The Environmental Physics Teacher

Questions About Light

2012-01-16T21:36:00.005-05:00

A biologist friend of mine recently emailed me with questions about the nature of light, so I figured I'd share his questions and my response. My favorite part is part 3 about the color magenta.

Hi Anne,

I'm teaching my kids in freshman bio about spectrophotometry tomorrow. To really understand it well you need to know how light wavelengths and filters work. I understand it well enough to teach it, but looking into color theory led me to some questions I am utterly confused about - we thought maybe you could help. Ok, here we go:

1. Supposed facts:
- White light is actually a combination of all light wavelengths from ~400nm to ~800nm
- White light can be made by shining blue light (450-475nm), green light (495nm-570nm) and red light (620-750nm)
Problem I have:
- If I make white light from red, blue and green light, how can I then derive yellow light (570-590nm) or cyan light (476-495nm) from it? How can white light be BOTH a combination of all wavelengths AND be successfully formed from three specific wavelength bands? If I use only three bands there are several holes in the spectrum.

2. Red light (620-750nm) plus yellow light (570-590nm) makes orange light (590-620nm).
- Does this mean that we perceive the light as orange as an average of the red and yellow - OR do the wavelenghts in the range 590-620 ACTUALLY exist - if so, from where did they origniate? Did the red wavelenths somehow shorten and did the yellow lengthen? If so how? Did the red wavelentghs somehow cause the yellow to lengthen? Likewise did the yellow cause the red to lengthen?

3. Similar to problem 2 - if I mix blue light (450-475nm) and red light (620-750nm) I get violet (magenta) light (380-450nm).
- How can mixing these two lights result in a wavelenth BELOW the lowest wavelength of origin?

Clearly I don't know much about light theory and it seems to me that it isn't a simple matter of adding and subtracting.

Anytime I do an internet search about "how to make magenta light" all I get is information telling me to mix red and blue - yes, but that doesn't tell me HOW the light (i.e. the wavelength range) is formed.

Any insight you have would be very welcomed!!!

Thanks so much!

My response:
Hey!

Wow. Those are _really_ good questions, and I had to do some poking around to fill in my own gaps... ok, big gaps in my understanding. Here is what I've got for you, not total answers, but I hope it helps:

1. Since "white" is not really a color, you could say that the color white is just a construct in our minds. I wouldn't even say it's always made up of "all the colors". It's just the "color" we see when each of the 3 kinds of cones in our eyes are stimulated with an equivalent amount of red, green, and blue light. Though you could also get white from simply mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow monochromatic lights. So... yes! There can be holes. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most "white" light is full of imperceptible holes anyway, known as absorption and/or emission lines. They're not the same thing, but basically amount to the same idea: white light is not necessarily always made of "all the colors".
Here's more info on absorption/emission spectra:
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node107.html

2. I think it's good here to keep in mind that light is just the superposition (or overlapping) of many frequencies, so while I think orange can exist on its own (say as it's emitted from some glowing element), if you had orange light, composed of a red source and a yellow source, you could break it down through a prism, into those components. The yellow is not longer and the red is not shorter. It's a question of these two being superimposed and perceived as one color in this case - similar to white light that's composed of some set of other colors (red, green, blue, or magenta, cyan, yellow). This is governed by something called chromaticity, which is, as you suggested, a weighted average of the wavelengths of the ingredient wavelengths.
More here: http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color5.html

3. Ok, so here's where things get super weird. I don't think it's really fair to say that magenta has a wavelength. Magenta: not specifically included in the electromagnetic spectrum. You _can't_ get magenta without mixing two colors. I know. That's weird. Magenta on the color wheel is that special place where the two ends of the spectrum meet. I would think that our brains would just take an average like every other superposition, but no, in this case, we mix and get something entirely new. But then, why should I be surprised? When we mixed red, blue, and green we got white - also not in the spectrum.
more here:
http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/science/strange-but-true/colour_spectrum_magenta_complimentary_bizarre

I hope this has been helpful. I certainly had fun digging into this stuff a little deeper.
Cheers!

*** not included in the email: I suspect that all the non-spectral colors (including magenta, brown, grey, white) are physical examples of emergence. Emergence is one of my favorite concepts in the universe.

Building Cider Presses with a Physics Class

2011-11-18T11:08:00.007-05:00

At the beginning of the year I had this great plan for my Experimental Physics course. We could build cider presses in the fall (tis the season), and use them as a vehicle for learning about simple machines, force, and torque. Sounds brilliant, right? Engaging! Interesting! Culturally relevant!

Buuuut yeaaaa... Oh dear. They're still not done and it's quarter 2 now (yikes!). We have the school harvest festival on Tuesday, and we were hoping to get them TOTALLY completed by then. That may still happen - we just have some pieces that need to get welded and then attached, and BOOM. Done. And I, for one, will be very pleased to let them go. Btw, we're auctioning them off... more news on that to come.

With the imminent end of this gigantic process just around the corner I've been reflecting on how I would do this differently next time. Let's just say, there were several things I would do differently should I do this project again. Here were the problems and their potential solutions.

1. The groups were too big, thus too many people were unengaged.
Next time, the Maximum group size: 3
2. This was pretty much the first thing we did as a class, so I didn't know people's strengths, personalities, and group dynamics.
Next time, I wouldn't do a giant project right off the bat.
3. This class does not meet for 1.5 periods like my other physics class. There's less time in general, soooo...
Next time, I don't have a solution for this :P. Maybe require more out-of-class work to be done on these presses?
4. I allowed them pretty much free reign to choose a design for their presses. They looked at other people's plans, but in the end each group really did their own thing. This made the process much longer and more complicated, potentially more valuable, as well, but not when you have a limited amount of time.
Next time, I would have a more cut & dry plan that everyone follows....

