The hollow Einstein face
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: May 23, 2009
We have an illusion that consists of a hollow face of Einstein which seems to be looking at you whether you are looking at the front of it or the back. It’s very impressive. I use it to remind students (and myself) that there is a heck of a lot out there that we still don’t understand, even if we like to pretend otherwise.
The illusion can be purchased from grand-illusions.com, one of the very best sources for all types of illusions.
So when New-Scientist posted a video on how this was being used to test for schizophrenia, I thought perhaps it was time to check it out again (apparently people suffering from schizophrenia don’t notice the effect).
New podcast on exam technique
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: May 13, 2009
I have uploaded a new podcast on exam technique. It’s 19 minutes long so I may have overdone it somewhat.
The document itself is available here and both podcast and document are on the revision page of the website.
You might notice that there is a gap where the itunes link should be; that’s because I’ve forgotten how to incorporate the podcast into itunes. It’ll come back to me some day.
I have also fixed all the links on top of each webpage (I hope) and played with the main banner on the homepage. It still looks very amateurish – one of these days I’ll get it right.
Junior Cert Physics Resources
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: May 7, 2009
- In: junior cert
- 1 Comment
I have tended to neglect the Junior Cert end of thephysicsteacher.ie
Hopefully this has now been rectified. Or at any rate it’s a start.
The interactive links were there already but not easily accessable, and were all on one long page.
The section which took longest to prepare was the ‘Tips for Teachers’ section. Hopefully this will prove useful to Biology and Chemistry teachers, and any new teachers, particularly hdip and trainee teachers.
Being more organised may also encourage me to be a bit more adventurous with the investigative approach rather than just telling students what to do for each so-called ‘experiment’.
I had my own school in mind with our own resources, but tried to be as general as possible.
The links on top are as likely to take you into a parallel universe as anywhere else, but that’s for another day.
I am particularly proud of the ‘Teachers’ Tips’ column; each section of the Junior Physics syllabus has been teased out seperately with comments which I hope prove useful. Having everything itemised like this means I can follow this guide as I teach them myself and alter sections as needs be. Perhaps others may even get involved and offer constructive criticism on sections which they approach differently.
As with all advice, it is more a work in progress than a finished product. I would like to include a set of equipment for each section which teachers could cross-check in advance, along with a suggested length of time for teaching each chapter and sub-topic.
Next up would be a set of higher-order questions and a variety of teaching approaches, with particular emphasis on Assessment for Learning.
Electricity in particular requires special attention. It is one of the most popular topics on the exam paper and I imagine one of the trickiest to teach for the non-specialist teacher.
But it’s a start.
Feel free to download them to your own pc and adapt them to suit your own school needs.
Let’s put the swine flu in perspective
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: April 29, 2009
- In: health
- 2 Comments
The total number of deaths in World War One was 16 million.
The number of deaths as a result of the Spanish flu which followed in 1918 was somewhere between 30 and 80 million.
In the 14th century the Black Death is estimated to have killed 75 million people (including anywhere from 30% to 60% of Europe’s population – including Ireland).
Which isn’t to say that the current Swine Flu shouldn’t be taken seriously, just that when it comes to risk our ability to be objective tends to go out the window.
The Black Death by Philip Ziegler is a book well worth reading for the historical and in particular the social and political implications of this desease.
Leaving Cert Physics Notes: now with experiments
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: April 26, 2009
- In: notes
- Leave a Comment
My homework over the Easter break was to write up all the Leaving Cert Physics Mandatory Experiments, including diagrams, sources of error and precautions.
I have incorporated them into the notes (they are at the very end) so now there’s no excuse for not having them written up on time!
They do tend to add bulk to what gets printed out and photocopied, which is not a good thing.
I would also like to have all the pages automatically numbered for easy reference but to do so pushes up the text at the bottom of the page considerably and results in even more pages being required.
Anybody know of a way around this?
I used four different sites to help me:
- Tom Healy’s site at thealy.com
- Tim Brophy’s site on teachnet
- Sean Foley’s site at mathsphysics.com
- The physics pages at slss.ie
Thanks to all concerned.
If they’re any use to you feel free to use them as they are or copy, paste and adjust them as required. You don’t need to let me know, but it would be nice. To see when and where the individual experiments came up on the exam paper just check the test questions which are also in the notes; they are all cross-referenced with the marking schemes which accompany them.
Together with the related syllabus extracts I hope that makes up the complete package.
Leaving Cert Physics Notes
Theological engineering exam
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: April 24, 2009
I forgot I had this and found it by accident today.
The troops were amused so I figured I would pass it on. I don’t know who wrote it and apologise to all those who find it offensive.
Horrendous:Average mark in Junior Science H.L written exam is 55%
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: April 22, 2009
I was browsing through the Chief Examiner’s report (as one does) for the Junior Cert science exam 2006 and found buried amongst all the text and statistics the following unbelievable nugget: the average mark for the written exam was 55%.
I couldn’t find any data on 2007 or 2008, so I don’t know if things have changed in the meantime or not.
