Two Dishes But To One Table

Adults Might Not Understand Bullying Very Well

Roger Ebert describes a scene in the documentary Bully:

"There's only one bully actually identified in the film. A clueless teacher has pulled together two kids who got in a fight and insists they shake hands. One kid is as friendly as an insurance salesman and sticks out his paw with a friendly smile.
The other kid refuses. The teacher sends the friendly kid away and lectures the other one. Of course it's the “nice kid” who is the bully. He probably gets away with more stuff than a con man."  (Roger Ebert's review of Bully)

I have been a cluesless teacher myself. 

I was a teacher who was on guard for some cartoon of a sluggo type fellow, taking a youngster's lunch money: 

 

 

 

That's completely unrealistic and misguided. In reality, the cruelty of students that has gone on under my nose is probably more like this girl with the cell phone.

 

 

I don't think I'm the only clueless adult, because when I searched at Google Images just now I saw a pretty heavy bias towards depicting bullies as  overt, buffoonish stereotypes of Butch from the Our Gang movies.   There were few image depictions of the opportunistic clique leaders, the abusive class clowns, that get insufficent scrutiny from teachers.

I'm going to the library now to see if  I can find Barbara Coloroso's The Bully, The Bullied, and The Bystander , a book that even has Jiu-Jitsu instructions listed in the table of contents, but also has a large section assessing the people who stand by during bullying, and the people who don't recognize bullying when they see it.

 

Recruiting Women to Computing

Harvey Mudd College in California turned around their undergrad courses and succesfully created a pipeline to pull female undergrads into being computer programmers. They remade Intro to Programming from the least popular freshman course to the MOST popular freshman course with these curricular changes:

1. They replaced Java language with the much more intuitive Python language.
2. They  changed the examples and exercises to things the students found relevant.
3. Finally, the course name was changed from Intro to Programming to Problem Solving with Machines.

More at the New York Times Science Times.

 

Finding Things Using Microsoft Windows

I think I just got 99 times better at finding things on my computer thanks to Indexed Tags  and Preview Pane.

To get Preview Pane click the blue and white square in the upper right corner of Explorer (the name of the program Windows uses as a file browser window). Now every time you highlight a file, you see the first page of the file. For example I was trying to remember which test had a stern warning against cheating on the first page.  Looks like it's not this one:

Preview pane is not cutting edge - my mom's old Windows 2000 computer uses it.  I just didn't know where it was in Windows 7 for some reasons.  My other discovery, tags with indexing is more profound.

Putting tags on my files will be enormously useful. In teaching I have increased my amount of spiral curriculum , which helps students learn but it has also increased the difficulty of finding all the mentions of a given topic.  For example since I teach density in multiple chapters, I need to be able to go back later and see when I first mentioned density, what level I have tested density at, which homework examples I've recycled from the last time I taught density, etcetera.  By tagging density throughout the year in every file that has it I make this easier.  I make it more portable for when I teach a different version of chemistry too (New York State Regents, SAT, A.P., etc).

Windows won't find tags if you don't tell it to fully "Index" those parts of the drive.  To do that, hit the blue "?" while you are in Explorer and look up Index FAQ's. 

Then to tag, the Explorer file window has a space to add tags at the bottom every time you highlight a file.

One way to

Want to Test Your Fingerprint Knowledge?

I really enjoyed teaching the fingerprint unit in Forensics Class recently.   

There were many hands on things we were able to do, including one that I had always wondered about, how to 'dust' for a hidden fingerprint around a smooth surface like a doorknob or cookie jar. [That one it turns out is super easy to do at home and anyone with a child and time to spend should show the child how to do that because it's very satisfying.  The only trick is you need a make up brush, borrowed from the lady of the house. Search on You Tube for any of their examples of how to do the dusting.]

(Thanks to Juan in my first period class for the fingerprint image at right, obtained by rubbing his finger with a pencil and then touching that to Scotch Tape.)

I invite you to try out below one of the questions I wrote for their exam.  I was worried whether I had worded it clear and unambiguously {always tough when addressing to a mixed group of teens} but there were zero issues with wording.  I will put the answers down in a post below this one. . .

 

Question #19.  

In each blank write  looks the SAME  or looks  DIFFERENT 

1. _____Your left thumb 1 day before you were born and your left thumb now.
2. _____Your left thumb, your mother’s left thumb
3. _____the print you leave on a door knob and the print that is on your finger
4. _____your left thumb and your right thumb
5. _____the left thumb of a twin and the left thumb of the other twin
6. _____the right thumb of Barack Obama when he was 2 years old and  the right thumb when he was 40 years old
7. _____Your left middle finger when you were a  20 week old fetus and when you were a 1 week old fetus [fetus is you before you were born]

 

Fingerprint Test Answers

(answers to Question 17 from above)

1. same
2. different
3. same
4. different (for some reason I caught a lot wrong on this one)
5. different
6. same
7. different (the fetus fingertips change from smooth to folded in the tenth week of pregnancy, caused by the basal layer of skin growing too fast and folding up relative to the skin layers above and below it)

Student's Concepts About "Smart" Students vs Hardworking Students

It's time for vacation homework.   My advanced chemistry class is going to have to do chemistry but they will also read and respond to Chapter 2 of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers', titled 'The 10,000 Hour Rule'.   Hard work as a road to success is a great theme for a tenth grader and has been my theme in chemistry since  the first day of September this school year.