Really? Did I just say that? I think really what I want is to have more time, more flexibility. I like Amir Abo-Shaeer's model where kids are required to put in x-hours of time into the class, and they can come in whenever to get stuff done, so long as they get it done.

Truth be told, I don't know if I would do this project again, unless I was teaching specifically an engineering class. I was thinking about proposing that, but (sssshhhhhh...) I've never taken any engineering courses. Lots of math and chem and physics. Bio even. But no engineering.

While I'm talking about dreaming of other courses, I've been thinking about the possibility of teaching a course I would call "the science of survival", but I'll leave that for another post.

Retrofitting the school's basement into a root-cellar

2011-10-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

We grow a lot of our own food here at MHS, but of course you can never have enough local food, and one of the limiting factors to local food being served in the cafeteria is storage space. We would grow more if there was a good place to store it. I have fond memories of a box of potatoes being stored in a air-conditioned closet just off the computer lab that also housed a Scanning Electron Microscope. Frankly, there's just not enough room in that closet with the SEM.

So my students took on the challenge of designing and mathematically modeling a root cellar for the school. We found an appropriate site, a portion of the basement accessible by a bulkhead, that we could retrofit to become a passively cooled root cellar space*.

The kids were totally pumped! They dove into that math, the concepts, modeling the heat flow, taking data down there. It was awesome. They came up with a plan. We met with the principal, the head custodian, and a grant writer. They were all on board - provided that we do all the necessary fund-raising, and got all the necessary permits.

All of that momentum and positivity slowed to a dead hault when we met with the building inspector to make sure that we could permit the retrofit, and then his analysis was a total buzz-kill. (That's gotta be a tough job, to be fair: telling people their idea is literally "not permitted"). Not only could we not have students down there, but we would not be allowed to put up any walls to portion off the space. It's frickin HUGE down there, and there was no way we could passively cool the entire space to the necessary temperatures. Why not? There was no sprinkler head down there. There was also no standard-sized doorway into the space. The bulkhead on the outside leads to a mini-door, maybe 4 ft tall. Bummer. Not exactly up to code for what we wanted to do down there.

So I thought the project was dead. Great idea. Impossible logistics.

But when I ran into the head facilities guy, Thom Wood, who was also at the meeting with the city building inspector, I was shocked to hear his impressions of that meeting. I was all "Bummer about the sprinkler system, and the no building walls down there, huh?" And he was all "What do you mean? We can easily just add another sprinkler head for like $100, no big deal. Also, I was thinking we should call up that company from Barre that cuts cement. We could get them down there to cut the foundation so we can have a standard-sized door." I was aghast with delight. What!? This was possible again? Sweeeeeeeet! Thom Wood: unexpected hero of the day!

So we're still working on it. Here's where things stand presently: one of last year's juniors is still working on this with me as an independent study. We've continued to meet with Thom Wood who outlined the process of getting all the necessary permits, starting with the zoning permit, since we'll need to build a little shed over the now-existing bulkhead. We've met with the city zoning permit guy and he was like "You don't need to present this to the Design Review Board. Just send me a letter with sketches and a description of the outside." No problem, sir. No problem.

The student got that done, and now we're on to the Building Permit application, which will be a little more mmmm... in depth. But hopefully we'll have that done by December. We're still chugging. I love this stuff!

This is what the bulkhead looks like now.

This is the student's rendition of the bulkhead with the shed-entrance to the root cellar over it.

*"What the heck is a root cellar?" is a question I run into more frequently than I would have expected. It's a cool space (usually 35-50 degrees Fahrenheit) used to store vegetables like carrots, potatoes, cabbage, onions, etc. It was how people stored food before electric refrigerators were available. Typically built into the side of a hill, or a basement, the naturally cooler temperature of the earth helped to stabilize the temperature at a slightly below comfortable level.

Peer Tutoring Update

2011-10-19T17:04:00.003-04:00

The peer tutoring program is up and running! WOO HOOO! Well... halvesies anyway. Specifically, we have started to match people up with one-on-one tutors; they've started to meet, and the feedback thus far is VERY positive. *whew* :) win-win-win (if you will).

The drop-in tutoring: meh, not so much. I think if we had a school larger than 350 students for 4 grades, we might actually have enough students to cover every period and be able to keep that room open, but as it is, it just hasn't come together - though not from lack of willingness on the part of the students.

Perhaps if we had a good start-date for that it could still get off the ground, but what we're finding is that some students we would otherwise have put in the drop-in room, wind up being the only one available for one-on-one tutoring a particular student. And THAT is where we think the real benefit occurs. So, I guess the one prong of this fork is eating the other. (Bad analogy? maybe. But I'm leaving it for now).

Starting a Peer Tutoring Program

2011-08-31T16:56:00.005-04:00

According to a survey we administered in the spring of 2010, the majority of students prefer to receive help from their peers! Thus confirming what I or any person in a high school could've told you without the survey.

We teachers also know that probably the best way to understand something is to have to teach it.
For some reason I despise the phrase "win-win-win", but, for better or worse, it applies to this situation. Kids who need help get it. Kids who know stuff are pushed to get it better. Teachers who don't necessarily have lots of extra time at school get freed up a little bit. Sweet.

But I'm sure I don't have to make a case that a peer tutoring program is a good idea. It's pretty much self-evident.

We're launching it tomorrow at the class meetings. I'm pretty sure this program is going to live and die by its PR. We need a critical mass of kids who both want and need help, so we've gotta get the kiddos to sign up. There will soon be a blurb on the school website, going home to inboxes everywhere in the "eNews", and every teacher and guidance counselor will be given soft & hard copies of the forms for signing up and the forms for requesting help. We've also developed an agreement form that outlines that tutors won't do the work FOR the tutee, etc.

