WulfTheTeacher

test

2008-10-10T14:48:00.002-04:00

Hey, it looks like the school website filters now allow me to access this from work. Badabing, I've got blog tools.

Hiatus

2006-05-26T22:45:00.000-04:00

In case you can't tell, this blog has become very inactive.

I started it because I was hoping to learn some better teaching skills and practices, but I don't think blogging is a very good method for that. I am still looking for teachers (physics teachers in particular) who share good classroom methods, but I don't think I'll be writing here much over the summer. Just a guess.

In the meantime, I'm still writing on more general topics at AtlasBlogged.

High Schoolers to Declare a Major?

2006-04-12T20:41:00.000-04:00

(this article is cross-posted at AtlasBlogged. Join the discussion there!)

Would it make sense to ask high school students to have more freedom and control over their own studies? I recognize that for most students, one of the worst parts about being in high school is the lack of control over their own curriculum. It really doesn't matter how much you hate math, poetry, or phys ed. You are going to take it. Is this paternalism? Or is it a realistic requirement when providing children with an education? To what degree could 13-year old could be expected to map out an education plan for themselves? Can we expect that children that age know what is best for themselves?

Legislation that unanimously cleared the Florida Senate Education Committee last week would require incoming high school freshmen to declare a major and a minor course of study. I think there are some obvious problems with this plan, and I would like to see how they will be addressed.

1) What majors will be offered? They will have to be pretty broad, because some schools won't have the resources to offer more than a basic "math and science", "social sciences", "arts and humanities" option.
The Bradenton Herald reports that vocational coursework would count - "fields like carpentry or auto repair."

The district in which I teach (in Virginia, not in Florida) is big enough to offer a math/science center, a foreign language center, an IB program, and a lot of vocational opportunities - but that's a big district with a relatively flexible budget. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that all of these kids will be able to pick bioinformatics. What will be the bare minimum a district would have to offer under this law, and how is that bare minimum different from the current required courses? There is a possibility this will just be an extra stack of files in the guidance department for many rural schools.

2) What if a kid wants to change majors? At the college level, this is easy enough. Worst case scenario is that it takes you longer to get your degree. So if a high school junior says that she feels she was misinformed about what "social sciences" entails, and she wants to switch to a hard science major, do you tell her "no"? Do you tell her she will graduate high school a year late? Obviously, the answer to these two questions will have to be "no". So what exactly is the point of calling it a "major" if it is really just an opportunity for students to pick and choose their classes?

3) What minimum competency would be required in the core classes? I suppose districts could default to the federal standards of minimum competency in math and ~~English~~ language. If you think the bare minimum is enough, then ok. But some people choose to learn more and we encourage that, ok? You do want to express yourself, don't you?

It is my understanding that many other countries have a system like this for their public schools. In particular, I have had several scientists and engineers from Germany tell me that they were separated from students with other interests by age 14. Provided that this is voluntary on the part of the student, this seems like an idea with potential. I would love to hear from any readers who are more familiar with a comparable working system.

And for you libertarian readers who would say "this, too, would be best addressed by privatization of all schools", please answer the question of what subjects must be studied under the Florida plan, or under total privatization. Are you so libertarian as to support a parent's freedom to send their child to madrasses? I am not just playing devil's advocate - I feel that question to be at the heart of the issue of unmotivated students in public schools, which is exactly the problem this Florida bill hopes to address.

A Line of Thunderstorms

2006-04-03T19:17:00.000-04:00

Having just finished Bernoulli in my classes, my students were inappropriately excited about the possibility of tornadoes in our area tonight. (I'm going to crack the windows even if my parents think I'm nuts, because we just learned about it!) Of course, they are young and immortal, so they view storms with a different perspective than I, a homeowner and father of two. I will be spending this evening preparing a lesson on lightning (on my laptop) and hoping that the storms don't bring any damage to our area.

Weekend Wedding

2006-04-03T19:08:00.000-04:00

I packed the family into the minivan and headed north to Philadelphia for the weekend, leaving 80+ tests on my desk ungraded. Mrs. Wulf's sister got married. The ceremony and reception were at the Plastic Club, which may sound very novo-techno, but is actually a classy and historic visual art club. The bride was beautiful, as was the bridesmaid (Mrs. Wulf), and my children were the hit of the party, dancing for hours past their bedtimes.

My students confronted me with disappointment today, as it is the end of the marking period and they NEED to know how they did on the test. I would have much more sympathy for them if they always turned things in to me on time.

Right now, I am just longing for this weekend - Spring Break. I need a little time to catch up on chores around the house. (Test link)

Positivity

2006-03-26T23:32:00.000-04:00

This is for Graycie and Old Math.

Old Math says he is giving up the blog for a while, basically because it's a bit depressing and old. I can relate to that. I try not to blog too negatively, and the result is that I don't write often. This blog was never meant to be a teacher's lounge bitching session, and I guess that wasn't the intention for other teacher blogs - even those who have degenerated into exactly that.

Graycie wrote last week that she was going to try to avoid the downward spiral by focusing on the positive things. This reminds me of how BizzyBlog inserts articles titled "Positivity" betwixt his writings on the economy and Ohio elections. It's refreshing, because most blogs who provide meaty content don't manage a lot of non-partisan, clean, wholesome positivity. I guess it just doesn't seem important.

Well, take some time to stop and smell the roses. And when the roses aren't in bloom, listen to this story on NPR about a "positive psychology" class at Harvard. On one hand, that sounds like a load of crap. But I am not just a physicist. I am also an amateur philosopher and economist, and we have to recognize that there is a demand for a course that tells college students that we aren't made to be in the rat race. Therefore, somebody must supply that course.

It is not mandatory, so nobody is having their time wasted against their will. And Tal Ben-Shahar sounds naive. But I have long recognized that my secret to personal happiness is to be childlike, without being childish. I know that the reason my students enjoy my class is largely because I enjoy my class. And a student who enjoys their physics class will learn a lot more than one who does not. How could this not be true in other subjects? I leave that for you to ponder. But keep in mind that not all of your students even know how to enjoy the subject you teach. Most of them have no idea why you would go study it in college or make it a career. And that means that they aren't getting as much out of the subject as you can give. Renew your excitement in your subject(s), and don't let the negativity stop you from being that (insert subject here) nerd.

I am proudly a physics nerd. I relish it. I revel in it. I have my Einstein necktie and my caffeine molecule coffee mug, and the last question on my every test is:
Physics is fun
a) true

(get it? There is no choice b!)

I know most of these kids won't go on to study physics, or even remember a lot of the principles and concepts. But they will remember the demonstrations, the bad jokes, and the positivity. And when they have negative attitudes, I will keep in mind that I am sending them out into a world where "positive psychology" is offered at Harvard University, so maybe they'll be okay if they don't understand Bernoulli's Principle all that well.

In the meantime, I am going to go smell something better than roses - my two preschoolers, who got out of the tub about three hours ago and fell asleep shortly after. And I will try to post more frequently, with more science articles and science labs, and with entries whose titles start with "Positivity". Good night.

ZooBank

2006-03-19T13:00:00.000-04:00

When people find out that I am a scientist, they often think I know The Answers. Sometimes, they realize that my degree in physics does not afford me any expertise in other sciences... but sometimes they don't. And even within physics, there are many niches and specializations, and most physicists know very little about specializations distant from their own. The average astronomy professor may know more than you do about quantum dots, but don't bet on it. Even the microscopy experimentalist professor may be uninformed about them. Scientists don't know everything - we don't even know everything about our tiny corner of science.

But we do try.

An excellent example of how disorganized a field of study can be, and what scientists are trying to do to change that, can be found in taxonomy. From the February 9th edition of The Economist:

[N]early 250 years after Carl von Linné, a Swedish naturalist, invented the modern system of naming living creatures, taxonomists still have no official list of all the animals discovered so far.

Doesn't that seem like something that should have been done a long time ago? Frankly, I just assumed that such a catalogue existed somewhere - kept by some group of universities, or the Royal Society, or the Smithsonian. If I had grown up knowing that such a catalogue did not exist, I would probably be a taxonomist and software engineer today - I mean, it's obvious that a need for such would exist. We can't even keep track of a few dozen elements without creating a comprehensive table that catalogues them all into rows and columns by similar behaviors. How could biologists expect to have any sense of order regarding thousands of thousands of species, without some sort of comprehensive catalogue?

Although Linnaeus's big idea was that each species would have one scientific name, so that scientists could know immediately what they were discussing, the lack of a single official “telephone directory” has frustrated the entire enterprise. Around 1.5m species are thought to have been described so far, but more than 6m names have been used.

Because of this, a group called the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) at London's Natural History Museum has begun planning a definitive, open-access, web-based catalogue of species - the comprehensive, peer-reviewed Wikipedia of all living things scientists have discovered. The project is called ZooBank.

Zoobank would start with the partial catalogues that do currently exist. For example, both the Zoobank website and the Economist article I linked mention the Zoological Record...

...which is maintained in the British city of York by a firm called Thomson Zoological that makes its money by scouring the zoological literature, collating the results, and selling them.

That's a 150 year old project, and it catalogues over 17,000 species per year, but it misses an awful lot of potential listings. Still, it's a place for ZooBank to start.

They are still putting together a blueprint (and are open to suggestions), but they hope to get off the ground in the next year or two. I can't provide them with any financial support or taxonomical expertise, but I can give them a little tiny bit of publicity here, and I hope it helps.

Double Helix Nebula

2006-03-16T20:33:00.000-04:00

To quote a friend who emailed me this article,

A double-helix-shaped nebula. Pretty cool.

Yeah, pretty cool. I have never seen anything like it. Better yet, astronomers haven't, either. The image is published in the current edition of Nature. The lead author of the article is UCLA's Mark Morris, who suggests that the strands were twisted by magnetic fields.

That's pretty amazing. Had to share.

70,000 Waiting

2006-03-14T23:34:00.000-04:00

Blogging is light because I've been wrestling a water heater out of a confined space in my laundry room and replacing it with a brand new one. You know, with all of that spare time and extra cash I had.

In the meantime, I'd like to direct any readers to an Ed Wonk article I've been meaning to write. When President Bush mentioned funding for 70,000 new AP math and science teachers, my first thought was,

HA! Where are you going to find them? 70,000 mathematicians and scientists who would take this job, but aren't already doing it?

Ed is slightly more eloquent but he makes the same point I would.

Interview Your Teacher

2006-03-10T20:14:00.000-04:00

F ound at the Education Wonks:

Pupils at a school in east London are so involved in the running of their school, that they interview all prospective teachers - even the head.

What a fascinating concept! I don't have any problem with this, either.

The 70 pupils involved in the "Making Learning Better" (MLB) scheme regularly observe teachers' lessons and make suggestions about how classroom displays, teaching styles and discipline can be improved.

"We know how we want to be taught as pupils," says Casey, 12, a "lead consultant", or senior pupil adviser, for art.

"Teachers are only teaching, we're the ones being taught. Lessons have to be fun and every person has to learn something - the lesson has to have a purpose to it."

Well, sure... but what do the observers say when one of their fellows is falling asleep or misbehaving - a disruption of the fun learning environment for all? I am sure this is more a generalization, and the pupil advisors are realistic. Oh, wait...

The management also hopes to roll out a student disciplinary committee next year, where disruptive pupils will have to explain themselves directly to their peers.

If done well, this could be very interesting and productive. I don't see it catching on, however. You know, resistance to change and all. Full BBC article here.

Great Geysers on Enceladus!

2006-03-09T22:12:00.000-04:00

(That's fun to say. Try it.)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

"We realize that this is a radical conclusion - that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."

High-resolution Cassini images show icy jets and towering plumes ejecting huge quantities of particles at high speed. Scientists examined several models to explain the process. They ruled out the idea the particles are produced or blown off the moon's surface by vapor created when warm water ice converts to a gas. Instead, scientists have found evidence for a much more exciting possibility. The jets might be erupting from near-surface pockets of liquid water above 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), like cold versions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone.

"We previously knew of at most three places where active volcanism exists: Jupiter's moon Io, Earth, and possibly Neptune's moon Triton. Cassini changed all that, making Enceladus the latest member of this very exclusive club, and one of the most exciting places in the solar system," said John Spencer, Cassini scientist, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder.