55%
This is after three years work. In hindsight it would have been more useful if it was one percentage point lower in that we could then conclude that the average mark didn’t merit an honour and maybe drastic action could have been taken. Maybe for that matter action has been taken, but again I couldn’t find any comment or reference to this anythere.
I can see why this statistic didn’t cause a furore at the time: the overall mark turned out to be 67%, so most students would have been (relatively) happy with that. This was due to the combining of the written exam with the two other sections.
Coursework A: (recording of experiment work over the three years) is worth 10% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 98%.
Coursework B: (based on a report of two seperate investigations) is worth 25% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 85%.
But stilll.
55%
Shocking.
The standard explanantion for this is that students no longer have a choice in the paper, so all questions need to be answered. This is certainly a large contributory factor, but when I looked over the papers for 2006, 2007 and 2008 there was another shock. I concentrated on Physics and found that the hardest topic – Electricity – accounted for over one fifth of all the marks on the physics sections.
Three other sections featured very strongly; Heat, Light and Energy, and all other topics were then very much hit-or-miss as regards whether they featured or not.
Some of the questions within each section were also ridiculous. I have listed some of the worst offenders in a submission to the editor of SCIENCE, the in-house journal for members of the ISTA (Irish Science Teachers Association). The full article can be accessed below: on the top-right there is the option to toggle for the full screen.
I included in the document a link to this posting so hopefully we will receive some feedback (the next edition of the journal goes out towards the end of May) .
What think you?
Apres-budget blues: the new tax-form
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: April 9, 2009
Currently doing ‘the rounds’ as they say:
Thanks James.
The Chemistry Hour
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: March 27, 2009
The Chemistry Hour
Gerard Bullett
Now let me praise, not famous men,
But men who, for little reward,
Scattered the floor of my dusty pen
With crumbs of truth from a cherished hoard,
And in particular him who came,
On Tuesday and Friday, praise the Lord,
Hoping to set our hearts aflame
With natural science, combustible stuff.
Snobs every one of us, lost to shame,
We saw he was shabby and thought him rough.
He wore a beard instead of a tie.
His proud experiments never came off.
And when we applauded, wild with joy,
The splintering glass, the loud explosion,
Anger burnt in his ageing eye
But how to quell us he hadn’t a notion.
Lost, bewildered, a baited bear,
He’d stand and suffer loud commotion,
With fluttering hands would stand and swear.
Our regular rioting got him the sack,
Tuesday arrived and he wasn’t there:
Some were regretful and felt his lack.
A gentle spirit, fatherly kind,
He always took his punishments back
At the end of class, if only you whined,
Or else forgot them as soon as given,
Having no room in his large mind
For misdemeanours, for sinners unshriven,
For impositions, for ‘lines’ and such;
He would forgive until seventy times seven,
O rare Mr Robinson, I owe you much:
You taught me more than I knew, although,
Of chemistry, nothing remains in my clutch
But the watery marriage of H and O.
Shhh, I got me this sweet deal goin’ on
Posted by: ozymandias1 on: March 25, 2009
Don’t tell anyone. I got a got a sweet deal with my bosses and I want to share it with just you.
Keep it to yourself.
These are in no particlular order. What have I left out?
- See where I work nobody checks up on me.
- I get paid over 60 grand a year and my job description hasn’t changed since I first began fifteen years ago.
- Truth be told it probably hasn’t changed much in over one hundred years.
- The material I teach hasn’t changed much in three hundred years. One of the sections I teach is called Modern Physics. This section is almost exactly one hundred years old.
- My holidays cover over one third of the year. Fully paid.
- I got job security for life. Nobody can touch me.
- Over 90% of what I teach seems to serve no purpose whatsover, which is just as well because nobody remembers it after they leave school anyway. Has Hooke’s Law saved your life lately?
- In theory I teach some of the most interesting subject matter that exists anywhere in this universe; in practice the writers of the Junior Science and Leaving Cert Physics syllabi couldn’t have done a more botched job if they deliberately set out to remove everything but the dry-as-dust ‘facts’ that we are left with.
- I can take up to thirty days sick leave per year without needing to provide a cert.
- Promotion in my job is based on how long in the tooth I am; therefore those longest in the tooth are the highest paid.
- I can close my door when I step into my classroom for the very first time and hardly anybody ever gets to look over my shoulder between then and the day I retire.
- Once or twice over the course of my career an outside ‘inspector’ may get to call in to see how I’m getting on, but not unless I get a couple of weeks notice so I can prepare for his visit so that I give him the impression that those few highly prepared and highly artificial classes are the norm.
- In a world which now cannot function without technology I too have moved with the times; where I once used chalk and a blackboard I now use (drumroll . . .) markers and a whiteboard.
- In a world where I can be in touch with a colleague half a world away quicker than I can make contact with a colleague across the hall, there is no onus on me to do either.
- I teach in a pretty well-to-do school where almost all students are interested in going to college, and where discipline issues mostly revolve around top buttons not being done up properly. I get paid the same as colleagues in schools where very few wish to learn and where discipline issues involve physical and verbal intimidation on a daily basis.
- I got a sweet pension which is fully secure. I don’t really know anything else about it because, well, I guess I don’t need to.
You gotta promise me you’ll keep this secret; I don’t want the word getting out.
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