We're trying a two-pronged approach. We're creating a Drop-In space manned by seniors who are "generalists" and can help read through a paper, or give quick advice on a math problem, etc. In addition we'll be matching kids to meet one-on-one (in some teacher's unused classroom perhaps?) on a weekly basis.

In case this is interesting to you, I'm just going to copy/paste the forms we're using here. Feel free to steal them for your own purposes.

Peer Tutoring Form

Signing Up to Receive Help

Return to ______________________

Name ______________________________ Grade ________

Subject(s)__________________________

Requesting help for quarter(s) ______________

When are you available? (example: period 3 on Mondays & Thursdays, period 6 MWThF, after school Wed):

Frequency:

____ Once a week

____ Twice a week

____ More often if possible

Primarily needs help with (check all that apply):

____ Homework

____ Quiz/Test Preparation

____ General Understanding

____ Other: ________________

(optional) Referral from _______________________________

PEER TUTOR APPLICATION

Return to _______________________

Name__________________________ Grade____

Type(s) of tutoring I am interested in (check one or both):
____ One-on-one tutoring (where you are matched with a specific student)
____ Drop-in tutoring (where anyone needing help drops by for assistance)

I would like to tutor during

____ first semester ____ second semester ____ both semesters

I am available to tutor at these times (for ex. per. 3 M/Th, per. 6 MWF, after school Wed)

I am interested in helping with the following courses (circle):
NOTE: it is not necessary that you remember everything about a subject to be a tutor.

Science courses: ________________________________________________________

Math courses: _________________________________________________________

Social Studies courses: ___________________________________________________

English courses: _______________________________________________________

World Languages: Language # 1______________ Level(s): ___________
Language #2 ______________ Level(s): ___________

Other such as writing/editing, music, technology skills, lower grade levels: ______________________________________________________________________

Teacher endorsement:

I believe that this student will be a capable peer tutor: __________________
(signature)
Additional comments by endorsing teacher (optional):

NOTE: If you are accepted and fulfill your tutoring obligations, this community service will appear on your MHS official transcript that is included in college applications.

Peer Tutoring Agreement

We, _____________________ and _____________________, enter into the
MHS Peer Tutoring Program and agree to the conditions as outlined below:

The “Learner” and the “Tutor” will...

Meet in _________________ (location) on________________ (day(s)) at ______________(time of day or period) for the duration of quarter ____(1,2,3,4).

Communicate with each other in the case someone needs to miss a session.
Make up a session promptly if one is missed.
Communicate immediately with ___________________ (see contact information in last bullet below) if either person does not arrange or attend a make-up session.
Work productively and stay focused on learning.
The tutor will not do the work for the learner, but rather help the learner understand the material and find his or her own success.
Turn in the Tutoring Record below at the end of the quarter.
Maintain confidentiality regarding tutoring sessions
Communicate with _______________ if tutoring is not working out for any reason.

Tutoring Record

Date	Today we worked on …(example: conjugating verbs)	Initials	Initials

Signed, ______________________________ Email ____________________

Phone _________________

Signed, ______________________________ Email ___________________

Phone __________________

Rural Teaching: Breaking the Isolation

2011-08-18T11:14:00.007-04:00

It behooves us as teachers to be the best we can be. (Wait, am I in the army? Ok, no.) But it's difficult to critically analyze one's own teaching when... say, you're the only physics teacher in the school. For all anybody else knows you could be espousing that cherenkov radiation was Newtonian Mechanics and no one would be the wiser. Not that anyone would really do that, but the point is we could be totally missing the mark and subsequently go unchecked.

Also Cherenkov Radiation is really eerie! Check it out:

Here is where I must confess: I am addicted to feedback. I need other teachers to lay their eyes on my plans, my students' work, video of my classroom, and I crave their thoughts. Not because I doubt the value of my own work, but because there is so much to be gained in the exchange of ideas and views. If we are going to move the profession of teaching to a healthier plain of existence it must be a collaborative effort.

And just because I'm the only one at my high school is not a good enough reason to not get what I need. If I'm not getting what I need, it's because I'm letting myself starve. I refuse to be a victim of my own choices.

This is why I'm starting a Central Vermont crew of physics and chemistry teachers. It started with my friend (and first year physics teacher) Meghan and I last year getting together because she had curriculum ideas and advice for chemistry (and it was my first year teaching chemistry), and I had curriculum ideas and advice for her teaching physics. This year she has moved on to a different school, and it has taken two people to fill her position. It looks like this crew of four (the two new folks, Meghan and I) will be the crowd that starts this. I'd like to invite some other local physics/chem teachers. We'll just have to see where this goes.

My fear is that we'll meet a few times and then it will peter out. Here are my hopes for this group: That we would

each come away feeling challenged and inspired
each come away feeling like we helped someone
get recognition or credit from our school districts for this work (not sure how yet?)
get some kind of sponsorship from a local bar or restaurant
have good mojo. You know... that we'd actually get to know and like each other.

Next Meeting: September 21st. I'll let you know how it goes.

Mysterious Optical Phenomena (that are so tasty!)

2011-08-15T00:08:00.005-04:00

My research into diffraction and holography has thrown me into a vortex of new ideas that are eating my brain. I will list them here along with my favorite line from their corresponding wikipedia articles.

Parhelic Circles "Even fractions of parhelic circles are less common than sun dogs"

Anthelion "How anthelions are formed is disputed."

Solar Glories "Glories are not conclusively understood."

What is Science For?

2011-08-13T11:45:00.011-04:00

Diffraction & Holography will just have to wait because there's something I need to post about like right now.