This was actually emailed to me by someone who read it on Drudge before NASA officially released it. This is exciting stuff!

Military Wins Important Battle

2006-03-06T14:02:00.000-04:00

(This article is cross-posted at AtlasBlogged)

A coalition of 36 law schools including Yale, Harvard, and Columbia were defeated by the First Amendment today, despite their best efforts. It is an uncontested fact that universities who wish to ban military recruiters from equal access on campus are free to do so - we have the right to associate freely, after all. But SCOTUS ruled 8-0 that the federal government does not have to continue to fund such institutions if they don't provide recruiters with equal access to students on campus.

The universities sued to challenge the Solomon Amendment on the grounds that military recruiters represent a violation of the campus policies of the schools not to assist employers who discriminate based on race, sex, or sexual orientation. The military, of course, does not allow open homosexuality.

The law schools argued that, at a minimum, they shouldn't have to actively help military recruiters by distributing their literature or arranging interviews with students. Chief Justice Roberts responded in the decision;

A military recruiter's mere presence on campus does not violate a law school's right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter's message,

I could have sworn that I had written on this issue in the past, but I can't find it... I must be thinking of comments I posted on another blog. I remember watching the arguments on C-Span back in December, and noting that the justices seemed very clear in their opinion at that time. One noted that it is highly unlikely that any student could mistake the military policy on homosexuals to be a policy endorsed by the universities where recruiters would interview prospective legal officers. The thought of a Columbia law student sitting across the table from a JAG officer and assuming that the recruiter represented the university - well, let's just say I got a kick out of that image.

So now what will these schools do? Can they turn their backs on the money, over the principle of treating gays (but not recruiters) equally? How much money is at stake?
From Bloomberg:

The federal government provides almost $35 billion a year to universities through research grants, government contracts and other sources, according to the American Association of University Professors. The financial stake is one reason almost every law school has agreed to give equal access to the military.

Emphasis mine. That's a big twinkie. The schools will allow recruiters on campus, and will bend over backwards letting students know how they feel about the recruiters and the policies of the military. And that's fine with me - let them tell the students anything they like, provided it is truthful and the recruiters are given the same recruiting opportunities that other employers are.

More from Bloomberg:

The Defense Department has listed only three schools -- New York Law School, Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont, and William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota -- as being in violation of the Solomon Amendment, according to Joshua Rosenkrantz, the lead lawyer for the challengers. All three schools are independent institutions, so their actions don't jeopardize funding for any other university departments.

At one point, the Solomon Amendment included a threat to withhold student financial aid. That provision was removed in 2000.

By the way, the full text of the Rumsfeld v FAIR ruling can be found here.

Pat LaFontaine's Jersey Retired

2006-03-04T22:13:00.000-04:00

I have mentioned before that I am a big hockey fan. I grew up watching the Buffalo Sabres on both Buffalo and Toronto stations, and I have wonderful memories of going to games in a blue and gold jersey with my name on the back. Now that I live in Virginia, I usually make at least one trek per season to see the Sabres when they visit nearby Washington. My son wears my old blue jersey when I play with him and my daughter in the cul-de-sac, with that little orange hockey ball and some short sticks. I'm a big fan.

I'll be honest, the only reason I want cable TV is to watch hockey games. There is nothing else I put on the screen for myself.

I remember seeing Pat LaFontaine play for Buffalo. I remember his team-record 148-point season in 1992-93. I even remember seeing him get into a fight at the game where Tim Horton's jersey was retired - a game where I got the autographs of Rick Martin and Rene Robert.

I hated seeing his career cut short by injury. I wish I could have been there last night when the Sabres retired his jersey.

I admit, I might have shed a few tears when Sabres announcer and emcee Rick Jeanneret closed the pregame celebration by leading the crowd in the old familiar, "La-la-la-la-la-LaFontaine!"

I just wanted to give the Hall of Famer a little salute, and remind myself of how beautiful it was to watch him on the ice. So, here's to Patty!

Richmond School Board: Sex, Drugs, Rock-n-Roll!

2006-03-03T20:54:00.000-04:00

Back in December, the chairman of the Richmond School Board stepped down (as chairman, but stayed on the Board) due to the controversy over his bare-chested photo being posted on an explicit dating website. My comment at that time was;

I have nothing against Mr. Johnson, and it certainly does not bother me if he is gay, but his decision to post this type of singles ad was so ill-advised as to be worrisome. Would you want someone this foolish holding such power over the schooling of your children? What are those children to make of the example he is setting here? This is a member of their School Board!

Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson was back in the news this week. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Richmond School Board member Stephen B. Johnson says he will resign from the board after being caught with marijuana at Richmond International Airport.

He had three joints hidden in a pack of cigarettes. He was trying to take them on a flight to California, where he would attend a conference on home schooling. That's right, a business trip.

Johnson claims the marijuana was for medicinal purposes. I once again wonder how he would feel if a teacher were in a similar situation. The news article tells us:

Richmond Public Schools describes itself as a "drug and alcohol-free workplace."
The School Board policy says employees outside the workplace who are charged with possession or use of illegal drugs are subject to disciplinary action up to termination.

Mysteriously, he wasn't charged. Which I guess means that a teacher in the same situation would be just fine... right?

For the record, I have zero moral objections to the web posting he did in December, or towards the possession and use of marijuana, whether for purposes medicinal or recreational. I've never smoked pot, but I think it should be legal. To me, the issue is not the objective value of what Mr. Johnson does. The issue is that a member of the School Board should be livng to a higher standard than this. He or she should be a model to students, and should not engage in any behavior that cannot be encouraged in teachers. As Times-Dispatch staff writer Michael Paul Williams wrote today;

even his most ardent supporters must ask how such a capable School Board member could exhibit such an inexplicable lapse in judgment while under the microscope. And he now has a problem overseeing a school system that describes itself as a "drug and alcohol-free workplace."

We wish him good health and appreciate his service to the board. But he has a credibility problem. Johnson's decision to step down is the correct one.

The Board should have asked Johnson to step down in December in light of his poor judgement regarding the pornographic web site. It might have saved them the embarassment of this current situation.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

2006-03-03T20:14:00.000-04:00

I had a student offer to teach the class today. I had just finished attendance and fired up the projector for a power-point presentation on the physics of fluids, when one of the darlings offered to present it to the class. She's not one of my top performers, but she is smart and generally has a good attitude. I don't doubt that she would be an "A" student if she felt that my class was more important than sports.

So I handed her the remote and sat down in her seat. I'm game.

She read the first couple of slides very well, without making it sound like she was just reading. She kept looking around the room to see who was paying attention, and she patrolled a little bit, like teachers are supposed to do. But after the first couple of slides, I was in for two big surpises.

1) She did an impression of me that was very funny,
2) These kids really do pay attention.

I sometimes come home after work and tell Mrs. Wulf that throughout the course of the day, not one damned kid listened to one damned thing I said all damned day. It's so frustrating, considering the amount of time I spend preparing the lessons, and considering how much I could be making in another field. But today, when this student started doing her impression of me, she and the class convinced me that they do listen, and they have been learning.

It started with a deepening of her voice, and soon the mention of "Back when I was in the Navy...", which everybody appreciated. And soon, she was ad-libbing some connections between the images and definitions shown on these slides, and those from previous chapters. "You remember this equation from previous chapters," and "Think back to the last chapter; I mentioned polar molecules. Do you remember why?" Several students called out, "Ionic compounds!" That really blew me away, because nobody got that right on the test.

Some of the slides have questions on them. The students somehow knew all but one - they were really having a ball. And when nobody knew the answer to that one question, I raised my hand. When called upon, of course, I said...

"Can I go to the bathroom?"

Turnabout is fair play.

Geography

2006-03-03T20:08:00.000-04:00

This is not a post on geography teacher and Bush hater Jay Bennish.

I just wanted to note that there is a really nice interactive geography quiz at this website. I managed to ace South America and Asia, but Africa was really too much. I don't remember West Africa at all. I know Eastern Europe would really be a puzzler for me - admit it, how many of you still see most of that area as "USSR"?

Transhumanism

2006-02-25T13:10:00.000-04:00

The Feb 23 Economist has an article on "the wacky world of anti-senescence therapy". What is that, you ask?

Humans are certainly living longer... Much of this change has been the result of improved nutrition and better medicine. But to experience a healthy old age also involves maintaining physical and mental function. Age-related non-pathological changes in the brain, muscles, joints, immune system, lungs and heart must be minimised. These changes are called “senescence”.

Anti-senescence therapy sounds like magic, right? The Fountain of Youth or something like that. Death is the only thing as certain as taxes. Right?

Not necessarily. Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge recently presented research at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Economist article notes;

As an engineer, he favours intervening directly to repair the changes in the body that are caused by ageing. This is an approach he dubs “strategies for engineered negligible senescence”.

A simple explanation of this approach is that we have the science and engineering skills to improve our life spans. This goes beyond studies of diet and exercise. Our bodies naturally break down as we age, but to some extent, we have developed the ability to rebuild them. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Sort of. We're getting closer.

So how seriously can we take Dr. de Grey? An article at OpenDemocracy addresses the question:

Within the scientific community, he is regarded with a mix of interest and scepticism. Is he a pioneer or a crank? Naïve or prophetic in his claims that we will soon be able to live for hundreds of years? Nuland's now infamous profile in Technology Review implied that there were major flaws in de Grey's scientific theories, but seemed more concerned that he might pose a threat to society. Noting that "the most likeable of eccentrics are sometimes the most dangerous", Nuland concluded that:
"his clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilisation to fulfil the highest hopes he has for its future. It is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed. Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us."
In the firestorm that followed the Technology Review piece, things got personal. One editorial comment – likening him to a troll – still reverberates in internet discussions.

"Do you care what people say about you?" we ask. "Yes. Deeply", is his instant reply. "I take it very seriously." Yet de Grey says that he's moved beyond the stages of being ignored or laughed at and is now being actively opposed. He seems quite relaxed about this progression.

This sounds like a marvelous bit of research to share with my students, especially as it interacts with the nanotechnology that I am struggling to incorporate into my curriculum. High school students love to discuss ageing and morality, don't they? One question that is sure to come up is the money.

Where does he think this funding might come from? "Public funding tends to be low risk, low gain. And technology funding from venture capital is too short term. What we need is funding that is ambitious and long term. That tends to come when national pride is at stake or when seriously rich people think it's cool."
It's the latter – an elite band of Silicon Valley millionaires and wealthy philanthropists – who are funding much of the research into life extension at the moment.

Hey, that sounds awfully familiar. And that's something I can support - as does Dr. de Grey.

The last paragraph from OpenDemocracy's story is a doozy that I think I will be sharing with all of my classes (not just this year's):

Science isn't a clean, logical endeavour pursued by individuals who interact only through peer-reviewed journals. It's a messy mixture of experimentation, argument and debate. And when it meets politics it becomes messier still. It is every scientist's responsibility to shape and be shaped by what society wants from science, to listen to the public and to take its concerns seriously. Whatever one may feel about his theories, this is something that Aubrey de Grey is doing in a quite unique and valuable way.

66 Years to Go...

2006-02-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

Ed Wonk highlights a story about Hazel Haley, who has been teaching for 69 years. She has been in the same room since 1952. My parents were in diapers that year. Her story is remarkable - well worth a read.

Hillary and the Vouchers

2006-02-23T21:49:00.000-04:00

The video and some transcripts of it are making the rounds on the blogosphere. I was directed to find it at Michelle Malkin, no surprise. You can see it here.

CLINTON: Suppose that you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher. Next parent who comes says, 'I want to send, you know, my child to the Jewish Day School. Great here's your voucher! Next parent who comes says, "I want to send my child to the private school that I've already dreamed of sending my child to.' Fine. Here's your voucher.
Next parent who comes says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist.' You say, 'Wait a minute. You can't send...we're not giving a voucher for that.' And the parent says, 'Well, the way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. And therefore, you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, gave it to a secular private parent. Under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me.'

Suppose the next parent comes and says 'I want to send my child to the School of...the Jihad.' Wait a minute! We're not going to send a child with taxpayers dollars to the School of Jihad. 'Well, you gave it to the Catholics, gave it to the Jews, gave it to the private secular people. You're gonna tell me I can't? I'm a taxpayer. Under the Constitution.'

