Wordless Weekends

Wordless Weekends

Building Bridges Again

The physics class is starting our second bridge project today. The bridge requirements are as follows:

• Minimum dimensions: 3 cm tall, 5 cm wide, 25 cm long
• Maximum weight (including all toothpicks and dry glue): 20 grams
• Height must be measured above the table level
• Weight must be able to rest on top of bridge

The students did some measuring and found the following information:

• Mass of 1 toothpick: 0.12 grams
• Length of 1 toothpick (point to point): 6.5 cm
• Avg. percent of weight from glue in 1st bridges: approx. 25%

They had to draw plans and make calculations showing how they would build the bridge within the parameters. Later today they will start the first phase of building.

Dreams of graduation

My director came to me today to see if I could help a senior get the 1.5 credits (a year and a half) of science that she needs to graduate. She was in a science class but it was too hard, she wasn't going to pass. So that would be dropped from her schedule.

So that means less than 3 quarters of the year to make up a year and a half of credit. When the 11th grade science class she was already in was too hard.

And all because her parents don't think she should be punished for the bad choices she made in the past by not being allowed to walk with her friends at graduation.

Flying

I'm tired of hearing about the "violations of privacy" issues with the new body scanner/pat down security procedures. Either we can have privacy or security, or some of each. But we can't have 100% privacy and 100% security.

Are we really Ok saying that only people who look "suspicious" should be checked? Who do we trust to decide who is "suspicious"? We have seen in drug trafficking that innocent and innocent-looking people have been used by the smugglers for years. Why wouldn't the same become true with terrorism?

Every year we see more "home grown" terrorists. What happens when they start to look like your next door neighbor or your brother? Who do we deem clever and observant enough to know which person should have the privacy violated and who shouldn't have to put up with it?

I know there are dozens or hundreds of other arguments on either side, including whether anyone has the "right" to fly in the first place. But I am just tired of the constant whining and bickering.

Performance Pay

I am deep in the midst of implementing a teacher performance pay project. And at the moment, it seems to be making me a worse teacher instead of better. I am spending so much time in meetings and dealing with paperwork that I don't have time to be prepared for class.

Breaking Bridges

Today we testing the Physic's students toothpick bridges. They had 30 toothpicks and had to span a 15 cm distance. We don't have a real set of weights, so we had to improvise. We started with a plastic container with salt, adding 100 grams additional salt each round.

When that container was full we took a plastic beaker and started adding D batteries, each has a mass of about 140 g. We go to 1,200 grams with 2 surviving bridges by the end of class. As a class we agreed that one had a better design and should be the winner.

Wordless Weekends

Power's Out!

It was going to be Wordless Weekend. But the power is out and I'm not terribly good at blogging from my iPhone. If the power (and Internet) return I will replace this with something better.

Cats-Masters of Fluid Dynamics

Apparently the way that cats drink water is actually pretty amazing. In fact the cat "balances the forces of gravity against the forces of inertia" and takes advantage of fluid dynamics with amazing efficiency. Even the big cats like lions and ocelots use this same mechanism.

There may be future uses of this knowledge in the field of "soft robots" with nonmetallic parts.

Read all about it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111107897.html

But this isn't English class!

I'm giving tests today in both Chemistry and Physics. And both tests will include a short answer question that will require an answer in complete sentences. In physics they have to write an actual paragraph.

This should not be news or a big deal, but it will be. Students will argue with me about their answers. They will tell me that they just forgot that a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period (or other punctuation). They will tell me that the obviously lowercase letter is just how they write capital letters. They will defend their paragraph-length run on sentence as grammatically acceptable.

And they will tell me "This isn't English class!"

Because apparently the only place in the world that writing should happen is inside the English classroom...

Standardized testing

Standardized testing is one of my least favorite things. It measures only a tiny amount of what we really want students to know and be able to do. And very often they don't test that very well either.

We are giving the PLAN and EXPLORE tests from ACT today and the students really don't take it seriously. They go through each section as quickly as possible and don't take the time to really try their best. Which means that the results will not actually reflect the ability of these students.

So how do we get the students to really try their best? It really does take effort and energy to take a challenging test and really push yourself to the limit of your knowledge.

Or, how do we get the test results to have less weight in the discussion about schools when we know that they aren't really representative anyways.

Physics Phun

So I thought I would write about some of the other activities we have done for Phantastic Physics Phriday.

One of our first challenges was to move a playing card the farthest distance without direct contact.

The rules were as follows:

• You can not touch or blow on the card
• You can not change the card itself other than to add things to it (no cutting, tearing, bending, etc.)
• You can build a device to move the card, but it can not be in constant contact with both you and the card (you can't just push it along the floor with a stick)
• You can not simply drop the card from a high location and count the fall as your movement.
• You can launch your card with some device and count its trajectory as movement.
• If you aren't sure if something is allowed, ask your teacher

The students worked in teams of 2 and were given about 25 minutes and access to materials such as balloons, straws, tape, string, rulers, bouncy balls, marbles, scissors, and other things that they asked for.