I recently spent a week in the woods at the Roots School, which is a place where people who are skeptical about "progress" can gather to learn primitive skills. I went almost directly from low-tech living to a science teacher's convention and the transition was simply too much for me. I broke down in tears on the southbound train taking me deep into the contiguous suburb that exists from Boston to Washington DC. Awesome. It was too much. I had lost faith that science as an institution was good. Science had become the enemy, particularly as I thought about the applications of scientific principles in the modern world. Would my students go on to invent the next equivalent to a nuclear bomb? Genetically modified crops that destroy entire species of insects or lack the capacity to reproduce solely for the purpose of making a corporation lots of money? I might even go so far as to throw skepticism on the Lowell Wind Farm project that will displace the native bear population. Where do we stop? And how do I know if my students will be any better prepared to make morally sound decisions with their science? How do I know that they won't sell out and use their science for their own benefit at the cost of public health or wellbeing? Yes, it was questions like these that ate my mind at that moment. What was I doing with my life? Would it actually lead to genuine good?

While I was trying to discretely get my emotion out through my ocular aqueducts the lady across the aisle from me turned to me and said, "hey, would you mind holding my sleeping kid while I go to the bathroom? Oh goodness! I'm so sorry to have bothered you while you were having a moment. Don't worry, I have moments all the time." I thought it was somehow fitting that while I struggled to believe that the future would be good with all the science I was stuffing into kids' heads that I got to hold a small child.

At the science conference people agreed that science posed a potential danger, certainly, but that in the end science was just a tool. The analogy that became popular was one of a chainsaw. Certainly science is neutral, neither itself good or bad, just a tool in our hands, but a rather powerful tool. As a science teacher it was my job to pass out chainsaws to students, and instruct them on how to use them. However, very few science teachers, engage their students in dialogues regarding appropriate use of the chainsaw. Is it good to use in the house? with small children? etc. You get the picture.

I will put it out there that one fellow actually espoused the idea that "science will save us." I didn't tell him this, but I find that idea laughable. Here I will quote Einstein: We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

It seemed to me that science was a blind and wandering child in the woods, aimless and stumbling. And the medical field had the distinct advantage of having clear goals. Where was the rest of science and technology going? What, then, are the goals of technology? At the time I would have said that it is goal-less.

But last night I had a conversation with a friend at a party about this topic, which I feel like shed a little light on the situation.

"Wouldn't it be great," I said, "if all science and technology were aimed at simply being delightful, making life more beautiful. Perhaps it could be used to make art or toys. Or perhaps it could be used to build relationships or make life more funny. Science should just really be used to make people happy. It seems like the aim of technology is to save us labor and time, when really, as long as it's not abusive or under compulsion, labor can be satisfying."

"Well, that's just the trouble" My friend said, "That is the goal of technology right now, to make people happy. The trouble is people don't know how to be happy."

POW. There it is. Technology is currently attempting to make us happy. But we just don't know

what makes us happy. We're not here talking about pleasure, you know: being drunk, high, or having sex. We're not even talking about cream-filled doughnuts or green jello. We decided we'd call that pleasure. But what about happiness? I asked him, "What makes you happy?"

He said he didn't know. He was one of those people. It's an important question, but he didn't know the answer.

So at the risk of looking like a sap I will make a short list of times I can remember being really happy:

Sitting with my friends, Amanda, Will, and Dan at Fresh Tracks Farm while the sun was setting over the winery hills, talking about life and the summer.
Making strawberry jam or relish or canning beans with my mom and my sister
Discussing scientific developments with my Dad
Standing still in the woods behind my parents house listening to the wind in the trees
Eating out on the deck at my parent's place
Walking anywhere in the woods and hearing a wood thrush
The first time (or any time really) you finally get a flame going from a bow drill
Reading C.S. Lewis and quietly having your mind blown
Laughing and laughing and laughing with my friend Biz
Learning about evolution and fossils at the Natural History Museum
Hucking a frisbee deep to someone in the end zone
Seeing kids' faces light up when they finally understand
Imagining, assembling, and troubleshooting a machine until it finally and blessedly works
Running laps around the church basement and rolling on the floor with laughter with Naomi, who is 4 years old
Writing poetry or music that I enjoy but don't feel compelled to share
Expressing myself through music to God

This is what life (and technology) are about. I think I may have my students do some exercise something like what I just did, making a short list.

True Confessions of a Physics Teacher

2011-08-13T10:58:00.004-04:00

I know what you're going to say. It's my job to know these things.

But I will confess, there are so many things to know in physics that it's easy to sort of mmm... pass by topics or ideas that are less intuitive, particularly if they're not that interesting. I've finally come to accept the fact that I haven't grappled with certain standard ideas in physics enough to "own" them in a way that I can explain to students. So this is both a record of my confession and my repentance, meaning I'll list the topics here that have eluded me to some degree and I'll write a bit about them after

I've researched them properly and feel like I own them.

The Hunter and the Monkey Problem

I know... this is classic and I really should already own this, but whatever. Here we go. Here's the gist as put by this website.

When hunting the wiley Stuphedwithstuph Monkey the hunter is always faced with a problem. The Stuphedwithstuph Monkeys have developed a sixth sense that allows them to let go of their branch the instant that a bullet leaves the muzzle of a gun. The age old question among hunters has been "Where should a hunter aim to actually hit the Stuphedwithstuph monkey?

A) Above the monkey.
B) Directly at the monkey.
C) Below the monkey.
The hunters have always believed that they should aim beneath the monkey so that the monkey will drop right into the path of the bullet. Individual hunters all disagree when it comes to how far below the monkey they should aim. Since no one has ever successfully shot a Stuphedwithstuph monkey the question has remained unanswered. Where should you aim?

I feel like that website has done a good job of explaining the correct answer, but here's my shortened version. If you aim at the monkey and there were no gravity you'd hit it, right? If the bullet starts to travel along that line and the monkey lets go at the same instant, both the monkey and the bullet will have deviated from that original line (B in the picture) by the SAME AMOUNT because gravity is working on them equally. Thus, it doesn't matter how far away you are, given enough time and space to fall, the bullet should eventually hit the monkey if you've aimed directly at it originally. At least that's how it works theoretically...

