The Chemistry Hour

 

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

shhh

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.

Why aren’t we teaching about global warming in schools?

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

From George Mondiot. Published in the Guardian, 16th March 2009.

In Britain there are a whole raft of differnt syllabii (at secondary level) for each subject, and different school boards have the option of choosing which one to follow, thus making interdisciplinary subject material very much a hit or miss affair.

In Ireland there is only one syllabus for each subject, so you would think someone at the top would be looking at what gets covered in each subject, and how the overlapping material can best be presented to complement this. In fact as teachers we are encouraged to find this out for ourselves, which I’ve no doubt some do. But most of us (while admiring the sentiment) simply put it to the back of an ever-growing ‘to do’ list.

Take Global Warming.
At Junior Cert Science level the words “global warming” do not appear.

The words “greenhouse effect” do make an appearance on the Leaving Cert Physics syllabus, almost as an after-thought in relation to chacteristics of Infra-red radiation.

I think it is dealt with in a little more detail in Leaving Cert Chemistry, but hopefully someone can add more detail.

What I am particularly interested in is to what extent is the following idea taught in our schools?

It is over-consumption on the part of the wealthier nations which is having catastrophic consequences for the poorer nations.

Is it covered in CSPE / Religion / Geography / anywhere else?

If not then I suggest that there is an obligation on us as teachers to try and change it.
One could incorporate the following

  • Science: The science of Global Warming / Extinction and evolution (after all, life will go on long after we’re gone)
  • CSPE: The ethics involved. In particular we need to address the fallacy where people believe that just because they don’t hurt anyone directly in their day-to-day lives, they are not not guilty of any wrong-doing
  • Geography: How/why civislisations have imploded in the past due to distruction of their own resources
  • History: I don’t know enough about History or how it is taught, but I imagine a lot of wars in the past were fought as a result of dwindling resources in one area forcing a whole population to move to seek food in another.

I’m sure there’s much more. the point is that Global Warming is only the most important concept to face mankind in the last generation, and we in school are doing almost nothing about it. And it’s just not good enough. Step one is simply to find our voice. And we’re not even there yet.

Podcast on Leaving Cert definitions

Defintions

After taking so much time to put the last podcast together on neutrinos and then post about it, the hosting site Podomatic went down for maintanance for 24 hours. So I don’t know how that affected your feed, but if you got nothing then for once it wasn’t my fault. Unless the reason it went down was as a result of something I did, which would be impressive even for me.

Another possibility is that I after I uploaded the podcast so many people tried to gain access at the same time that the server just couldn’t handle the traffic 🙂

In which case a lot of people are in for a disappointment with this one. It consists of physics definitions which have appeared on leaving cert exam papers going back to 2002. When the new syllabus first appeared we were told that there was going to  be less emphasis on learning stuff  ‘off by heart’, particulary in relation to definitions. In practice this may well have been the case, the problem however is that because some definitions still appear, students have to cover all definitions to ensure they know the few which come up.

The syllabus is also unhelpful in that it’s not at all obvious what constitutes a defintion, but perhaps when the new syllabus comes out (in the year 20??) it may be more clear.

Apparently over 200 people have subscribed to this podcast, and that was after only two uploads, one of which was put together by two students.
One question: Why?

I think some people who were hoping to be entertained are going to be sorely disappointed with this one. No chance of it going viral then. It will be interesting to see if students find it useful. If you are a student don’t be afraid to let me know how I can improve.

I have put a link to both the podcast and the script on the Leaving Cert Revision page of thephysicsteacher.ie

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Neutrinos they are very small

I posted about neutrinos recently, but didn’t do them justice (John Updike’s poem excepted).

So I’m taking a second stab at it. I usually include (what I consider to be) interesting tit-bits at the end of the relevant chapter in the Student Notes, but at five pages this would be too much.

so I’m going with a podcast. It’s about twenty minutes long, and the script will be available to any who wish to read it in the Particle Physics page of my website.