Gladwell points out that the Beatles hit America in 1964.  But they began playing in 1957!  And they went through a period as the house band in a Hamburg caberet where they worked (brace yourself) 8 hours of playing onstage (brace again) for 7 days a week.  For weeks at a time.

By the time the Beatles had their first burst of success they had played on stage an estimated 1200 times.  

Looking at Flowers this week in Forensics

I've been busy this semester with a new class: Forensic science.  The science of crime solving is my new strategy for spreading the good news of science to the portion of the student body who previously didn't want to buy what I'm selling.

So far it seems to be working; parents and other teachers report positive chatter about forensics outside of class.

I like forensics as a science class because it allows me to go broad, touching on all the different disciplines I like to teach.   In a typical week I teach them biology, a little chemistry, a little physics, a LOT of math [a great achievement for this particular student audience], and even English and history.

Thursday and Friday we spent two days on the microscope looking at $35 worth of pollen bearing flowers that I bought in the neighborhood.  Fairly cheap student light microscopes gave decent views for them to sketch the pollen of Lillies, daisies, gladiolas, and a few flowers that I haven't gotten the correct name for.   If we had more time there are routes of inquiry I wish we could follow on this, because the flowers that DIDN'T yield viewable pollen interest me as much as the ones that did.   (One of the main things they taught us in research at Ohio State is that a negative research result can be exploited just as well as a positive one if you're clever and curious.)

 I didn't take any pollen pictures under the microscope yet but here is a picture of my own skin cells that I took Tuesday with a hand held camera and the microscope at 400x power:

Using Xcel & an Online Survey in a Science Lesson

I wish to file my Friday chemistry class under 'lessons that worked' .  The lesson could apply to many areas.   The general components of this style of lesson format were:

1) Take students to the computer lab to assess themselves by an online survey (a teenager's favorite subject "Who am I?") and then

2)  Let them compile their result within the context of an entire group of people to see where they fit (make it socially relevant).

3) Use Xcel (introduce a marketable skill)

It was at the end of a chemistry unit on gases.  We have been  have been studying the ratio of atmospheric gases and how they interact with visible and infrared light (an excellent javascript simulation is at PhET Colorado).  To connect this with climate change we went online in the computer lab and each student answered a bunch of questions about themselves, resulting in a household carbon footprint estimate and a personal carbon footprint estimate.  

I don't know about them, but after seeing that our students' annual outputs are all individually  well over a ton of carbon dioxide I went home that day and was extra diligent about turning off unused lights.

Then, this is the marketable skills part, they got their first ever lesson in putting formulas into Microsoft Xcel.   Only two students out of 60 had ever used Xcel before (this is a tenth grade class).   I had them share each other's results as a class, total everyones results from the first two columns together, convert the result from tons of CO2 to liters in a fourth column, sort it, use Series Fill to insert ranking numbers, and then sort it by alphabetical order on the student names.  

To my surprise, they found the calculating abilities of Xcel very interesting. One student looked at the screen for a minute, realized the possibilities of a spreadsheet, and started yelling out That's hot!  That's hot!  That's so hot!  Yo...   I agree.

There's Antimony (Sb) in Matches

Kids hanging out after school eats into my precious to-do list progress but the feedback and enjoyment really make up for it.  Since I'm the chemistry teacher I have a small crew of students that know they can usually get me to show off the fun stuff in our chemical closet.  I think I do as many demonstrations outside of class as I do in class.  Today my young scientists (1) pyrolyzed a matchhead, (2) did the classic atmospheric pressure steam can crush, (3) sucked a balloon backwards into a flask, and (4) did the meter stick trick where two supporting fingers sliding to the middle always meet at the center of gravity of the stick, including if you balance a weight on one end of the stick to make the center not at 50 cm. This is all while I'm entering homework grades and just calling from across the room what to do next. 

Matches have been an attention grabber ever since I  bought a big box of the strike-anywhere kind.  The matches, in and of themselves, are a topic of fascination with the tenth graders often rivaling their interest in any demonstration I'm trying to show them.

If you too enjoy matches here are a few  links I liked.

What's in a match? (very long detailed article at Answers.com detailing the completely different forms of phosphorous in safety versus strike-anywhere matches).

Why use a match in the bathroom?  (I wonder if alternative mechanism #3 bears consideration: that the struck match puts activated carbon into the air.)

Matchless firestarters, (including the Ancient Indonesian Air Piston).

 

 

Paul's Advice to Teachers and Other BUILDERS: Plan to Work Within the Limits of the Foundation

Every September for the rest of my working life I will recieve my new class.  They will  bring with them their foundation, made by another, and my role is not to focus on what isn't there, but rather to accept and focus on the foundation just as a builder must.

Writing in First Century Asia Minor Paul noted that human beings have an existing foundation, just like a building and that proselytizers of all types must work within the foundation:

"Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.  For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid."

This gives me perspective on my classroom situation.

The core of a builder's job at a New York City Charter School like mine is to be aware of the young scientist's emotional composition, level of science literacy, and attitude toward having an adult in the room running things.  Coming in from my outside culture (whatever you want to call my culture -- I'm not going to label it)

I want to remember that I will better engage the group's needs if I always keep 'builder' in my job description and not just 'broadcaster of science'. 

Paul implies a rather strict merit pay system for builders, saying that:

"(Various builders may build) on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw -- the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each has done.  If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will recieve a reward.  If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss. "

The builder will be saved, but only as through fire.