Students came up with a huge number of possibilities.

One team made a simple catapult but they were disqualified when their playing card (attached to a marble to add weight) ended up on the roof of the school.

Another team ran a length of string from one corner of the room to the other and attached a balloon to the playing card and a piece of straw to the other side of the balloon. They ran the string through the straw then blew up the balloon and let go, using the balloon to propel the contraption along the string.

A third team used a similar idea, attaching the card and some wings to a balloon before blowing it up and letting it go.

The winning team moved their card all the way down the hallway, about 5 or 6 times farther than any other team. They took 4 balloons (one for each hand of each partner) and taped a section of straw into the mouth of each one. Then they blew up all four balloons and held them closed. They put the card on the floor and used one balloon at a time to blow the card down the hallway. They aimed the mouth of the straws underneath the edge of the card so that it glided like a hover-craft.

It's pretty exciting what students can come up with when given a challenge and freedom to explore their own ideas.

Monday, Monday...

It is Monday of what promises to be a crazy week. This morning before school I had an almost hour long meeting. Two days this week we have conferences after school. And the other two days we have some kind of shortened schedule.

Add that to having a mixed single/block, every-day/every-other-day schedule already and it adds up to a very exhausting week.

Also, my clock didn't get changed in my classroom for Daylight Savings. It doesn't bother me because honestly if I'm looking at that clock I'm really just checking the minutes not the hour. I know the hour because I know what class period we are in. But all day long kids kept commenting and complaining about it.

Maybe I will take a nap when I get home...

Wordless Weekends

Wordless Weekends

Phantastic Physics Phriday

Every Friday in Physics we take part of class to do something different. Something that isn't notes, worksheets or labs that require lab reports. Sometimes we watch a video sometimes we have a building/creating/problem solving challenge.

For the problem solving challenge today the instructions were given one at a time instead of all at the beginning. The students didn't know what the final challenge would be until the end. They had to complete each step and then wait for further instructions. This helps balance out the students who work very fast and very slow.

Today's Phantastic Physics Phriday Challenge Activity:

1. Students were given a piece of cardstock, a pushpin and a pre-cut piece of string. They were told to tie the string to the pushpin.
2. Then they were told that they had to use the string/pushpin and a writing utensil to draw a perfect (or as close as they could get) circle on their cardstock. No further instructions about how to do that were given. Students could ask for additional materials if they wanted.
3. The students had to cut out their circle, keeping it as close to a circle as possible.
4. The students were told that they would be using their cardstock circle as a measuring device and that they needed to calculate its circumference.
5. They were told that they would be using their circle to measure a distance on a flat surface. They could add any additional marks or measurements to their circle to make it into a measuring device. They were reminded that having more graduations on a measuring tool makes it more precise, but only if the placement of the markings was accurate to begin with.
6. Seven markings were placed on the table and labeled A through G. Each student was given a distance to measure, A-C or B-F, etc. Each student had a different distance so that there would be less comparing of answers.
7. Students were allowed to measure their distance multiple times and add markings to their circle. They were not allowed to make any marks on the table or use any additional materials, to increase friction and get the circle to roll better for example.
8. The students submitted their measurements on a piece of paper as a competition to see who got closest to the actual distance.

Overall this went really well today. We actually had 5 students get with in 0.3 cm of the actual measurement and the distances were all between 20-60 cm. It was fun to see the different strategies employed by various students.

Definitely a successful adventure.

It's not a real force!

Today we are learning about circular motion along with centripetal (real) and cetrifugal (fake) forces.

One of the tricks is trying to get the students to understand that the forces are because of the constantly changing velocity.

There is lots of drawing circles and arrows on the board, and then me swinging a bucket of water around and above my head.

I haven't swung the bucket yet, hopefully it works well :)

Early morning meetings

So I find myself at work way too early in the morning due to staff meetings. We are now meeting for almost an hour before school once a week. That means that we don't get done with that meeting until about 10 minutes before school starts. Which in turn means that if you need to get any work done before school you have to get here very early.

In other news my Physics class will be taking a test on Projectile Motion today. I have a feeling it will either go really well, or really poorly.

Fire Marshall

I have had yet another run in with the State Fire Inspector.

In his report he listed that we didn't have the Science Lab Safety Checklist on file.

But, he never asked anyone if we had one.

I'm pretty sure that "on file" implies that the item in question has been filed away, out of sight. So how he presumed to know that we didn't have one I'm really not sure.

He even came into my room, while I was here, and didn't say or ask anything.

So I filled out the Checklist (for the 3rd time) and my boss told me to post it on the wall near the fire extinguisher.

Now, I'm pretty sure that papers attached to the wall is actually ever MORE of a fire hazard...but apparently I don't know enough about fire to have an opinion...

NaBloPoMo

Well it's Nation Blog Posting Month once again.

I've been so busy that I really forgot about my blog, even if I kept up with Twitter. But, I'm going to try again. I've been inspired by my friends who are taking the challenge of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

So, hopefully I will manage to keep ot up for a whole month!