Ok, that took a little time... and in attempting the next topic: diffraction and holography I got bogged down in Instructables and subsequently got inspired to make a ferrofluid. So here are some other topics I hope to research and post about soon:

Diffraction and Holography

Fresnel Lenses

Capacitors in (RL circuitry)

something about standing waves bothers me. Not sure what exactly it is yet.

Virtual Images and the Eye

So This Is How It Starts... Church Planting 101

2011-08-05T12:09:00.007-04:00

This is terrifying. No way around it. But let me explain a little background first.

I helped start a church in Burlington. I invested a lot in that group, and leaving it was really difficult. It was 45 minutes away, and frankly, it's just hard to be in community with people 45 minutes away. You'd think that I could find something delicious church-wise here in Montpelier, but you'd be wrong. So for three years or so now I've been keeping my eyes and ears out for the possibility of starting something new. I've been in a variety of iterations of Bible studies and discussion groups and established churches all of which were precious and valuable in their own way, but they all stopped eventually (or I stopped going). No judgement. I enjoyed those iterations for what they were.

But it seems now that I have a core group of spiritually homeless Christian folks who would like to start something in the Montpelier area. I know this may sound shallow, but I think it's actually kind of important: We're all in the same demographic. Specifically, we're all mid-twenties, young professionals, relatively open-minded to what church means and looks like.

Truth be told, there are at least 13 others who I would like to invite once we have something more established, but we'll see... let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Another point I feel is important: In no way do I want to "steal" people from established churches. Of those 10 folks only two regularly go to church elsewhere, so I want to be very sensitive about what I may be asking of those two... we'll see. No pressure. Let's not burn any bridges. Even so, I'm not including myself in that count. I will need to have a difficult conversation with the pastor of the church I currently attend and for which I lead worship. I'm sorry, but it's just not home. I think they'll understand.

We have no real pastor for our group, though we do have the blessing and potential oversight of an area pastor, so it might be nice to involve him somehow, though I'm hesitant, because in no way do I want his or any currently established pastor's influence in the structures we set up for ourselves.

I write this for my own good as well as anyone reading this... here are my "must haves" in a church. (I feel like I'm writing a personal ad). haha.

Church should:

Engage people with multiple learning styles (ah, differentiated church)
Rely primarily on social construction (People learn through talking with each other, finding meaning for themselves)
Be about something in the community (feeding the homeless, CSA's for low income families?, etc.)
Be intellectually and spiritually stimulating
Be a safe place for people to disagree, be heretical, & express doubts (Don't belittle someone's thinking on account of it being different).
Be a place where all voices matter and can be heard (maybe the pastor isn't always the one who leads)
Be FUN! (I think we may need to sponsor a condiment war - see below: chocolate sauce vs. ketchup)
Must love dogs

This is my list, but I KNOW that I will need to be open to the lists of 10 other people. We will need consensus... at least on some core issues.

I met with two of them yesterday, and three more this coming Saturday. One more on Sunday. So far it's looking like meeting Sunday afternoons at 3pm may be best time to gather as a whole group. The couple from yesterday volunteered their place to start. Welcome to church in Montpelier. Now, I've never given birth, but I hear that at some point during labor there's an uncontrollable urge to push. It seems like we might be about there now...

A Series of Educational Reality Checks

2011-08-03T00:01:00.004-04:00

Today I spent eight hours in a room with educators from VT, NH, and RI and some folks from Measured Progress as we reviewed questions for this coming year's NECAP assessment - VT's state science assessment: fascinating process. It's humbling and infuriating for the same reason. Humbling because there have been a handful of questions that I just simply didn't know, and infuriating because... well, I have, what I consider to be, a functional adult life not knowing these things. Which drives home to me a question I have muttered to myself on and off recently: why do we teach these things? I mean, these specific things? I know, I know. They're supposed to build up to further knowledge - things people will need in college, but I just don't know that I buy that. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason.

Amir Abo-Shaeer made a point at our Knowles Science Teacher's meeting that although every dutiful high school learns about logarithms, they really aren't that useful in the real world. Most people will simply never use them for anything functional. He referenced a TED talk in which Stephen Wolfram made the point that humans are really good at solving complex problems and thinking creatively, but not good at calculating. But calculators are really good at calculating and really bad at thinking creatively and solving complex problems... So... shouldn't we teach that - and let calculators do the rest? I love it. (To be fair, I watched the TED talk, and didn't get that out of it, but I'll leave it to you to hear for yourself):

One of the things I love about Amir's comments is that they're like a series of reality checks. Is this really worth it? (and the answer can be no). Is this the best it can be? How can it be more practical? I think John Dewey (the pragmatist educational philosopher) would approve of such an honest line of questioning.

Root Cellar Update

2011-08-01T12:33:00.005-04:00

After school ended we finally got the city building inspector to come by and take a look at the basement space that we hope will host the root cellar. He said roughly what I expected him to say: No Students. We will only be permitted to build this thing if it’s faculty only. But then he said some things I did not expect him to say. Specifically, we were not permitted to build walls within the 70’x30’ space. What? There’s no way I can passively cool a space this large to temperatures low enough to preserve food. No way. We would need an air conditioner, and then it may as well be a walk-in refrigerator. Boo. Why? Because of the sprinkler system. Each space would need its own sprinkler head. Gr.

I thought this was the end.