Now, tell me how we're going to make those choices.

The fact of the matter is that this argument - as compelling as some would like to think it is - boils down to a matter of elitism. Wealthy people can choose to send their children to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School, or the Jewish Day School, or the school of the Church of the White Supremacist, or the School of the Jihad (nice ring to that one). But poor parents cannot. How could a Democrat with presidental aspirations ever be making this statement?

The answer is the NEA, of course. The NEA hates vouchers, because they threaten the monopoly we public school teachers currently have and are desperately trying to hold. There's a union, dammit. A union that votes and whose financial support any Democrat with presidential aspirations would clearly need. That is all there is to it.

What is the Value of Algebra?

2006-02-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

You will never need to know algebra.

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writes an open letter to a high school dropout named Gabriela:

The L.A. school district now requires all students to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate. This is something new for Los Angeles (although 17 states require it) and it is the sort of vaunted education reform that is supposed to close the science and math gap and make the U.S. more competitive. All it seems to do, though, is ruin the lives of countless kids. In L.A., more kids drop out of school on account of algebra than any other subject. I can hardly blame them.

Oh, no. Is this guy really going to tell students that one of the subjects we most need to improve in our schools is useless? Why would he do that?

Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column...
Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers. Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not.

I am almost at a loss for words. The hubris is so thick that it seems like sarcasm... but there is no follow-through. It is not sarcasm. He is serious. He thinks that he never uses algebra. He thinks that it ruins lives to tell students that they have to learn it in order to get a high school diploma.

Part of me really wants to get worked up over this. I'd like to ask Mr. Cohen if he feels any differently about literature, because his column reminds me of those people who drag their child into the bookstore and demand the books that are assigned by the school, and then stare in horror as the books are delivered. "Oh my GOD! She has to read that whole thing? Look at the size of that book, and it looks so boring! What the hell does she need to read this for? Augh!"

But part of me is too tired for Mr. Cohen and his kind. Good for you, Mr. Cohen. There is nothing so satisfying as the casual dismissal of things you do not like, is there? I am sure it makes you feel like Peter Pan to tell the students of this nation that they are wasting their lives away in the persuit of education. But even in this dismissal of learning, Cohen may have taught the careful reader a lesson: One need know nothing more than how to type, in order to get a job as a journalist.

Science and the Government

2006-02-18T18:28:00.000-04:00

(This article now cross-posted at AtlasBlogged)

Part of the problem with government funded science is that money is the rudder of scientific research. If scientific research is funded by a private individual, organization, or corporation, then the aims of the research are plain, and scientists know ahead of time what they are in for. But with government funding, researchers often believe that they should be given free rein to seek "truth", and the public believes that their findings represent "truth", and often fail to view the findings with the skepticism that true science demands.
Furthermore, the findings of these scientists do not belong to them individually, and accusations of silencing by the government are not hard to find - especially when research is begun under one administration and ends under another. And, in some cases, those accusations might be true... and that might or might not be done with good reason, which makes the situation even more mucked up. The whole enterprise of science becomes a political battleground - something that irks scientists who feel entitled to the funding and the findings.

Consider NASA's budgetary balancing act. The agency is being asked to retire the shuttle fleet and bring on a new generation of launch vehicle over the next decade (see previous), and in order to afford doing so, they are cutting funds to other projects. From the Hampton Roads Daily Press:

Leaders of the House Science Committee launched a bipartisan assault on President Bush's proposed budget for NASA on Thursday, saying the plan makes troubling cuts in aeronautics and science programs to finance a manned mission to the moon and Mars.

Two years after Bush announced his plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020, the initiative is triggering wrenching changes within NASA that are raising alarms in Congress.

NASA's 2007 budget calls for a 30.4 percent increase in space exploration systems over the current year's spending level. Much of that money would go to develop a Crew Exploration Vehicle to replace the aging fleet of space shuttles.

But to finance that increase with relatively little new money next year, NASA would have to cut spending on aeronautics research by 18 percent. Langley Research Center in Hampton, which specializes in aeronautics, is expecting a budget cut of about $50 million next year.

While science programs would get a modest funding boost of 1.5 percent next year, lawmakers complained that a new five-year plan calls for a $3.1 billion cut compared with last year's projections. The magnitude of that cut, aides said, could affect things as varied as the Mars robotic exploration programs, advanced telescopes to find planets around distant stars, and programs to observe phenomena such as black holes.

"I am extremely uneasy about this budget, and I am in a quandary at this point about what to do about it," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., the committee chairman, who summoned NASA Administrator Michael Griffin to Capitol Hill to discuss the spending plan.

"This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science and perhaps even worse still for aeronautics."

We are apparently of the belief that space science would not exist if it were not for NASA, and a cut in NASA science expenditures will lead us back to the dark ages. The answer, I suppose, is more funding - because government spending isn't yet enough, right?

From the Charlottesville Observer:

We're glad concerned NASA scientists and officials have decided to speak out. And we hope President Bush and his political advisers learn a lesson from this whole, ugly affair: Trying to muzzle scientists whose findings are politically inconvenient is a terrible idea. And it usually doesn't work, either.

This is true, but this also assumes that the muzzling is wholly a matter of dirty politicians trying to impose religion over Truth. That is not a safe generalization, even if you believe it to be the case here.

The AP reports that the House Science Committee on Thursday demanded more transparency and scientific openness. It is a noble demand, but it is simply unrealistic. The immediate issue is very offensive; a NASA PR officer resigned...

...after he was accused of trying to limit reporters' access to a noted NASA climate scientist and insisting that a Web designer insert the word "theory" with any mention of the Big Bang.

But not every issue of scientific openness or censorship will be this cut and dry, and government would be well served to stick to research that has direct and legitimate use by government agencies, most notably the military.

To emphasize my point, I direct readers to this article: NASA and NOAA Open Science Policies Not Matched at EPA.

Despite public concerns about Bush administration political interference with science, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is requiring prior headquarters approval for all communications by its scientists with the media, according to an agency email released Thursday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national association of government workers in natural science agencies.

The scientists quoted in this article sound very reasonable - how come NASA and NOAA scientists are told to engage the public in open dialogue, but EPA scientists have to go through their PR department? But the fact of the matter is that every interview that starts with "I work at the EPA..." is one that purports (implicitly or explicitly) to be an official statement of the agency, the government, and the scientific community. The agency is absolutely correct to have a level of oversight in this - the most liberal policy should be one of uncensored access to EPA scientists, but with the agency made fully aware of all interviews and speeches, and able to denounce, deny, or fire the scientist, depending on the content of the comments. It is wholly inappropriate to allow individual scientists (who after all have political agendas of their own) to represent an agency and the people of the United States, without any supervision.

The Ice Machine

2006-02-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

From the Tampa Tribune:

Benito Middle School student Jasmine Roberts examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants.

Her project won the science fair at the New Tampa school, and she hopes to win a top prize at the Hillsborough County Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which starts Tuesday.

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling.

"I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much," she said. "And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner."

Her discovery: Seventy percent of the time, the ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.

My anecdotal input: Ice machines are hardly ever emptied for cleaning. They can get pretty nasty, and nobody notices it until the health board comes by. The managers of the restaurants say in the story that they clean the ice machines regularly, but there is a difference between cleaning the dispenser and cleaning the ice maker itself. That is probably where the bacteria is coming from.

Toilets, on the other hand, are frequently emptied (flushed) and scoured thorougly. Managers are notified if they are imperfect.

In defense of the restaurants:

Galina Tuninskaya, vice president of Applied Consumer Services, a private lab that tests drinking water, said the standard for drinking water is usually 100 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter. The highest amount Jasmine found was 54 units in ice from a self-serve machine.

Pasco and Archimedes

2006-02-18T14:30:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note that one class attempted to use the Pasco Force probes to do a lab on Archimedes Principle. I don't really know how well it went, because I didn't give them a procedure (that's my usual treatment for honors or AP) and I haven't graded them yet. But the general point here is that any lab that could make use of a spring scale or a triple beam balance, could probably use a force sensor to do the trick. That's no justification for buying the probeware, but if you are getting the probeware anyway for labs on friction, Newton's laws, Hooke's Law, etc, then keep in mind that they can be used for this sort of thing as well.

The typical procedure I saw being used by the lab groups involved a graduated cylinder and several brass weights. The students determined the volume of each brass weight by seeing how much the water level went up when the weight was dropped into the cylinder... and then the lab group would argue about how to use this information to calculate the buoyant force. The trick of course is that for any object submerged in water, the buoyant force will be ~10N per liter of space the object takes up. I am hoping that when I go to grade the labs, most of them will show that they did this part properly, but I have seen in the past that many students have trouble keeping straight the difference between the density of water and the density of the object displacing water. We shall see.

As for the experimental part of the lab, they all seem to have figured out that they could use the force sensor to hang the brass weight from a string and record the weight, then lower the weight into the water and see what it weighs while submerged. I really should have made them turn in a procedure before hand, because a few of the groups doubtless enacted this procedure after seeing everybody else was doing it.

Wish me luck. I will be drafting a step-by-step procedure for my standard-level classes to use for this lab. They'll probably be doing it next week. And keep an eye out for a Hooke's Law lab - AP just did that using both a force sensor and a motion sensor, and I will post their various procedures as soon as I have a chance to read through them.

That's So Brokeback

2006-02-14T20:36:00.000-04:00

One of my administrators gave me the scoop on a nearby high school that made the Richmond Times-Dispatch today:

Parents and other interested spectators will have to do the cheering for the Douglas Freeman boys basketball team at tonight's Colonial District basketball tournament quarterfinal.
Freeman's principal, Dr. Edward Pruden Jr., has banned all students from the Rebels' game against visiting Maggie Walker Governor's School. The Rebels won the district regular-season title and are the top seeds in the tournament. The ban doesn't affect Maggie Walker students...
The ban is punishment for an inappropriate cheer during last Friday's home game against archrival Mills Godwin.

Their inappropriate cheer that went unreported in the T-D? Some Freeman students singled out a Godwin player and refered to him as "Brokeback Bobby" all night. The school was concerned about proper public decorum, sexual harassment lawsuits, and general sportsmanship.

Um, especially that part about the lawsuits.

Pruden has expressed in the past that he wants the students to cheer for Freeman and not against the opposition, and especially not to single out an individual player.
"We were shocked he banned students from a home game," said Laura Rothenberg, a senior who has been a part of the cheering section for four years. "It has made us step back and see that Dr. Pruden took it to heart and was offended. Once everyone cools down, we can accept the fact that it was inappropriate and come around and start with new momentum."

Well, that's a pretty cheery assessment. I suspect most students won't see it that way. I suspect most students will feel that Dr. Pruden is an overreactionary jerk who punishes the whole school for the behavior of a few. I suspect they will think him power-mad.

I really, honestly understand his motivation, but I really don't think this was the proper response to the situation. The primary concern for every educator must be to educate. What lesson can we honestly expect Freeman students to take from this event?

The ban covers one game. The district tournament continues at Douglas Freeman with the semifinals tomorrow night and the final Friday. Freeman, as the district champion, already has earned a berth in next week's Central Region tournament and will have a home game Feb. 21.

But it's not just an issue at high schools, as fans of the Gonzaga basketball team have been in the news lately for the exact same thing. The response there?

...the faculty advisers for the Kennel Club booster group urged students to avoid "inappropriate chants"...

There is no ban of the entire student body. There is open discussion on campus of what is appropriate and what is not. High school students are not too young to be treated the same way. As one of my openly gay students noted to me today, teenagers are more offended about not being treated as mature individuals, and having the entire student body punished for the actions of a few, than by the chanting of words that are used as slang throughout the school anyway.

"That principal is so... brokeback!" he said with an ironic smile as he swept out of the room.

These kids know what is right and what is wrong. It is just that they sometimes need to be reminded of it, and told that wrong behavior will not be tolerated. They don't need to be summarily barred from a school event just so the administration can cover their butts.

