Schadenfreude

Or "hoist with one's own petard"? Dear Chris Woodhead's department at the U of Buckingham has been inspected by Ofsted (hardly worth the effort, with three students...) and got a grade 3!

"Schadenfreude"

(The opposite is "Erfolgstraurigkeit"!)

The Periodic Table as a threshold concept

Having had a discussion last week about the periodic table as a threshold concept in chemistry--which I am sure it must be... Well, that's a lame excuse for publishing this link to an animated version of Tom Lehrer's marvellous setting of "The Elements" (which I will also note on one of my least-visited pages). You will need your speakers on.

Evaluation data for last Saturday

You can now download the basic data from last Saturday's Study Day, in Acrobat format. We hope to undertake more detailed processing shortly. Thanks for the 178 questionnaires returned.

A strange and anomalous result!

You can't please all of the people all of the time? That may indeed be true, but it appears that the two Study Days for Year 2 students have significantly bucked the trend. At the moment we have not yet formally processed the evaluation questionnaires, but the staff review after the event suggested strongly that;

• you found the Study Days useful and stimulating,
• and the theme was helpful--even if you did not stick to it!

Many thanks for your enthusiastic participation and the really positive feel you brought to the proceedings on both days! Do look on BREO for the follow-up material and discussions, and many thanks too to those of you who are posting there.

Clip on Classroom Management

At a recent tutors' meeting, several people mentioned that they had found the following clip to be a useful resource for the discussion of class management;

Health and Safety--a threshold concept?

As we get closer to the second Study Day for second year students, I've posted a short paper offering one answer to the question whether Health and Safety is a threshold concept. I rather surprised myself with the outcome. Given that some Interest Groups have decided to take this topic, I hope you'll find it interesting and it gets you back in the groove for discussing TCs.

Looking forward to seeing you again!

If you can't stand the heat...

In the linked paper I quoted from Meyer and Land (2003) on cooking, and went on to say "Perhaps the fact that I do not find that obvious accounts in some measure for my failings as a cook! Despite the reference to the physical equations about heat transfer, there is no suggestion that it has to be "understood" at that academic level."

Well—look here! "The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen" is a great bite-size exposition from the New York Times of a couple of days ago.

It worked for me, in terms of understanding what is going on (better in fact than Heston Blumenthal's (2006) In search of perfection London; Bloomsbury ; always reference correctly even when the source is downright silly, as this one is!)

Since somehow I am on to that... Implicit in Blumenthal's title is a (tongue-in-cheek) assumptions that there is a definitive version of several classic recipes. But the point of all of them is that they are themes around which there are countless variations; that is what makes them classics (we're not necessarily talking haute cuisine here; he has chapters on roast chicken, fish and chips, bangers and mash...).

Question, folks! How do Blumenthal's recipes relate to learning how to cook?

Several years ago, we had a really good student who taught cooking. (As I write that I become aware that he taught chefs. It's not the same thing. But he did not teach "catering", because he was really keen on the hands-on skills of cooking--but on a large scale.) However! I vividly remember him telling me that his principal problem was getting his trainees to eat what they cooked. Often they did not want to taste it! What was the threshold concept for his students?