By chance I ended up in Tom Wood’s office (he’s the head facilities coordinator, the only other person on the tour with the building inspect

or), and he seemed to have an entirely different impression. He’s an architect, so maybe he sees opportunity where I road blocks. Regardless, he said, “oh yea, we can just add another sprinkler head for like $100 easy.” Oh… ok. “And we may as well cut the foundation so that the bulkhead entrance from the outside is really a standard-sized means of egress.” Oh! Um… ok! And as long as we’re cutting the foundation we may as well do everything necessary to bring it up to code for children to be down there as well. (And suddenly the sun was shining and happy rainbows broke out over the capitol building... as seen from the high school parking lot)

Meanwhile Tom has put together a line-item in the budget for constructing such a space, totaling roughly $15,000. He said it was mainly put in because the administration would need something to reject some part of his proposed budget, but nonetheless, it was in there. So I told Tom that I could definitely write grants to allocate the $15,000.

It seems I have an unexpected ally in Tom Wood! WOO HOO!

This year I will write grants. And probably next year we will build it.

Word.

Debriefing Conversations With A "Genius"

2011-08-01T11:16:00.003-04:00

In my last post I mentioned that KSTF brought in MacArthur Genius Amir Abo-shaeer, who, among other accomplishments, started an Engineering Academy at his school in California. I will admit, I was skeptical at first. That doesn’t sound all that amazing, right? I mean, I have known KSTF fellows who have started engineering programs at their schools. But after I herad him speak to the whole crowd after lunch, I realized this guy really has a fresh approach and something to say. There was an opportunity to attend a Q&A session later on, after which I stuck around to ask him more questions. He and I stood outside the ballroom chatting it up, while we both missed the subsequent speaker, whom we were all slated to attend. Here are a smattering of things I understood from those conversations:

Project-oriented not Unit/Standard-oriented. His curriculum is fundamentally different from any curriculum I've heard of (though I will admit this thought has occurred to me and I dismissed it as impossible), in that he teaches big projects that require an understanding of a variety of physics principles. So each project might have elements from what would otherwise be more than one "unit", but over the course of the year, all the projects will have required any understanding of all the physics principles normally covered in a physics class.

Depth not Breadth. To be fair, he doesn't cover a ton of principles, but he does go into the ones he does cover in detailed depth.

**New thought: I need to create an Alumni survey for those students who come back to visit, to assess what pieces students remember, found useful, did they remember the concepts they learned when they needed them in class? Did they end up referencing my notes at all? What was the most memorable thing from their physics class experience?

No Throw-Away Projects. He only has students do projects that for which the end result is something of an extremely high quality. For example, he has students create a baby mobile, that's so cool looking that they can be sold in a toy store, or auctioned and the money given to a local charity. People want these things. He also has them create a water feature. These items can go for up to $500, but the pieces to create them cost as little as $35. These are items that students, again, could sell they are of such high quality. One of his students reflected to him that after this kind of project he said, "After experiencing this course, I realize that the rest of my education up until this point has been worthless." That's a great endorsement for his course, but not necessarily what we're going for. Amir came to education from mechanical engineering, and he reflected that if we have these students for 13 years and professionals have come to expect that by the end of those years they essentially know NOTHING. That is unacceptable. He thought about it in terms of "man-hours" and if he was an employer with access to this kind of resource he would certainly be using it to do something productive in the world.

Tutoring Model: Some of his students needed funds to travel for a physics competition, but they couldn't afford the trip. They could've just set up a car wash, but instead he set up a tutoring program. So donor's dollar does 3 things: it helps he kid go to the competition; it helps a student who needed the tutoring, it pushes the tutoring student to know the material better and be an educational leader. Why let your dollar only do one thing? 3 birds. 1 dollar.

Follow Up: If donors support a project at the end of the project he spends like $35 on a nice frame and put together a digital collage of pictures of the project and types up a nice letter thanking the donor to go with the pictures. Of course the business ends up hanging it up somewhere in their office, and people see that. He sees this as an investment in future projects.

PR: Every single project he does he gets PR for. A team of students writes press releases and they make t-shirts. Students also meet with donors. But of course he was trying to raise 3 million dollars for his new institute. I'm not sure I need to do that. But I would like to have students write press releases. What a great natural authentic assessment.

Non-Profits Should Have Some Overhead. The backstory here is that he started a non-profit specifically to fund his classes. But I'm applying it to the non-profit I work with, the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. Getting to the point: large-scale donors want to see that you have low overhead, but not NO overhead. The Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative currently donates ALL of the funds it receives to helping low-income families. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while. We need to stop doing our own books and actually PAY someone else to do that for us.

I'm sure there are probably other things that soaked in, but those are the things I can think of for now. Clearly I have a lot of work to do before school starts! :)

For a little more info on Amir Abo-Shaeer check out these youtube interviews or check out the book written about him and his classes: The New Cool

KSTF: Like a Shot in the Arm

2011-07-31T14:21:00.010-04:00

My long hiatus from blogging here has really been due to the lack of internet at my abode. Though I don't regret this, I am pleased as punch to now have internet tethering through my phone. I sincerely hope that this means I will get back to blogging. Truth be told: I miss it.

Today I have the delightful task of doing absolutely nothing on a train from Philadelphia to the simple city of Montpelier. I'm pretty sure that some of the folks whom I told about my method of travel thought I was a little touched to choose an 11 hr train ride over a 2.5 hr flight. But I see it as a gift. How often do you get to just be quiet and do simple sedentary things? As a teacher/

ultimate player/non-profit founder/church goer/environmental activist, not much.

I'm returning from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation summer meeting, my 7th (or 8th?) time attending. And by now, I have extremely high expectations for this meeting. I was a little worried when the first session wasn't quite what I had hoped for, but I made the best of it, and the rest of the weekend blew me away it was so inspirational and curriculum changing.

At the moment I'd just like to jot down some notes about sweet things I'm taking away from that meeting while the memory of it all is still vibrant. Let's start with the easy things first.

KSTF Fellow Geoff Gailley showed us how to build small hydroponic systems, which I'd like to modify as a semi-primitive water filter using sand, charcoal, etc.

