My colleague Mark Campion organised a hiking trip to Scotland for the last few days of the holidays for 15 students plus 5 teachers.
Stunning scenery and great walks for four days. Torrential downpours on day 5.
Day 5 was the best.
Click on the flick icon on the right (scroll down to find it) to see more pics.
We had a ball.
Bring on another year.
Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century – but this modern version has a short video about each one.
In the short time since launching this site, our videos have been watched more than 1.8 million times.
But we’re not finished yet. We’ve started updating all the videos with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments.
So once you’ve watched all 118 videos, make sure you come back and check on our progress. We still have a few surprises up our sleeves!
The video above is a short introduction. Find out more at periodicvideos.com
Excellent resource; thanks Ewan.
A Texas school is to allow vetted teachers to carry handguns into school for the first time starting next term.
District superintendent David Thweatt:
We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.
It certainly adds a new dimension to homework policy and lesson plans.
Hammerite have posted a nice video of their electrostatic spray pain-gun in action. No contact with the metal being painted is necessary, and it even paints around the back.
Nice one.
Who would have thought physics was connected with the real world?
Mankind’s closest relatives – the world’s monkeys, apes and other primates – are disappearing from the face of the Earth, with some being literally eaten to extinction.
Source: IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (see article here)
And we’re supposed to be the intelligent ones.
The bumph from the school arrived today containing school calender, results, agenda for staff-meeting etc, but all I wanted to see was whether or not I was teaching second years next year. Up until now we taught science on a rota system at Junior Cert level. All the students in the year are split into groups and taught Biology by the specialist Biology teacher, Chemistry by the specialist Chemistry teacher, etc. They rotate after a set amout of class periods to that each term they get to do one complete cycle.
The system sounds good in theory in that the specialist teacher will have a greater enthusiasm and knowledge for each topic than a general teacher. And for the teacher it means much less preparation time, both for theory and experiment. It certainly made my life easier for my first few years.
More recently we have begun to notice disadvantages, and like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke (can’t see that phrase lasting much longer in our pc world), once we began to question the system it quickly became apparent to all that it was actually failing the students.
Firstly there was no ownership for teachers over indivdual students, so none of us were particularly concerned with a given student’s progress, or got to know their strengths as well as we should have.
Secondly, a lot of time was lost in adminstration during each rotation; results which should have been transferred from one teacher to another often got lost or simply forgotten about.
If the number of periods allocated to each group varied (due to teacher illness or other unforeseen breaks) then one group advanced more than another. This always caused problems when setting a common exam paper at the end of term.
So this year for the first time I get a class to myself at second-year level and will presumable get to hang on to them next year. Which means I get time to try out some of the ideas I have been reading about over the last few years:
Bottom line:
I don’t know how much of this I can incorporate but if by the end of the year I have spoken less and listened more than would otherwise be the case I will consider it a success.
Sometimes the most basic question can be the hardest to answer. “How do magnets work?” is one such question. If you’re a teacher like me you’ll probably end up using fancy terms like “North and South Poles” and “Opposite Poles Attract”, and may even go on to demonstrate it using the floating magnets above.
But how does one magnet know that the other magnet is there?
And that, my friends, is a great moment. It means that at least one person in my class managed to avoid all the ‘education’ that I stuff down their throats, and maintained his ability to think for himself. ‘Course that won’t help him (or her) much when it comes to exam time, but at least in my mind it counts for a lot.
I hope to be teaching more Junior Cert Science this year and need to remember to avoid the temptation of throwing in jargon as a substitute for deeper explanations. For that matter, when the apple falls from the tree how does it ‘know’ which way is down?
Here’s a lovely article taken from the science magazine Discover detailing how the author realises that nobody actually understands how magnetism works.
Think for Yourself 