(This article now cross-posted at AtlasBlogged)

I've Got No Wires To Hold Me Down

2006-02-12T13:50:00.000-04:00

I am wireless at home! Mrs. Wulf actually did it, so I can't take any credit whatsoever. But I am in the kitchen, on a laptop, totally unplugged. It feels good.

Pasco Probeware Works

2006-02-11T22:05:00.000-04:00

FINALLY!

The initial reason I started this blog was to share some of my methods with other teachers, especially science teachers. This is only my third year teaching high school, but I have been teaching at various other levels for almost a decade now, so I am getting a little confidence and feeling like I might have some things to share.

The number one thing that I wanted to share was the use of Pasco Probeware in my high school physics classroom. Our school invested a few thousand dollars on Pasco Probeware last year, in hopes of making our science labs better learning experiences. I have modeled the use of them on some of the labs I performed as a student (and later taught as a TA) at VCU. Last year was a transition year, as I took old labs and altered them for the new equipment - replacing spring scales with force probes, and thermometers with temperature probes.
But the motion sensors had the biggest impact, because students were able to see a real-time graphic display of x-vs-t for one dimensional motion. This makes it much more intuitive for them to learn the relationships of position, velocity, and acceleration.

I was so excited about this year being even better. But then disaster struck. From my point of view, having our school switch from Mac to PC was a nightmare. None of the Pasco software was installed on the PCs, and the probeware was useless... until this week. I could have dealt with this just fine, if at the beginning of the year I had been told "no Pasco till February". But instead I have been hearing "next week" the whole time, so I haven't had the best attitude. I don't blame anyone for the delay in installation, but it has been very unfortunate for my classes.

Anyway, they work now. The software is installed and we got started this past Thursday and Friday with an introduction to motion lab, which was a little ridiculous for the students, considering that they had this material back in September. But it was nice to give them something easy, so they could concentrate on using the software more than learning the concept. The lab consists of graphing motion relative to the sensor, and matching some pre-made graphs of position vs time. We discussed how the sensor is able to determine your distance (x = v/t, and it knows the speed of sound in air), and played around with them a little bit. If anybody reading this would like to see the lab instructions, I would be more than happy to email them to you (they are in powerpoint format). Contact me at Wulf@atlasblogged.com. You are welcome to alter the document or use it as is, free of charge.

Starting this coming week, I expect to be using the force sensors to investigate Archimedes Principle. I am trying to come up with a good and useful way to use our few pressure sensors to do a good lab on Bernoulli, but I might have to settle for a demonstration. I will keep you all updated.

The Future of Space

2006-02-05T20:46:00.000-04:00

(This article now cross-posted at AtlasBlogged)

Last week saw the anniversaries of three separate NASA disasters that weigh heavily on the future of spaceflight. It is inherently dangerous to strap oneself in at the top of a rocket and travel at the speeds necessary to achieve orbit. It is expected that NASA is doing everything it can to mitigate those dangers. But it is not enough to fix the O-rings and launch away.

When the family car breaks down too many times and repair costs stack up, many people face the quandary of paying the maintenance costs or putting the money toward a new automobile.
But at NASA, officials are trying to keep space shuttles far older than most cars on the road today going until at least the end of the decade, while hurrying to build and fly a new reusable passenger launch vehicle to replace the shuttles. All this, under a virtually flat budget.
Most experts say the agency really has no great options for reliably putting astronauts or large sophisticated cargoes into space over the next 10 years or so.

(story by Lee Bowman, here)
The fact is that the nature of spaceflight over the last 30 years has been relatively boring for the public, who funds space flight but probably does not understand why – especially in the post-Cold War era. Are we racing anybody at this point? Well, maybe China, but I don’t think most Americans actually see it that way.
(Incidentally, I recently found that the Chinese astronauts are called “taikonauts”. See previous.)

Due to safety concerns about the shuttle fleet, we are actually now in a position of having to rely on the Russians, despite our victories over them in the original Space Race and Cold War. Soyuz flights are the only way to replenish the ISS with crew and supplies, and new components for the ISS are not able to be delivered as long as the shuttles sit grounded. Too large to be taken on Soyuz, they highlight our inability to fulfill our promises regarding ISS.

The situation chafes partners like the European and Japanese space agencies, each with sophisticated modules that cost more than $1 billion to build gathering dust until they can hitch a ride.

It may be that the vehicle itself isn’t the biggest problem, since the vehicle is designed around the larger goal. Why are we in space at all? Is it to have an ISS, or to have manned missions and eventually a base on the moon, and Mars?

John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said human spaceflight had never recovered from the decision to build the program around the shuttles and then the International Space Station, maintained mainly by shuttles.
"NASA is attempting now to recover from 35 years that in many ways were a dead end," Logsdon said. "That was not NASA's mistake, but the country's, the national leadership's."
It took two disasters -- the Challenger and then the Columbia -- to shock the White House and Congress into trying to redirect the program, Logsdon said.

(from NYT story carried here)
So what about the next generation of American spacecraft? What is it, when will we see it, and will it be any good?

Current plans have the shuttles flying through 2010 to finish building the ISS, with new lunar-capable vehicles coming on line by 2014. Projected dates vary, but it seems hard to avoid a gap in flight coverage of at least three years. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has recently confirmed that the agency expects roughly 18 more flights out of the shuttle program (no definitive word on whether any will involve repairs to the popular Hubble Telescope), but the cost of these flights precludes other projects and expenditures, including R&D.
From Space.com:

That means other projects have to be canceled, cut back or postponed in order to free money for the shuttle's last missions. A steady trickle of reports in recent months indicate several space science and aeronautics projects are being cancelled or pushed back.

Well, it turns out the next generation of vehicle didn’t need that much R&D. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is planned to make use of shuttle booster rockets (Solid Rocket Boosters, “SRB”) along with a variant of the shuttle’s huge External Tank. Unmanned and heavy lift missions are being planned with the same concept, with the ability to use extended-length SRBs for more thrust as needed. The general interchangeability of systems is expected to reduce costs, as is the fact that the systems are familiar and already in production.
From SpaceRef.com:

Fairly early in the analysis, planners determined that a new hybrid booster had no particular benefit over a launcher developed from either EELV or shuttle-derived designs. They also determined that cost effectiveness could be achieved if the launch vehicles chosen for CEV systems could yield a higher flight rate by multiple government users, such as the national security community.
According to sources familiar with the launcher section of the so-called 60 Day Study, the future U.S. manned and heavy lift launch vehicle architecture will be based on two configurations of shuttle-derived vehicles.
Cargo vehicle studies using Space Shuttle ET and SRB hardware focused on two major variants: so-called "side-mounted" and "in-line". Side-mount designs hang cargo and/or crew off the side of a large external fuel tank as is currently done with the space shuttle. In-line designs place the cargo (or crew) directly atop a lower first stage as did Saturn launch vehicles.

Manned missions to the moon or to Mars would essentially make use of shuttle components with an Apollo Saturn-style module on top. The interchangeability scenarios shown in the image here practically scream “toy”, but are looking more and more realistic.

In the end, the two ET-derivatives; a side-mount vs. a stacked in-line produced better safety margins for the CEV aboard the in-line mold line.

One of the more interesting developments (read about it at (another article from Space.com)
is the fact that NASA is planning to use engines

fueled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and methane...
While methane is a less efficient propellant than liquid hydrogen, it is easier to store for long stretches and is readily available on Mars, making it possible for NASA to meet future propellant needs by taking advantage of martian resources.

The use of an Apollo-style module is also desirable with regard to escape options for the crew.

For the CEV crew to escape a launch abort, only the part of the CEV containing the flight crew would be explosively detached from the remainder of the CEV/launcher. This approximates, by comparison, the Apollo launch escape philosophy wherein the Command Module was separated from the remaining Service Module part of the Apollo spacecraft.

Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that it is the function of the United States government to involve itself with missions to the moon and Mars, or even to the ISS. There is renewed interest and even excitement in spaceflight these days, but much of it is in the private sector, with plans to begin space tourism within the next two years.

Within the next two years, billionaire businessman Richard Branson promises to begin suborbital flights from a planned launch pad in New Mexico… Branson has reportedly already sold tickets for future space trips – for $200,000 each – despite the fact he does not yet have a spaceship to market.
The commercial space race kicked off last year when a small company based in the Mojave Desert successfully flew the first privately built aircraft – SpaceShipOne –70 miles above Earth to the edge of space twice in less than a week. The company, Scaled Composites LLC, collected the $10 million Ansari X Prize and captured the imaginations of those who dream of space travel. The company is building SpaceShipTwo and has an agreement with Branson’s company to design a commercial space vehicle for as many as nine passengers.
Congress has decided not to regulate such flights until the industry matures. For the X Prize flights, Scaled Composites received a commercial launch license, the same one a defense contractor needs to launch a rocket.

(Virginia Pilot story here)

But what is the point of going to space? Other than, of course, because it is there. Should this be the interest of the government, or of private agencies? What is the legitimate function of the government, anyway? There are certainly good arguments for government involvment in spaceflight, but they aren't often made... probably because the right questions aren't often asked. (follow-up coming soon...)

Fallen Astronauts

2006-01-28T18:09:00.000-04:00

Today is the 20th anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, which famously exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on a beautifully clear but tragically cold Florida morning. Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, school teacher Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis (of Hughes Aircraft Co) were killed on live international television.

Also, yesterday marked the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 1 flash fire that took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

And this coming Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the disintigration of the space shuttle Columbia as it reentered the atmosphere. Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon were killed.

I would like to post a little bit about the future of NASA in the coming days, but I will leave today as this blog's Day of Rememberance for 17 astronauts who lost their lives in the dangerous endeavor of spaceflight.

Exit Exams

2006-01-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

Should a student have to pass an exit exam before being awarded a diploma? Is that a good idea? Would such a high-stakes test be fair?

While the high school exit exam may be difficult for some seniors to pass, a majority of South Valley students who were asked about it Tuesday feel it's a necessary test -- even those who haven't yet passed it.
High school senior Amanda Garcia is one of them. She has taken the exit exam three times. She has passed the English component of the two-part exam, but still needs to pass the math part of the test, she said.

HT to Right on the Left Coast for this article, which is a good read despite the use of the hated "irregardless".

The California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) has two parts:

English-language arts and mathematics. English-language arts goes through grade 10 standards. The mathematics portion is a little bit of grade six standards and a lot of grade seven standards, and there are 12 Algebra I questions out of 80 total questions that students are scored on in math.

The math part of the exam consists of all multiple-choice questions...
Students have to get 55 percent correct on the math part of the test and 60 percent correct on the English-language arts part of the test to pass each of those portions.

Like Darren at RotLC, I don't understand the argument that a diploma should be awarded to students whose primary qualification is that they kept showing up, year after year. The biggest problem I have with the Virginia SOLs is that they are micromanaged - in every course, the required state-wide homogeny stifles the ability of teachers to adapt and expand into topics of greater teacher expertise... or student interest! Teachers around the Commonwealth complain that they have been reduced to teaching to the test. Obviously, students are taught a lot of things they won't remember or use as adults - I'm willing to admit that an understanding of the Hawley Smoot Tariff is really not that necessary to most people. And that's coming from a guy who is both a history buff and an amateur economist.

An exit exam that focuses on ensuring minimum competency in the basic "three R's" just seems like an idea no reasonable educator could oppose.

Always Off My Guard

2006-01-21T15:55:00.000-04:00

"DAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAaaaaaaad?"

5-year old Wulf, Jr. was yelling at the top of his lungs from the opposite end of the house. His little sister was asleep. He knows better. I quick-timed it to the back bathroom and snapped at him.

"What is your problem? Your sister is sleeping - why are you yelling all through the house?"

The boy looked up innocently from the toilet and said, "Well, you see, I have too much energy..."

How can I do anything but laugh?

Students and Pluto

2006-01-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

It's the week before midterms, and I have been worried about the knowledge level of my students. They really put my mind at ease for a while today, as they derailed my review session briefly to discuss the New Horizons probe launched for Pluto.
They knew its speed. They compared it to escape speed and orbital speed. They reminded each other of the difference between a projectile and a satellite. They sidetracked to the Stardust capsule that brought comet dust back to earth, parachuting safely to the Utah salt flats last week.