KSTF Fellow Aaron Debink taught us these super-easy pin-hole cameras for a unit on the particle model of light. Here we are using our new creations!

On an entirely different note, for some time now I have been using Logger Pro, but I never knew that including error bars on your graphs in Logger Pro was as simple as turning on a button. In fact, my friend (and fellow KSTF Alum) Charley has created a jing to help remind his students how to do that when they forget. (Link to come soon!). That way they can include a best fit line and see if it "hits the points" within the error bars. I have labored over a useful way to teach error bars, but resisted since it was more tedious than it was valuable. Hopefully this will resolve that issue.

Everyone in KSTF is deeply invested in the style of teaching known as modeling, and though I teach the four basic functions, I don't do much with explicitly teaching students to differentiate between them using data until their in the trenches of some other experiment. However, my friend Bradford spends time doing this using four experiments between these variables:

Weight on a spring and its stretch (linear)
Length of a pendulum and its period (quadratic)
The length of a written paragraph and the width of that same paragraph (inverse)
Distance of a sheet of paper from a projector bulb versus the size of its shadow on the screen (inverse squared)

As soon as I heard about these four experiments I knew I was going to steal them all. I can already see how I will frame the project for my students. This is going to be a new staple.

KSTF flew a master teacher in from California to speak to all of us, and to call him a master teacher would be an understatement: Amir Abo -Shaeer recently won the MacArthur Genius Grant for his work in physics teaching. Yes, that's right, he's a genius teacher! I have a LOT to say about what I learned from my interactions with him, but one simple piece I can capture here for now is that I need to ask last year's juniors to come back and work as teaching assistants in my classroom. This accomplishes three things: It provides another voice and pair of hands that can help students learn, it helps free me up to help more people, and it pushes the students themselves. They will gain a deeper understanding of the material and they gain experience as an authority figure which requires a higher level of responsibility.

Ok. That's probably good enough for now. More to come later... I'm certainly not done debriefing this meeting.

Students Start an Organization for Art about VY at GIV Winter Weekend

2011-02-12T15:06:00.007-05:00

I'm here at the Governor's Institute Winter Weekend with 74 highly-motivated students from all over Vermont. I'm working with the Engineering strand, most of which is currently building rocket stoves, and a small handful of which is working creating a website for people to post art related to Vermont Yankee.

Now I've never built rocket stoves with my students, but I'm tempted to do so this year in conjunction with our study of energy. The trouble is that most of the students have covered the topic in chemistry (which is not to say that they remember it). It would be a way for us to get some hands-in experience with efficiency and biochar. I'm definitely interested in getting students to make and understand biochar.

These kids are so efficient in their work that this is mainly what I've been doing:

Allan Baer's Stand-by Power Project

2011-02-09T09:12:00.006-05:00

As if my students weren't doing enough cool stuff, Allan Baer's here (as I type) presenting to my students a new project that looks at stand-by power usage.

Allan's done this project before in the Galapagos and basically worked miracles there, bolstering education, taking his students to tv stations, and presentations before the UN, and influencing national legislation in Ecuador through a refrigeration replacement program. In his words, he basically "got drafted" by the National Science Foundation to do the same type of work in the United States.

I'm not sure how we were so lucky to connect with this guy, but I'm pretty excited about this for a number of reasons:
(did I mention I love lists?)

1) I love data.
2) I love students taking their own data.
3) I love students taking data relevant to their own lives.
4) I love students taking data relevant to other people's lives and then presenting to them, and making change in the world as a result of their findings.

So good. All these pieces for me add up to a sweet project.

Allan Baer says, there was only one stand-by power study done in the United States on the household level (as opposed to in a lab). And apparently that one study only sampled 10 household. So if even one of my classes does this study we will have a more telling sample size than the most credible study on the topic to date! Very interesting. Super-exciting.

Air Quality Device at MHS

2011-02-08T13:51:00.006-05:00

My Chemistry in the Community class has been hoping to measure air quality around Montpelier with a fairly sophisticated device, recently acquired, used, from a school in CT. It can read levels of CO2, CO, SOx, NOx, particulate matter, radiation, temperature, relative humidity, and a variety of other things. The students, working in groups, have devised questions to pursue answer about the air quality in Montpelier, and we've determined 5 sites at which the air will be measured with this device hopefully every year for the next 10 years.

Where are the lucky sites?
1. Hubbard Park
2. The intersection of State & Main streets
3. The College Green at VCFA
4. Montpelier High School
5. Somewhere high up on North Street

These sites represent a variety of elevations and traffic/population densities represented in Montpelier.

Now if we could only get the dang machine to connect to a computer.... :P

(I'm afraid that what I'm actually teaching students is that "real science" requires fancy equipment that mostly doesn't function)

Transitioning to a New Church

2011-02-07T11:42:00.005-05:00

For about three years now I've commuted to go to church. I know. I bought a place so near to my work that I didn't have to drive even all last winter (I know, I'm crazy), but good church communities are like wild blackberry bushes. They're a delight to find and you certainly keep a mental note of the location and keep going back. So I've been commuting the 50 minutes or so to attend St. Andrew's regularly on weekends to participate in a delightful blackberry bush-like church.

But this hasn't exactly proved sustainable for me on a few levels. It's quite a bit of travel time. It means I don't end up hanging out with the people there very much, so I'm only loosely in community with them. I can't really invite my interested friends to church cause it's such a time commitment. And as any good gardener knows, the proximity of your garden to your front door directly affects its productivity. So being in charge of the "church garden" from 50 minutes away wasn't, perhaps, a great plan.

Of course, I wanted to see St. Andrew's grow into health, and with regular attendance over 40, and our finances starting to become sustainable in the foreseeable future, I feel pretty good about their future. Meanwhile, what blackberry bushes do we have here? I'm sure there are lots of good churches, but I hadn't found one I felt at home at until recently. Well, feeling "at home" may not be quite the right word.