I don’t know if one dedicates podcasts to people, but since this is my podcast I make the rules. I got a lovely email recently from Niamh, who is a leaving cert student and is planning to study Physics in university next year. Apart from saying nice things about the website, she went on to write about her enthusiasm for Particle Physics:

 . . . Its just so interesting! we started pair annhilation in class the other day n i was whisperin “isnt this just so cool?” at the back of the class after every paragraph.

See that’s what we as teachers should be saying, except instead of whispering it, or speaking in our usual monotone voice, we should be shouting it from the rafters:

THAT”S MAD THAT IS !!!!

By the way, the picture (familiar to all neutrino afficienados) is of a bunch of physicists checking out one of the 11,200 photomultiplier tubes that line the Super Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan, which also features in the podcast.

Hope you like it!

 

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Dissection – great fun entirely

I have been experiencing a renaissance in my teaching life ever since I decided to embrace my ignorance on all issues biological (still can’t learn to love Chemistry unfortunately, but there may still be time).

We did heart dissections the other day.

I spent an evening searching for related videos on youtube. I am a firm advocate of the notion that unless you have been ‘prepped’ in terms of what to look for,you may well end up looking at an amorphous mess. In other words both the student and the teacher can be looking at the same object and see two completely different things. Discovery Learning obviously has its place, but as a teacher it’s all about knowing when to mix and match.

As usual there was a lot of sifting to be done before ending up with final list. As always, this is a labour of love.

Along the way I picked up the following nuggets:

  1. Each day your body makes 200 billion new blood cells.
  2. White blood cells live for two weeks, Red blood cells live four months.
  3. You have about 5 litres of blood in your body; when you donate blood you are giving up about half a litre.
  4. Your heart pumps about 70 times a minute, which equates to over 100,000 times a day!
  5. When exercising your heart-rate doubles to about 140 times a minute.
  6. Your heart is about the size of an apple.
  7. Blood takes about 35 seconds to make a round trip when relaxed, or 15 seconds when exercising.
  8. Heart Disease is Ireland’s number one cause of death.
  9. Irish women have almost twice the rate of death from heart disease as the EU average.
  10. The difference between a Heart Attack and a Stroke:
    Both are a result of blocked arteries: In a heart attack the blocked arteries are feeding the heart muscles, and those muscles are not getting the oxygen and nutrients they need to function.
    With a stroke, the blocked arteries are in the brain, and those brain cells are not getting what they need to function… depending on where in the brain it occurs, different functions are affected (e.g., speech, writing ability, and so on…)
    A third place where blocked arteries occur is in the lungs… then it is called a pulmonary embolism.

Ms Salter gave me a crash course on the dissection itself the day before, so I knew just about enough to set the troops on their way. They had an absolute ball, so why is this not a  mandatory activity? Why should non-specialist teachers like me get away with not doing such a memorable activity with my students?

I have since been informed that we can get hold of hearts which have all the tubes coming out of them, which should be much more educational.
I did tape the students doing the dissection itself, but accidentally taped over it. Sorry!
If doing it again I would  tell the students that their task is to teach another group about what they have learned. It tends to focus the mind!

I have put the youtube links on my website here.

What would Jesus do?

jesus_the_teacher010

If Jesus was around today, would he use Powerpoint?

Would he have an Interactive WhiteBoard?

Would he twitter/blog/youtube/podcast/mindmap/moodle?

Would he give out about the syllabus?

What would be his homework policy?

Could he turn the other cheek to Batt?

The following does the rounds every now and again:

Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain and, gathering them around him, he taught them saying: blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are the meek; blessed are they that mourn; blessed are the merciful; blessed are they that thirst for justice; blessed are you when persecuted; blessed are you when you suffer; be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven.

Then Simon Peter said, ‘Are we supposed to know this?’
And Andrew said, “Do we have to write this down?’
And James said, ‘Will we have a test on this?’
And Phillip said, ‘I don’t have any paper.’
And John said, ‘The other disciples didn’t have to learn this.’
And Matthew said, ‘Can I go to the toilet?’

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus’s lesson plan and inquired of Jesus, ‘Where is your statement of objectives?’

And Jesus wept.

I’m with you in spirit.