Science

Henry Reed: Naming of Parts

One of my favourite poems is Naming of Parts, by Henry Reed. It encapsulates so much of what is wrong with our education.

It is about an army instruction lesson on the parts of an army rifle, where the poet is half listening to the instructor, and half looking outside the window at the beautiful japonica flowers. For me some of the best lines are here:

And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got.

So many Physics concepts are interconnected and we often find that we teachers introduce one concept in terms of others which students have still not covered and are therefore not familiar with.

Of course the more obvious message is the contrast between the dry-as-dust lesson and the wonderful world outside.

It’s also nice to read the comments below the poem; different people take completely different messages from it. And of course there is no one ‘right’ answer or interpretation, in spite of the answers which (some of) my English teachers wanted me to learn off so many years ago.

Henry Reed and Frank Duncan reading “Naming of Parts” here

Film adaptation of poem here

 

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Youtube – is it just me?

I have had access to youtube in my classroom since last September and it is by a country-mile the geatest ICT resource I have in my arsenal.

You could take away the Interactive Whiteboard, the dataloggers and the DVD player, but I would cry if I lost youtube.

The irony is that I bought a VHS-to-DVD converter last year and it has taken me a full year to convert all my library. At the time I had probably 75 programmes, many on the same VHS cassette, and I was excited at copying each program on to a seperate DVD for easy access.

The big advantage of DVD was that I could scroll straight through to whatever part of the program I wanted – no more rewinding and fast-forwarding. I was also considering putting everything from there onto a large external hard-drive, for even easier access. All of this would take an inordinate amount of time, but would at least encourage me to use the resource more, where previously I would use it sparingly because of the hassle.

I think that for many students a video of anything more than ten minutes would lose their attention.
Hence my fascination with youtube.

This resource is available to everyone, there doesn’t seem to be anything too dodgy on it, or at least if there is it isn’t thrown at you; you would have to go looking for it.

All clips are under ten minutes. My favourites are Quantum Physics clips, because this stuff is not on any leaving cert syllabus (except maybe Religion) and the comments themselves are often revealing.

I wish I had this resource when I was growing up. If nothing else it allows me to see there are so many people out there who are as fascinated by science as I am, and unlike text-books and teacher conferences these people are all only too happy to express their wonder. It really is inspiring.

There are also wondeful demonstrations which can I can incorporate into my own lessons, and the videos usually include all those small but vital bits which text-books and demonstration-books often omit.
I feel like crying when I realise this resource is blocked in most schools.

I have spent quite a while loading up my favourite clips onto the online favourite program delicious.

CESI (Coputer Education Society of Ireland) are having their conference next month so my homework over the next week is to put together ten top reasons for unblocking this site.

Or is it just me?

del.icio.us site tagged with my youtube links are here
CESI homepage

Junior Cert Science Investigations

Our third years have started their junior cert investigations. The physics version is to compare the insulating ability of different materials.

Seems very basic, in fact too simple to qualify as an investigation at this level.

Until you try it out.

I don’t have third years this year but I walked in to PO’s class to see how he was getting on . They were starting off with a control: Putting 100 ml of water into an uninsulated calorimeter and plotting a cooling curve.
But they ran into problems straight away. It took ages for the water to cool down from a starting temp of 80 degrees.  So they are wondering how they will manage when it is insulated.

One student came up with the clever idea of using a set time and noting the temperature drop for different materials.

Others suggested using a smaller volume of water to begin with. So then we had to decide which was the best idea, and more importantly how would we decide which was the best idea.

Test them by experiment – bingo. 

Now we were getting into it. Conflicting ideas, not quite getting published in a peer-reviewed journal, but nevertheless good stuff. Next we will look at whether we can carry out valid comparisons, but just arguing over it introduces a personal ownership factor as opposed to just following the traditional cook-book receipe.

Then there is still the issue of making sure ‘amounts’ are equal; equal by volume or equal by mass?
And oh my goodness, what if there is no one right answer?