They knew things about New Horizons I didn't.
1) It is powered by 24 pounds of plutonium dioxide.
2) There were protests over this. [eyes roll]
3) It carries "the first student-built science instrument to be sent to another planet," a dust-counting device designed and built by University of Colorado students.
4) It also carries some of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes.

Okay, that last one chokes me up just a little.

Incidentally, if you are unfamiliar with Celestia ("The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions") and Google Earth, I highly recommend you download them and play with them. Especially science teachers with access to computers in the classroom. My students seem much more familiar with the scale and the names of the bodies in the solar system this year because of Celestia. And it's just fun to play with.

John Stossel vs Public Schools

2006-01-19T22:03:00.000-04:00

I don't watch John Stossel. I don't even know what channel he's on - I'm sure ABC is somewhere between 2 and 30 on my TV but I honestly don't know. My friends say I would love the guy - he's libertarian, he does hard research, blah blah blah.

I didn't see his special last week, but he's had quite a lot of mail about it. He has posted an article/column, Myth: Schools don't have enough money

Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a "documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools."

Disclosure - I am not in the NEA and I think they're full of crap.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

I am curious... what do you suppose that figure goes to when special education is taken out? I am sure it is still too high, and special ed is its own separate issue, but I would like to know.

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money...
A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

This article doesn't really supply much in the way of an argument. He provides some figures to support what I already knew, but I guess the meat was aired last Friday on 20/20, whatever channel that is. I'll troll EducationWonks and Google for reaction, but I would also welcome the comments of any who watched the special.

Math in the Classroom and Sex in the Parking Lot.

2006-01-18T21:42:00.000-04:00

In Chesterfield County Virginia (bordering on Richmond), a high school special education teacher has been charged with taking indecent liberties with a student. She appeared in court today, and the focus of the reporters was on her attire, of all things. She is reported to have worn a "short dress, a tight green dress". A local AM DJ Mac Watson tried to start a conversation about whether such an outfit was inherently inappropriate for a person being charged with any kind of sex crime.

Mac soon found however that the conversation needed to focus on something else. He had so many calls and emails supporting the woman, that he felt the need to take his audience to task. This 39 year old mother and teacher is accused of taking indecent liberties with a minor - a friend of her 16 year old son. The reaction of listeners ranged from, You shouldn't judge her before she goes through the due legal process, to the predictable, Hell, what's the problem? Every 16 year old boy dreams about that, and she's just giving him what he wants! Who is hurt by that?!?

Mac addressed both of these arguments in the short time I was able to listen.

First, the due process argument. He and his producer listed off several other legal cases in which absolutely zero calls have come in from listeners concerned about due process, including a member of Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors who is also a P.E. teacher, who was accused last month of two sex crimes against a minor. The difference? This teacher is a woman, Mac says. The audience and the media have no problem hanging a man out to dry for sex with a minor, but a woman... that's just hot.

Double standard? I hate to jump to conclusions without more study, but it seems like a double standard. So... is it? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, isn't it a duck? Interestingly, William Saletan has an article on Slate.com on this topic - it is also available on audio, check the link. And he takes on this issue like a good scientist - not with his gut, but with facts. And he says this is no duck:

The new public enemy is the bespectacled babe who teaches our kids math in the classroom and sex in the parking lot... I hate to change the subject from sex back to math, but this frenzy—I'm trying hard not to call it hysteria—reeks of overexcitement. Sex offenses by women aren't increasing. Female offenders are going to jail.

(emphasis mine)
I don't like to make broad generalizations, nor generalizations about broads (what movie is that from?), but anecdotal evidence - my gut - tells me that people do see it differently. There is some double standard. Debra Lafave deserves to serve time, even if her lawyer says she is too pretty for jail. Imagine a man making that argument - I'm too pretty for prison. It wouldn't work - double standard, at least for the general media and general public.

But the numbers don't lie. The legal system isn't allowing a rash of female teacher sex scandals. It just seems that way. William Saletan's article is pretty clear (he credits Slate intern Ben Raphel with the heavy work), and it will have to be the final word on the subject for me, unless someone digs up better research to refute it. That looks like a tall order.

So what about the second argument from the listeners of the radio show today? That it's okay because that boy wanted it? Putting aside for a moment the issue that he doesn't get a say in the legality of the woman's alleged actions, this one is definitely a double standard. I have yet to even see an argument on this. It is simply understood that when a male teacher seduces a minor and claims she (or he!) wanted it, it is statutory rape or worse. When a female teacher seduces a minor and claims the student wanted it, well, that's a little different. Many people nod wisely. Others shake their heads sadly. It is only a small minority who proclaim that this is the same thing on a moral level. An older man and a teenaged girl - that popped up all over the place in my history books. It just isn't seen the same way, and I don't know that I want to make a strong argument on how I feel about it, other than to say that teachers always have to be careful. Everybody has to, but how many people in society are surrounded by 17 year olds all day? Keep the window shades and classroom doors wide open, teachers.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't wear a tight, short green dress to court.

iPod Clothes

2006-01-11T21:32:00.000-04:00

If only there was a way for my students to have their iPods in the classroom without it being conspicuous.

Levi Strauss has announced a new range of jeans specifically geared toward iPod users. They come complete with built-in headphones, joystick, and even a docking cradle.

Perfect.

Nanoelectronics

2006-01-02T11:37:00.000-04:00

Financial Express is reporting that nanoelectronic techniques have been added to the biannual ITRS. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) is an assessment of the semiconductor technology requirements. The stated objective of the ITRS is to ensure advancements in the performance of integrated circuits. This assessment, called roadmapping, is produced by semiconductor industry associations from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the US. It is used by the industry as a planning tool to determine how best to spend R&D money.

The Financial Express article summarizes:

The transition to a post-silicon era is forecast...
The shift away from conventional silicon transistors has become an important part of the industry's thinking, though the use of nanotechnology is not expected to replace current chip-making processes for another decade. The urgency in moving to molecular electronics is propelled in part by recognition that conventional technologies, despite significant advances, will not be able to sustain indefinitely the chip industry dictum, known as Moore's Law, that projects a doubling of computing power roughly every two years.
The semiconductor industry has repeatedly found ways to make conventional transistors ever smaller, making it possible to place more transistors on a single chip for increased computing power and capacity. Currently the smallest of modern transistors are no more than a handful of molecules across; the industry believes it can continue to shrink conventional transistors for only the next decade.
But even those minuscule transistors are bigger than the new class of nanoelectronics, composed of components as small as individual molecules. Researchers are experimenting with a variety of new materials beyond silicon, including organic molecules and carbon nanotubes.

All emphasis added by yours truly. The original article seems to be from NYT.

Stem Cell Fraud

2006-01-02T09:44:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the reports that a South Korean research scientist had faked his results has come a deluge of questions about scientific integrity and the value of peer review. The implication has been that peer review should have caught the fraud before publication. What good is science if it sometimes publishes things and then later takes it back?

As BizzyBlog wrote on 12/17,

Why the need for an “independent verification” if the paper was already “peer-reviewed”?

This attitude demonstrates a misunderstanding of peer review and of science itself.

Science is not a club or a church. Science does not issue edicts or statements of truth in the way many seem to imagine. Just because a researcher has published some work does not mean that it comes with a stamp of veracity that all scientists sign on to.

BizzyBlog (and others) have come to terms with this during the course of this scandal, but have now raised a second concern (which I find completely legitimate): the effect of using taxpayer money to support researchers in uncertain scientific fields, such as stem cell research. If public money is spent without full understanding and disclosure, our public trust has been violated.

BizzyBlog's suggestion:

So the next time you hear the term “peer-reviewed,” I would substitute these words: “passed the smell test (maybe, and if the person submitting the work is ethical and conducted his/her work conscientiously and honorably).”
Given the ever-larger dollars, very often tax dollars, that are based on the reliability of scientific work, standards must be raised, even if it costs money up-front (auditors, if you will) to raise them, and even if scientists’ egos are bruised in the process.

Given that federal funds are being used I see the author's point, although in the interest of full disclosure I must say that I am too libertarian to support federal funds for stem cells or most other scientific research anyway. But even with federal expenditures in the field, these audits are not necessary if we all understand how science works, and what "peer review" actually means. BizzyBlog now outlines a December 30 WSJ article by Thomas Stossel, American Cancer Society Professor at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the division of hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who sums it up nicely:

If reporters understood that journals are magazines, not Holy Scripture, we might not be witnessing ever more onerous regulations inhibiting interactions between academic and industry science.

Dr. Walter Witschey, director of the Science Museum of Virginia, has written an article (here) that hopes to explain the process of peer review for those who do not understand it. In layman's terms. I highly recomment it if you have never submitted a paper for publication in a scientific journal.

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T20:09:00.000-04:00

It is amazing how little meaning January 1 has to me these days. My entire life, it has been a big deal. I was excited to stay up late as a school child. It was one of the wildest nights of the year in college. I lamented being on watch at midnight back in the navy.

But it means nothing to me as a teacher. My new year starts just after every Labor Day. My version of "resolutions" is something I ponder all summer, and enact every fall. Nothing special is enacted for me on the first of January. I hadn't really realized that until last night.

If 1 January is a big deal to you, then I really hope it went well for you, and heralds a great new year.

European Galielo Satellite Network

2006-01-01T20:03:00.000-04:00

The public has become much more familiar with GPS over the past 10 years or so. Many of my students have it in their cars (spoiled!) though they don't know much about how it works. I am hoping to change that in the coming month (except poor AP; they are stuck in thermordynamics), so it is very timely that the European space project Galileo was kicked off this week.

From the Economist (emphasis has been added by me):

On Wednesday December 28th, the Giove-A satellite was launched into space from Kazakhstan, kicking off the biggest-ever European space project. The Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element (the acronym is also Italian for Jove, the king of the Roman gods) is a crucial first step in the roll-out of Galileo, a satellite-based navigation system. Giove-A will test several key technologies for Galileo. If all goes well, the system will be operational in 2008.

European boosters are celebrating a technological leap forward that they say will give them economic and strategic independence from America’s Global Positioning System. GPS, a project of the American military begun in the 1970s, is provided as a free service worldwide, causing some to say that the €3.6 billion ($4.3 billion) Galileo project is unnecessary... Projects like this tend to run over their estimated costs, and once the system is in place, Europe will feel bound to maintain it, whatever the cost...

Galileo is a joint project of the European Union and the European Space Agency, with backing also from China, Ukraine, Israel and India...

Though user fees will not, by themselves, pay for the project, it is hoped that Galileo will create jobs and economic growth (including tax revenues) as industries develop new services based around the satellite system. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001 estimated that Galileo could produce a benefit-to-cost ratio of 4.6 to one...

France’s president, Jacques Chirac has said that European companies could be American “vassals” without their own navigation system. For him, a grand project like Galileo accomplishes several treasured goals: creating jobs in France, reducing its reliance on America, and bringing glory to European (including French) technology.

I think it is interesting the political angle that many news reports are taking on this, with regard to the motivation of the project. An example from the Drudge Retort (the name says it all) is fairly typical of news reports I have seen:

If successful, Galileo will end Europe's reliance on the GPS system, which is ultimately controlled by the US military...

Last year, US President George Bush ordered plans for temporarily disabling GPS satellites during national crises to prevent terrorists from using the technology...

Galileo is under civilian control. The European Space Agency says it will guarantee operation at all times, except in case of "the direst emergency". It also says users would be notified of any potential satellite problems within seconds.

To me, this makes it sound like Galileo was dreamt up last year as a way to retaliate against the Americans for turning off GPS. But the fact is that a project like this is not clumped together in a few months, from concept to launch. Galileo has been in the works for years, and for several reasons. During the Clinton administration, there were already questions of why Europeans were considering a duplicate system, but the fact is that Galileo can be used in ways GPS cannot. GPS is accurate to within about 10 meters for civilians, and about 3 meters for the US government. Galileo will give accuracy to about one meter for those with free access to the system, and down to centimetres for paying commercial users. Also, GPS would need to be upgraded before it can be used for some of the applications the private sector has in mind. Boeing and Airbus have been angling for years to see the system handle “free flight” in which each aircraft finds its own route clear of other aircraft, without the middleman of radioing controllers on the ground.
As a 2003 Economist article on Galileo noted;

GPS needs more spending to upgrade it to handle applications in which lives could be put at risk, such as in air traffic control.

