired by Science (Bull et al. 2010) – a paper written ‘to encourage debate on how better to engage students with science’ which focuses particularly on what’s going on in our schools. It also asks ‘whether there is an increasing mismatch between science education of […]
Continue readingThe government’s Tertiary Education Strategy makes it clear that New Zealand needs to continue to develop a well-educated workforce, and that one of the priorities within this is to support high quality research that helps to drive innovation. So it’s fair to say that a fair proportion of that workforce needs to be employed in areas based on science, […]
Continue readingWell, it’s Sunday, & time for something different. Very different…
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