Their homework was to come up with their own ‘hypothesis’; not which was the best insulating material, but rather which is the best way to test this.
Then the bell went and they reminded us that we wouldn’t see them again until  January.
Oh well.

I discussed this with PO last year.
The key is for us teachers to get comfortable with this approach and try to adapt all experiments so that they can be carried out in this manner. There may just be hope for us yet.

Ten Great Ideas

Been thinking about my previous posting.

What are the ten great ideas in Science that we don’t emphasise?

The average student remembers bugger-all about science, but if we were told there were ten things that a student had to remember, what would they be?

1. Kinetic Theory – Everything is made up of atoms and vibrate at temperatures above -273 degrees Celsius.

2. Evolution

 3. Global Warming

4. Each atom is 99.9999% empty, and so therefore all objects which appear solid are almost completely empty space.

5. Deep Time: The age of the universe, the age of the Earth, the age of first life, and the age of humans

6. Science does not offer Absolute Proof

7. Fundamental Attribution Theory: Humans are genetically hard-wired to apportion blame for our own mistakes to others while wishing to take the credit for achievements which are outside our control.

8. Quantum Theory

9. What Science doesn’t know

10. Mass Extinctions

Where does the ‘stuff’ in trees come from?

learner.org is an interesting site which “uses media and telecommunications to advance excellent teaching in American schools.”

One of the issues they address is the area of misconceptions in Science.
This is a wonderful video which asks where does the material that makes up trees come from.

College graduates from Harvard and MIT were asked and not one of them gave the correct answer. In fact their answers were very similar to those given by six year olds.

It makes us question what other serious misconceptions we are responsible for, and leads us to question what and why we are teaching.

If we put together the ten most important ideas in science, how many of them are emphasised in our science courses?

College students answering these questions kicks in at about the 8-minute mark.

A primary school kid gets a look at solid air (dry ice) at 53:20. The look on his face is worth waiting for.

The video is 1:21 long. Access it here

Some nice Modern Physics resources

I think my first post here was on teachers.tv. They have just released some new gems on particles, presented by Brian Cox.
They include The Forces of Nature, The Building Blocks of Matter and The Hunt for the Higgs.

Some of these include interviews with Murray Gell-Mann. Follow this up with an entertaining presentation from the Nobel Laureate himself at Ted.com

In Search of Giants

Gell-Mann on TED.com

Magnets are so cool

Magnets are possibly the coolest thing on this planet. Einstein was fascinated by them, as is every kid who comes across them. Not only in Junior Cert but also in Leaving Cert. We just don’t do enough with them.

I have to admit to being just a tad obsessed with them myself.
There is a Junior Cert activity where you hang a bar magnet so that it aligns itself North-South. I never bothered with this because hanging the magnet from a retort stand meant that the magnet became attracted to the metal in the stand. Hanging it anywhere in the lab would have resulted in it being attracted to nearby metal (or so I thought) and getting a saddle for the  magnet to sit in was also a pain.
Then there is the issue of the magnets losing strength and becoming less effective.

 Discussing it with my Chemistry colleague Peter O Boyle, he showed me a simple way to hang the magnet, so I tried it with a recently purchased bar magnet, and just let it hang form my hand. And to my great amazement it worked a treat!

I know plotting compasses do this anyway, but there is something very weird about holding a piece of metal on a string, and no matter what way you turn around, the metal continues to stay still (or nearly so). Something very weird indeed. And it’s a feeling you don’t experience with a textbook

Apologies to everyone I have ever taught for not trying this before

‘Course nowadays there is a new generation of magnets of  which Neodymium seem to be the easiest to get hold of. There must be a bucket load of cool things to do with these.

 They certainly make the demonstrations in ElectroMagnetic Induction work a lot more smoothly.

One impressive application is ‘The World’s Simplest Motor’. Nobody should be allowed teach magnets again without getting the students to make these (there are even easier alternatives – do a search for ‘homopolar motors’ on youtube).