That article also notes a suggestion by David Braunschvig of Foreign Affairs magazine:

(He) suggests that the Pentagon hives off the military version and develops a separate commercial system to compete with Galileo. In an emergency, they could act as back-up for each other. At the moment, the commercial services based on free access to GPS have revenues estimated at around $12 billion, with no return to the American government.

And although it will be owned and controlled by the EU (not China, you conspiracy theorists!),

Galileo will be in part a commercial system. A concessionaire will get the right to operate the system for a fixed period in return for plunking down two-thirds of the deployment costs—around €2.2 billion

. (quoted from Economist, 2004)

You would pay for it, wouldn't you? Bring on the satellites! Bring on the market!

Merry Christmas all

2005-12-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

As the in-laws recede northward on I-95, I find myself starting to worry about next week. I still have until Tuesday before classes start again, but I can't help thinking about the fact that I haven't graded the tests I brought home, or figured out how to make the next two weeks of material exciting enough to whip the students out of their post-holiday, pre-midterm haze.

I am always looking for new ways to make the material more exciting for myself and my students. It is very demoralizing to come up with an idea to this end and find that it fails miserably. Among the multitude of gifts under the tree at the Wulf household this year was The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Kakalios has been trying to make physics more exciting for his students for a while now, and he thinks that comic book superheroes are a good way in. He notes in the introduction that such a fanciful example for the laws of physics is a great way to sidestep that horrible question, "When am I ever going to use this?" If this book is able to provide some ideas as I get deeper into it, I will recommend it to my fellow science educators. But even if it doesn't inspire me as an educator, I know I will recommend it for the fact that it is very funny and informative.

Okay, it's time to grade that AP test, I know. I will check back in with you all as soon as I can lower my stress levels enough to again feel like I am on vacation.

Hahahah, it's time to add in some photos that are needed for a game I play. Pay them no mind.

Astronomer's Delight

2005-12-23T19:30:00.000-04:00

From SpaceWeather.com:

CHRISTMAS MORNING: "Mom, dad, wake up, it's Christmas!" If this happens to you at 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 25th, steal a glance out the window on your way to the tree. The crescent moon will be gliding by the bright star Spica--a pretty close encounter. In some places the moon will actually blot out the star. Check here for sky maps and more information.

Also,

if you get a telescope for Christmas, point it at Mars--fast! The red planet is receding from Earth at a speed of 30,000 mph and shrinking as it goes. Using an 8-inch telescope, Joel Warren of Amarillo, Texas, took these two pictures of Mars five weeks apart:

What a difference: By mid-January, Mars will be only half as bright as it is tonight, and its apparent diameter will have decreased from 13 to 9 arcseconds. So now is the time to observe Mars. Look for it straight overhead after sunset: sky map.

What was the top scientific breakthrough of 2005?

2005-12-23T10:14:00.000-04:00

The journal Science has proclaimed evolution the breakthrough of 2005. (article here)

My first thought: Why is this still considered a breakthrough, 146 years after "The Origin of Species"? Wow.

Sabres Fall

2005-12-22T23:16:00.000-04:00

My Buffalo Sabres fell tonight 4-1 to the Florida Panthers. Curses!

This ends a 13-game win-streak for goalie Martin Biron, and a 7-game win streak for the team. They are still in great shape overall, but what really burns me is this:

The Sabres, who were last beaten by San Jose 5-0 on Dec. 2, had also won nine consecutive road games, one short of the league record set by the Sabres in 1983-84 and matched by the St. Louis Blues in 2000 and the New Jersey Devils in 2001. Buffalo last lost on the road in Ottawa, 6-1, on Nov. 12. The loss to the Senators was Biron's last defeat.

Sigh. But that's okay - I love this sport, and I am just thrilled they are playing again, after last year's strike. And I love the Sabres, no matter how their season goes. To have them playing and doing this well is just icing on the big fat hockey cake.

Gifts from Former Students?

2005-12-22T22:46:00.000-04:00

I have had a couple of years now of teaching high school students, and being on the receiving end of some wonderful (and completely unnecessary) gifts. In fact, as I type I am digging into some Hershey Kiss cookies (we call them Kiss Krinkles) that were dutifully delivered by a student who doesn't enjoy the class much but whose mom probably felt it was a good idea anyway. And I really appreciate every bite of them.

This year, I experienced something I had not heard about before: Gifts from former students. I cannot tell you how surprised I was by this - especially since these students are off at college, not just advanced to the next grade. How touching is that?

The first was yesterday, when I met up with three former students for brunch. They told me about college at rival schools, and gave me a beautiful and hillarious book they had written about what it means to be an AP student. I was swelling with pride as their book explained what nerds they have become in each of the subjects they took at the AP level - including my beloved physics, of course.

The second time was today, when a student who graduated two years ago called me and said he'd like directions to stop by my house. It was unexpected but not at all unwelcome - he goes to college in the area and I meet up with him about once a month. He stopped by today and handed me a very heavy gift. I opened it and was quite surprised to find he had given me a gorgeous book on astronomy and cosmology called "Universe".

I have been taken off guard and thoroughly humbled by these two gifts and the sentiments attached to them. I just had to share.

Stem Cell Research

2005-12-20T14:07:00.000-04:00

New Jersey has become the first state to use public money to fund human stem cell research. The state announced $5 million in grants Friday to be split among 17 projects, the New York Times reported. Only three involve human embryonic stem cells, with others studying animals or using adult stem cells...
"The grants we have awarded today are based on science, not politics, and have been conceived by some of the brightest minds and best institutions in our state," acting Gov. Richard J. Codey said in a statement. "This funding will hopefully set the stage for a new era in medical treatments that will ease the suffering of millions and ultimately save lives."

(from physorg)

I hate New Jersey, but I love medical research. The libertarian part of me would rather not see this funded by the state, but the scientist in me is much more excited by the fact that the state is not trying to block stem cell research. In fact, my soon-to-be-ex-governor Mark Warner was complaining about Congress's anti-research stance just last week.

Congress, Warner said, has put too much emphasis on issues like the Terri Schiavo case, while blocking stem-cell research and ignoring the challenge of 45 million Americans living without health insurance.

Hey, I'm stuck with statists in the government. I at least want some statists who are interested in scientific research.

Intelligent Design Finally Ruled Unscientific by Courts

2005-12-20T12:53:00.000-04:00

"Intelligent Design" is a pretty vague concept. Its proponents feel it is scientific, despite the fact that it makes no falsifiable predictions and is therefore clearly not a scientific theory. It would get tossed out of any 4th grade science fair. Now, this doesn't make it untrue - a lot of things that would get tossed out of any 4th grade science fair still have value. But the measure of truth regarding Intelligent Design cannot be determined by science - it must be determined by faith, which means it does not belong in the curriculum. Today, a federal judge finally spelled it out for the ID camp (who will now return to the drawing board instead of "getting it").

It is amazing to me that a court actually had to say this. Intelligent Design should never be taught in a science classroom as science, period. There is no reasonable way around this position. Having said that, I will still feel the need to bring it up in my science classroom again next year, as I have explained in the past at AtlasBlogged (Science is Not Afraid and ID in my Classroom?).

Some interesting reading on the subject can be found here (pro-ID) and here (against). Both articles appeared in the Philadephia Inquirer and act as a little bit of point/counter point.

Vacation

2005-12-19T12:11:00.000-04:00

Well, I am about halfway through my first day of Christmas vacation (I don't count weekends), and I haven't really done anything. That's the point, isn't it? At least on the first day?

The kids are at daycare, the wife is at work, and I am sucking down Kenya AA and listening to Neil Young as I scroll through the blogs and enjoy reading news articles I had saved without reading through. I'm thinking about fixing the blogroll both here at and AtlasBlogged, but that seems a little like work and I am not sure I am up for it.

[glance at huge stack of school stuff]

I'm not sure when I will get to that stuff - grading, writing midterms, whatever. It'll come. Right now it's just time for coffee and Neil Young.

Nortel to Sponsor ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative; Quanta to Build

2005-12-16T22:59:00.000-04:00

Nortel announced today that it has become a corporate member of the "One Laptop per Child" initiative that was founded earlier this year by Nicholas Negroponte. It was announced on Wednesday that Quanta would build the machines.

This initiative (in case you haven't heard of it) was founded with the purpose of putting laptops with wireless connectivity into the hands of children in third world countries (and Massechussets) at a cost of less than $100.

The machines will run Linux and require little energy (turning a hand crank will be enough to power them). Connecting to the Internet will be possible through mesh networking. The first 5 million to 15 million units will get shipped to China, Brazil, India, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand.

Will it be a big success? Or a flat failure? Somewhere in between, I'm guessing. I'll keep an eye on the project for my readers, if I have any.

Wulf The Hockey Fan

2005-12-16T21:18:00.000-04:00

My students are well aware of the fact that I am a huge hockey fan. Hockey is
1) the world's most excellent sport, and
2) a great way to demonstrate the laws of physics.

Thus we talk about it as often as I can get away with. Virginia is a southerly state, and my students who are not actually from here are not generally from hockey country.

Oh, and the Sabres are off to their best start since winning 20 of their first 29 games in 1979-80. I love them, and they didn't lose me over the strike.

(By the way, in 1979-80, Don Edwards and Bob Sauve won the Vezina and the Sabres won the Prince of Wales trophy. They lost to the famous 1980s Islanders in the postseason. More importanly, they played damned good hockey.)

the 22 Greatest Scientific Breakthroughs of the 20th century

2005-12-10T18:24:00.000-04:00

In his new book, "The Discoveries," novelist and physicist Alan Lightman offers his list of the 22 greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, devoting a chapter to each and reprinting the scientific papers in which they were presented. The list of 22 is provided here by the Boston Globe:

1. THE QUANTUM - Max Planck (1900)
2. HORMONES - William Bayliss and Ernest Starling (1902)
3. THE PARTICLE NATURE OF LIGHT - Albert Einstein (1905)
4. SPECIAL RELATIVITY - Albert Einstein (1905)
5. THE NUCLEUS OF THE ATOM - Ernest Rutherford (1911)
6. THE SIZE OF THE COSMOS - Henrietta Leavitt (1912)
7. THE ARRANGEMENT OF ATOMS IN SOLID MATTER - W. Friedrich, P. Knipping, and M. von Laue (1912)
8. THE QUANTUM ATOM - Niels Bohr (1913)
9. THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NERVES - Otto Loewi (1921)
10. THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE - Werner Heisenberg (1927)
11. THE CHEMICAL BOND - Linus Pauling (1928)
12. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE - Edwin Hubble (1929)
13. ANTIBIOTICS - Alexander Fleming (1929)
14. THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION OF ENERGY IN LIVING ORGANISMS - Hans Krebs and W. A. Johnson (1937)
15. NUCLEAR FISSION - Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (1939); and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (1939)
16. THE MOVABILITY OF GENES - Barbara McClintock (1948)
17. THE STRUCTURE OF DNA - James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick (1953); and Rosalind E. Franklin and R. G. Gosling (1953)
18. THE STRUCTURE OF PROTEINS - Max F. Perutz, M. G. Rossmann, Ann F. Cullis, Hilary Muirhead, Georg Will, and A. C. T. North (1960)
19. RADIO WAVES FROM THE BIG BANG - Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson (1965); and Robert H. Dicke, P. James E. Peebles, Peter G. Roll, and David T. Wilkinson (1965)
20. A UNIFIED THEORY OF FORCES - Steven Weinberg (1967)
21. QUARKS - M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, H. W. Kendall, E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, L. W. Mo, and R. E. Taylor (1969)
22. THE CREATION OF ALTERED FORMS OF LIFE - David A. Jackson, Robert H. Symons, and Paul Berg (1972)

So... what are the odds we manage to teach all of this stuff to our children before awarding them diplomas? I may have found a specific goal for this year's classes...

The Richmond City School Board's Johnson

2005-12-06T13:34:00.000-04:00

News at Richmond.com:

Stephen B. Johnson resigned as Richmond School Board chairman Monday night after reports last week that his profile appeared on an explicit dating Web site.

(full story here)

Bare-chested photos that have since been removed, but had been posted in the gay section of manhunt.net. Johnson's photo was reportedly not explicit in nature, but the text describing him was reportedly very graphic. Richmond.com and the school board seem to be taking a very tolerant approach to this issue - after all, is a man not free to do what he likes in his private life? He has broken no law, endangered no child, and done absolutely nothing wrong. Deborah Jewell-Sherman, superintendent of city schools, led the school board and meeting audience in giving Johnson a standing ovation last night, and thanked him for his service on the school board, which will continue (just not as chairman).

Board member Carol A.O. Wolf, District 3, said Johnson demonstrated true leadership when he decided to voluntarily resign as chairman of the school board.
"He is a good man and a great soul," she said. "He will continue to fight to make things right for the children of Richmond . . . A lesser man would have been undone by this invasion of privacy. He deserves respect for being willing to admit error and to keep working to make our schools better."

I will keep these comments in mind the next time I see that a teacher is found to be posting images and information on an explicit gay singles website. I am curious to know whether Richmond.com and the parents will show the same level of understanding. I await the standing ovation that teacher receives from the school board.

I have nothing against Mr. Johnson, and it certainly does not bother me if he is gay, but his decision to post this type of singles ad was so ill-advised as to be worrisome. Would you want someone this foolish holding such power over the schooling of your children? What are those children to make of the example he is setting here? This is a member of their School Board!

Not everyone is taking the example Johnson sets so lightly. Richmond Morning Show host Jimmy Barrett asks, "Is Stephen Johnson right when he says the Times-Dispatch article about him is a cheap shot?" (at Newsradio 1140 AM)

Last night's Richmond School Board meeting was a Stephen Johnson lovefest as employees lined up to defend his actions and accuse the Richmond Times-Dispatch of running a smear job on the embattled school board member. Johnson himself called the article that outed his presence on a pornographic gay dating website "a cheap shot." The impression you get is that it was done strictly for political reasons. That somehow Richmonders do not have a right to know about this "private" part of Stephen Johnson's life. OK, I'll grant you that he wasn't involved in child pornography but this website does cast doubts about his decision making abilities and would be unsavory for any school official to be involved with. Interestingly enough, we did find out from school board member George Braxton that this would not present a job problem for ANY school employee, teachers and prinicipals included....That's a scary thought! The overall opinion expressed by many other Richmond school employees seems to be 'everyone makes mistakes' and 'Mr. Johnson did no wrong.' A liberal urban school agenda? Or are they right? Cheap shot? Or public service? That's our Question of the Day.

84% of respondents say Johnson is wrong, and voters have every right to know what kind of man he is. Normally, I really don't care for talk-show callers or on-line polls, but I think this is in such stark contrast to the opinions expressed by the school board members that it merits some thought. Again, this is the example he set for teachers and students - we all now know this is completely acceptable behavior in Richmond, VA.

At least we are clear on that.

A couple of inches of snow, and the city of Richmond shuts down.

2005-12-06T12:54:00.000-04:00

I'm okay with that. A day at home, reading my current book and enjoying hot drinks. I'm catching up on a little school work and planning to watch a movie. I'd like to take a second to note that Virginia is a very progressive state that relies primarily on solar power for snow removal. No pollution there.

Failure at Math is a Disaster for Society

2005-12-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

I sometimes note to people that math literacy is not given the same amount of respect as reading literacy. This absolutely drives me nuts. Think about how acceptable it is to say "I am not good at math" or "I am not a math person". The principal at my school once said "I am not very good good at math," to the entire faculty at the beginning of a meeting. Would it be considered at all the same to say "I am functionally illiterate" or even "Big words escape me"? Heck no.

But math literacy is inherently important - arguably as much as reading literacy. I found a wonderful article on the importance of math literacy, though I admit you have to be reading literate in order to comprehend it.

Working Past Midnight all Month

2005-12-04T13:38:00.000-04:00

What a month. I have had a great time moving from the pendulum lab to a circular motion lab, for all classes. And AP is nearly caught up! But it has been absolutely brutal - Thanksgiving break was spent fixing the kitchen instead of prepping for class. And being a student on top of being a teacher is not helping - that reading class is really sucking up the time. Add to it that I am a parent, and my wife works retail - you can guess how much help she is around the house at this time of year. I have been up past midnight most nights this month, just trying to keep my proverbial head above water.

Thankfully that will soon be over. As soon as they quit trying to tell me how to be a better teacher, I can get back to actually trying to become a better teacher.

Super Low Tech Lab

2005-11-13T22:47:00.000-04:00

I have spent so much time trying to drag my labs back out of the 1990s and into the 1950s (see here for an explanation) that I have been neglecting my family and even my blogs.
I have decided to remedy that. I just spent a 3-day weekend with the family (it is very rare that my wife and I would have days off together), and now I am trying to figure out what to do this week. None of my demonstrations and labs that rely on PASCO can be used, so it's low tech on momentum for the standard class - I think we have some spring loaded carts that still work. I will load one down with some weights and see if a reasonable demo can get the point across. For honors... I don't know. I'll sleep on it and wing it in the morning. They probably need one last review of Newton's laws for linear motion anyway, and we can start circular motion on Wednesday.

But AP... that's the lowest tech class of them all, this week. They will spend tomorrow deriving an expression for the period of a pendulum, using 3 meters of string and various brass weights. I don't expect them to nail the whole thing in an hour, of course, but if they can figure out the general form of how the string length affects the period, and how the mass and amplitude do not, then I will declare them geniuses and go home happy.

And if you go to this link and click on the words "simple pendulum" at the very top, you might go home happy as well. Be amused by simple things... like the simple pendulum.

Quote of the Day

2005-10-31T20:51:00.000-04:00

"In physics, it takes three laws to explain 99% of the data; in finance, it takes more than 99 laws to explain about 3%."
Andrew Lo

Counting Curse Words?

2005-10-30T14:11:00.000-04:00

I don't have Chuck Shepherd's "News of the Weird" as one of my daily news sources, but every once in a while I check in on him and find a real gem. The latest installment quotes the Daily Mail for the following story:

At the Weavers School in Wellingborough, England, teachers were told in August to tolerate 15- and 16-year-old students' cussing, even the "f word," at least up to five times per class. According to London's Daily Mail, the teachers were to merely keep a count of the words on the board, which the school believes shows tolerance for occasional bad language, but which more cynical teachers and parents believe will encourage the students to max out usage in each class.

I am thinking, No. I didn't tolerate that when teaching at the university level, and I certainly wouldnt' from high schoolers. Heck, I put a damper on it when I taught in the navy. If you can't curse like a sailor there, you certainly can't in my classroom. This is plain ridiculous - thus, I ridicule it.

Vector Torture

2005-10-30T12:25:00.000-04:00

Note to myself for next year:

My physics courses generally start with basic definitions and equations of the terms of motion (like velocity and acceleration) so the students can describe how an object is moving.
From there we move into Newton's laws, with which a student can describe why an object is moving.

Then comes the fiasco of applying this knowledge in more than one dimension at a time. Vector addition is very difficult for these students. Even in my honors classes, only half of the students have had trigonometry prior to my class - I believe it is a corequisite course - so students are overwhelmed with the number of equations and relationships they have to use.

"I don't get it."
"What's the x component?"
"Wait... last time you used cosine, so why are you using sine here?"
"What are we trying to find, anyway?"
"I added the vertical distance to 9.8, because that's vertical too."

I think next year I will spend the first week or two introducing our use of trigonometry without any discussion of movement. If a line segment is placed on a graph from the origin to the point (x, y), can we find the horizontal component, the vertical component, the angle? Of course we can. And once they think of that process as a mathematical process - one of geometry, not of physics and motion - I suspect it will all fall into place more quickly.

I'll let you know next year.

Teach Integrity

2005-10-29T23:06:00.000-04:00

Any good scientist knows it is more important to record one's observations in the laboratory than to record what was expected but did not happen. It is a constant struggle to convey this message in the classroom. Students spend their entire schoolday looking for the "right answer" - usually meaning the one that will get parents and teachers off their backs so they can get to the business of doing what interests them. And is it so different in the real world?

M.I.T. Dismisses a Researcher, Saying He Fabricated Some Data

Sigh. I emphasize to my students that if their data is grossly wrong, but they are able to record it properly and explain why, then they are on track for a good grade. I have had students get a 100% on a lab assignment despite having an experimental error of more than an order of magnitude. If a student is able to sit down afterwards and figure out why the expected results were not achieved, and especially if they can explain a better procedure or setup for investigating the topic in question, then clearly that student deserves a superior mark. That student is a good scientist.

Our school has a writing initiative (to improve scores on standardized tests), and every teacher is required to give at least one writing assessment per quarter. Many teachers have an essay on their test and count that. Some assign the work as homework despite the fact that it is supposed to be done in a timed setting, like the standardized tests are. Personally, I like to get the students a little off-topic... for example, get them writing about ethics instead of the momentum chapter we are covering. I think this NY Times article on Dr. Luk Van Parijs may be the prompt for their next assignment.

Technological Failures

2005-10-23T18:03:00.000-04:00

I have fallen way behind my intended pace of at least three posts a week. I blame technology.

My school district is one that has been in the news for years, because we issue laptops to all students in high school and middle school. Initially these were iBooks, but the district made a very popular switch to the Dell Inspiron 600M this year (at least for the high schools - the Apple contract with the middle schools ends this year, and it is still not known which platform the county will choose for the next four years of middle schoolers).

There was some negative press about ditching the iBooks after a 4 year initiative. Well, no, there was some negative press about the stampede that occurred when the district offered the old student iBooks at $50 each.

But the public showed little concern about any glitches with the platform shift. Teachers and students were largely enamored with the new Windows machines, too, making naysayers look like the Cult of Mac - you know the type.

So now we have these new machines, and the Dells are for the most part faster machines than the iBooks were, and they have MS Office instead of Apple Works, which makes it easier for most people to get anything done. But they didn't manage to put on every last little bit of software that would be needed by every last little teacher, including the software for the PASCO probeware my school purchased over the last few years. We have a full lab set of motion sensors and force sensors for mechanics labs, plus an assortment of probeware for temperature, absolute pressure, sound level, light intensity, magnetic field intensity, and probably some other things I can't remember off the top of my head.

In other words, after the school spent a few thousand dollars on making our physics labs easier to do and easier to understand, the district took away our ability to use the equipment. I know it was not intentional or malicious, and frankly everybody is very sympathetic and concerned, but that doesn't change the fact that right now my students in the Class of 2005 are doing labs that are no more technologically advanced than those I did when I took the class 15 years ago. What's the point in having a laptop in the science classroom if you can't use probeware? It is very frustrating for me, because the last two years of probeware were such an improvement over having students plot position vs time by hand, or use spring scales and stop watches, with their great capacity for inaccuracy and error.

In fact, I have been spending many extra hours retrofitting all of my lab documents to the technologies of 1950... leaving very little time to sit here and blog about the teaching techniques that would make life easier for science teachers everywhere. Suffice it to say that I am a member of the Cult of Probeware. As the year progresses, I will share more of my experiences about using probeware to teach, both at the high school level and university (we used LoggerPro and video capture there, and I was hoping to start incorporating those technologies this year, but no dice - maybe next year).

Incidentally, I have seen Vernier probeware demonstrated, and I can't really see any difference between Vernier and Pasco. If you start to incorporate either into your science classroom and you have the appropriate software available, you will find that students learn more, and faster.

What do the Chinese call their astronauts?

2005-10-14T21:12:00.000-04:00

Shenzhou-6 is China's first multi-manned and multi-day spaceflight (see here, here), and is now entering its third day in orbit.

My students were completely unaware of it. Most of them were unaware of the fact that the Chinese had ever been to space. None were aware that there is a new space race brewing, which may be bad for somebody politically, but which should be good for science educators.

Here is what my students know about space flight, in general:
- The Russians launched Sputnik and it was a big deal.
- The Russians put a man in space before the U.S.
- The Russians put animals in space, as well.
- John Glenn was an astronaut.
- The Americans did finally surpass Soviet achievements.
- The Americans landed on the moon (this is contested by approximately a third of my students, who believe that this has been proven to be a hoax. Proven!)
- "Apollo 13" is based on a real NASA mission.
- There was a shuttle that blew up on liftoff, in an unknown year. (One student even knew that a O-ring failed, though he was surprised to learn what an O-ring is, and how small one is. After I learned that they didn't know much about this, we watched streaming video of the Challenger, and many students claim never to have seen it before. I find this amazing, but I am sure some of you will find it amazing that I was born after the last lunar landing.)
- There was a shuttle that blew up on reentry a few years ago. Given a few seconds, they were able to recall that it was the Columbia. They had a vague understanding that foam cracked the wing. There was a sense that a coverup may have been involved on this catastrophe, as well.

Remember, these are 16-18 year olds in public schools in America. I was glad to see the things that were known by most, and I am endeavoring to fill in the gaps. The following is a very incomplete list of things they do not know about space flight, just based on the last week's worth of conversation:

- Anything about the X-prize, except that "that British guy who owns Virgin" is involved in a deal to commercialize space flight. A great discussion ensued about whether it is worth $200,000 to buy 2 half hour flights.
- Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen.
- Anything about nations other than the USA and USSR putting anything into space, with the exception of students who were of the same nationality as an astronaut they were aware of (Indian, Israeli, Japanese).
- ISS ("Do you mean there are people in orbit right now, on that thing?")
- the altitude at which things orbit.

I shared J-Track with AP today, and they were wonderfully impressed, as am I every time I check that thing out (JAVA applet 3-D plot showing the position of over 500 satellites in real time). The other classes may see it on Monday... technology pending. More about that in the next post.

SpaceShipOne on Display at Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum

2005-10-05T17:57:00.000-04:00

SpaceShipOne was formally donated to the Smithsonian in a ceremony in Washington D.C. today. It now hangs between Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1.

Burt Rutan and Paul Allen were on hand at the ceremony. If you don't know what SpaceShipOne is and why it belongs in the NASM, consider this:

Like many space entrepreneurs, Rutan thinks the private sector can do what NASA cannot: inspire tomorrow's astronauts and scientists by offering them the real promise of a trip to space.
There are signs that SpaceShipOne's historic suborbital flights marked the dawn of a new space age.
Of the 26 teams that entered the Ansari X Prize competition, 10 are now viable companies, according to Ian Murphy, spokesman for the prize's successor, the X Prize Cup.
Rutan has a deal with British entrepreneur Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, to build a fleet of five spacecraft. The new company, Virgin Galactic, will take passengers on 2 1/2-hour trips into space for $200,000 each.

Nobel Prize Time

2005-10-04T22:04:00.000-04:00

Wow, more than a week since my last post. Sometimes, it's hard to find time even to sleep or grade papers.

If nothing else, I have to say I am always excited by the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. Isn't everyone? I have been called a geek for much less, I assure you.

Early in the schoolyear, we always have to talk to science students about the precision of our lab equipment (or lack thereof). How accurate are the scales, meter sticks, etc? What uncertainty will this create in your measurements? How many significant figures do you have in this measurement?

Conveniently, we can refer back to these conversations when discussing this year's Nobel Prize winning research:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Roy Glauber, John Hall and Germany's Theodor Haensch for studying light and harnessing lasers to create a "measuring stick" to gauge frequencies with extreme precision.
"We get most of our knowledge of the world around us through light," said the Academy, calling optics "the physicists' tool for dealing with light phenomena."

The winning trio's research answered such questions as how candle light differs from laser beams in a CD player and how light can measure time more accurately than an atomic clock.

"All three of them deserve the prize," said Peter Rodgers, editor of Physics World magazine. "The general area of quantum optics and lasers is an area in which there has been a lot of progress in recent years. This prize reflects well on progress in that area."

Haensch used even-spaced laser pulses "like the teeth of a comb or the marks on a ruler" to determine the value of frequencies and Hall refined this technique.

"One of the best applications is to test whether what we teach in physics is true or just approximately true," he said.

Four Days of School

2005-09-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

I've been told that this 4-day school week is the newest educational controversy... school districts do have to find a way to cope with the higher prices of gasoline and heating bills, so expect this to be an issue for small rural districts first.

Brownsville PA is exactly that. They are looking at switching to a four-day school week to save energy costs, and they are making plans to have longer school days in order not to lose overall instructional time. (article) But Superintendent Lawrence Golembiewski wants to cut Mondays, unlike the Fridays suggested in other districts.

To accomplish the switch, he'd add about 15 minutes to each class period to cover the same amount of material over four longer school days. He favors Monday as the day to close, figuring it would be counterproductive to close on Friday but keep schools heated for sporting events on Friday nights.

"We live in Western Pennsylvania," he said. "You cannot touch King Football."

This makes a lot of sense, financially. What are parents going to do with their kids on that new day off? And will No Child be Left Behind? It's hard to predict... if it has never been done before. But it has.

Financial problems prompted the East Grand School District, about 80 miles northwest of Denver, to adopt the four-day week in 1982, business manager Flo Glenn said. District officials heard many of the same objections about longer days and child-care problems, but she said the district has realized savings in transportation and heating costs.

Good. But academic performance?

Teachers report that they now cover about 20 percent more material each year because classes are longer and students have more time to remain engrossed in discussions. Test scores also went up "a little bit," but he said other factors contributed to that increase.

I assume this is an 8-period day, not block schedules. I wouldn't want my students for 2 hours at a time.

Student participation in school activities has increased because students believe they have more time to balance extracurriculars with homework, Creal said. Teachers, too, like having an extra day to plan lessons and projects.

I'll bet they do. I am about ready to forward this to my own superintendent.

The East Grand website includes several great sources of information, including the Colorado Department of Education 4 Day Report. Please check these out.

The Four Day School Week

2005-09-24T15:15:00.000-04:00

In Jackson County, KY, the students will be getting a three day weekend.

Every weekend.

Across Kentucky, school districts are cutting field trips, redrawing bus routes or curtailing athletic events to cope with rising fuel costs. But no one's making quite as dramatic a change as Jackson County.

Starting the week of Oct. 17, students will get every Friday off. Teachers will work half a day.

With the move, approved by the school board Sept. 5, Jackson becomes the fourth school district in the state to implement a four-day week, and the first to do so primarily for financial reasons.

What a great lesson for the students: If gas prices go up, take more time off.
Incidentally, I found this article via In The Agora.

A Problem With Higher Education?

2005-09-18T14:08:00.000-04:00

I just read the article Warning Signs about Higher Education, by Alexander H. Joffe (director of Campus Watch). It is this kind of writing that makes the American Right sound so lost. Mr Joffe bemoans the state of American Universities, saying they "have a deeply negative impact on American society, its sense of cohesion and dignity, its perceptions of right and wrong, and ability to do good in the world... [and they have a] hostile environment toward people with traditional religious beliefs."

Joffe claims that some of his friends have decided not to let their children attend a university, because campuses are so dangerous to the morals and intellect of students. Yes, shelter them, that will ensure their success. [/sarcasm] It is disturbing to me to read his contradictory statements.

Consider these two from the same article:
"The middle class believes that academics and the environment they create on campus, in politicized classrooms and generally in terms of permitting or even encouraging any type of behavior, is antithetical to the values it has struggled to convey to its kids..."
And,
"The liberal arts no longer appeal for their own sake to a wide swath of the middle class, since they no longer reflect values of free inquiry and tolerance for others."

So is the problem that students are permitted and encouraged to inquire freely about the people of the world, and the lifestyles or beliefs of people unlike themselves and their parents?
Or is the problem that students are no longer able to inquire freely about the people of the world, and the lifestyles or beliefs of people unlike themselves and their parents?

Surely Mr Joffe would say that I have missed the point. But when he claims "The first step is for academia to realize that it is they who have lost touch," any critical reader should recognize that Mr Joffe is out of touch with both academia and the average American.

What would cause academia to feel that they have lost touch with anybody? American collegiate enrollment is higher than ever before, especially in the parts of our society where it used to be an unattainable dream. American universities are the envy of the world - grab the Sept 8 Economist if you don't think so. Any private corporation would be ecstatc to have the growth and success that American universities have been having over the past several decades - academia would laugh you out of the room if you tried to make a serious argument that they have lost touch with our society as a whole, or any subgroup within it. Mr Jaffe's argument sounds naive without some hard evidence that it represents anything beyond the most extreme religious minority of our population. And frankly, I went to college with people like those Mr Jaffe claims are becoming disenfranchised. Most of them had strong enough religious convictions to get through school unscathed, or else were already losing their faith before arriving at college.

In short, there are definitely problems with higher education. I can't see that Mr Jaffe knows what any of them are.

NOAA Hurricane Hunters Getting Drones

2005-09-18T12:23:00.000-04:00

It may not be as romantic an image
as a small prop plane with salty, gritty air jockeys chomping on corncob pipes and bracing against the bucking turbulence of the outer bands of a developing hurricane in order to provide us with the relevent data like atmospheric pressure and wind speed... but it's cool. And it's useful.

NOAA is hoping to use unmanned drones (Aerosonde platform) to investigate certain aspects of hurricanes that cannot be safely investigated by other means - specifically, conditions at really low altitude inside tropical storms. The report is here, and it lists two primary scientific objectives;
to observe and better understand
- The surface ocean and atmospheric boundary layer environment ahead of and along the projected TC track
- The low-level inflow layer associated with a mature hurricane.

A (short) related NASA article here.

We will definitely be talking about this in class. Chapters on flight are coming up soon, and the students always want to know more about hurricanes - probably even more so this year.
Thanks to this political blog where I first found the story.

Job Security

2005-09-18T10:42:00.000-04:00

"Forced Out by Storm, Teachers Seek News of Job Openings, PayHost states relax hiring rules, while federal government mulls ‘highly qualified’ waivers."

Woooo - what a situation. Some people who have been displaced by Katrina are looking at starting over from scratch. What would draw me back to where I currently live, if all of Virginia were destroyed? Not a thing, I guess. I would quickly find myself living with family in another state (I've got a couple of options), and if I had to pick up a new job there, I think I would buy a house.

New Orleans will be struggling for years and years to replace their infrastructure and qualified public servants. A third of their police force is reported to have left the job, and that was a bad force to begin with. What a nightmare, all around.

Technology Stinks

2005-09-15T21:33:00.000-04:00

I spent 90 minutes before classes this morning trying to get the printer working. Any of the printers. Any one of the (counting, counting) 9 printers I am supposed to have access to at my school.

Understand that I am about as computer literate as you can get without being paid to be a computer geek. But something in this new system sucks. I don't know what the problem is, but it is going to get pretty critical soon.

After school I got a chance to see the Film Club for the first time since June. The Film Club at our school does not watch films or discuss the social impact of films, as I had supposed when I first heard of them. They make films. As I now enter my 13th month of sponsoring this club, I have to be honest and admit that I have never done a damn thing for them. They are completely self-driven, extremely motivated, and really good. Other than providing a room for weekly meetings and access to an LCD projector, my major contribution has been to read scripts and watch footage while saying, "Great but inappropriate." "Really good story but the school cannot sponsor you making a film about a teacher who murders his students, even if an angel dismembers him at the end." "That goes beyond innuendo and is just plain sexual." Etc. Sometimes I really feel like I am being a dick... a real Principal Richard Vernon. They assure me I am not, but I hate stifling these 17 year olds on issues that I really don't think are a big deal, personally. My life as a teacher.

First Entry

2005-09-14T22:07:00.000-04:00

Not much to say in the first entry. Today I walked my AP class through the formulas of constant acceleration and free fall, and then tried to keep that same pace with my honors class. The big differences between the two classes are 1) the AP students have mostly taken a physics class before, 2) the AP students are on average taking higher math classes, 3) I only have 10 kids in the AP class, but 3o in the honors. Because of these facts, honors stopped at the beginning of free fall.

I did get through free fall in my Conceptual class, which is for students whose math skills are poor. We keep it below trig in that class. I took that class out to the football field today and re-enacted the experiment for which Galileo is so famous (and which we have no evidence he actually did); Dropping stuff from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We dropped a golf ball and a bowling ball from the top of the bleachers. They knew what was supposed to happen, probably from their middle school course, but it got us outside and helped establish after a week of class that physics might actually be a fun course. We'll see how long I can keep that up.