My former youth pastor, Tom Friedrichs, recently took over the Alliance church in Barre as well as continuing to pastor his own church in Orange. Every Sunday he races from the 9am service at Barre Alliance to the 10:30am(?) service at Orange Alliance. Barre Alliance had been in kind of a tough spot, so he called me up to say, "hey come play music for Barre Alliance." So I went, and though it's no St. Andrew's, they are in an unusual and interesting spot where they are highly flexible and open to change - quite a delightful opportunity.

I mean how often do you find a church (particularly in Vermont) who is open to new ideas? Gosh. It's awesome. I mean, fair enough, they were in a tough spot for a long time. Shockingly since Tom took over preaching and I started coordinating the music they've more than doubled their congregation. WHAT? Yes. More than doubled.

St. Andrew's knows that I'm stepping down from my position on the leadership team in March when my term is up. But until then I'll be doing double duty.

So far I've been able to influence the meeting time at Barre Alliance, advocating for discussion questions during church, but how do I influence them to be more green. Granted the culture of this church is significantly different than the hip young progressive culture of Burlington, VT. This is a church where I had a lengthy dialogue about whether or not it was appropriate to have an American flag on the stage. In the same Sunday I had to call out a guy for not recycling (his excuse: "Well, I'm a bachelor". My response: "Do you care about people? Then recycle. Living alone has nothing to do with whether or not you recycle.") as well as calling a different guy out for burning his garbage (me: "dude, that's so not cool. Don't burn your garbage, dude."

So they've got a little further to go. That's ok. I guess I can make a bigger difference here by teaching them how to set up more sustainable systems for themselves. We'll do it as a church at first and hopefully they'll see this as a value at church and thus a value for their day-to-day lives.

Root Cellar at the High School

2011-02-07T10:50:00.007-05:00

As you may have read, Montpelier High School has a fantastic local food program, largely thanks to Tom Sabo, who has spearheaded the many facets of this work. Each biology class grows food at some point during the year in the school's greenhouse, which is then sold in the cafeteria. The Earth Group at the high school is in charge facilitating the composting program, so that food scraps are sent to Vermont Compost, who then gives us a deal on dirt to grow more food.

In the past my physics students did a study of renewable energy to supply the greenhouse its electrical needs, and so now we have a grid-tied photovoltaic system atop the greenhouse which provides more than the demand of the greenhouse.

And now ... the next layer of awesome: a root cellar!In case you're not familiar with the concept, root cellars are basically natural refrigerators. It turns out that the ground maintains a temperature between 50-55 degrees Farenheit, depending on where you are and how deep you go down, which is already pretty cool, but there's a way to get it to 35-45 degrees, which is more suitable for storing veggies. All that's necessary is having an air inlet (low to the ground) and air outlet (closer to the ceiling). Thus hot air will escape out to the outdoors and denser, cool air will come in through the bottom inlet. Thus keeping your veggies at a nice cold temperature.

But root cellars don't just have to be dug into the side of a hill, they can also simply be a part of one's existing basement. All you need is a window or bulkhead or some other way for air from the outside to come into the space. Enter Montpelier High School.

Of the limiting factors preventing us from growing our own and buying more local food is storage space. With the addition of a root cellar, we could grow more, and buy more food in bulk in season from local farmers to serve our students.

It turns out, that MHS has one bulk head that leads to a space underneath the stage. We've had local root cellar expert, Richard Czaplinski, come down there to check it out and he thinks it will work. The administration is on board and the students are pumped.

Benefits:My students get to use thermodynamics to model the heat flow using equations for equilibrium, insulation R-values, and Q=mC∆T. It's an open-ended problem with no right answer that means something to our community, so it's authentic. Indeed, I do not know what the "right" answer should be. So we'll see what they come up with.

Obstacles:
Mold & Asbestos. I spoke with the new facilities guy, Thom Wood, about the potential for mold and asbestos down there. So far the word is that he doesn't think that space was ever tested for asbestos. He and the principal are "pretty sure" it's safe, though I have another friend who is "pretty sure" there's asbestos down there. Hm. So we'll need to get it tested for both Mold and Asbestos by Crothers Environmental. So we'll see what they say.

Permitting. Thom also brought up that it's not technically a "habitable" space, but it probably doesn't need to meet the same codes as, say, a classroom (with natural light and ventilation), because basically it's like a large closet. Thom said he would speak with the fire marshal to figure what we would need to do to make it up to whatever code we need to meet.
*whew* I think it's going to happen. There are some nay-sayers, but I believe them to be under-informed.

My students are presently off and running with the project, we'll have some initial calculations soon I hope! :)

This is my physics class and I meeting with the Principal, Heat Custodian, the Service Learning Coordinator, a local grant writer:

KSTF Summer Meeting: Turns Out I Voluntarily Left the State of VT (!?!)

2010-07-30T00:24:00.005-04:00

Albeit for a very short while...

Not too much to say at the moment since it's past midnight, and I'm definitely tired :P but I'm hanging out in Philadelphia at the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation summer meeting: the first KSTF meeting I've voluntarily attended since my fellowship ended last year. What can I say? I just couldn't stay away. I love these people. Tomorrow I'm presenting with two other fellows in a seminar called "Off the Grid" in which two guys were inspired by my bike generators of a few years ago, and went on to build super sweet bicycle generators to take their classrooms off the grid. Very nice. They drove to the meeting so that they could bring their bike generator to the meeting, so people have been donating energy so that the presentation itself can be run off of the human-energy-filled battery. Best of all, these guys made shirts for us. Pictures to come.

Survival or Simple Living?

2010-07-24T21:08:00.006-04:00

So I just got back from the Roots School Core Skills 1 class, which was about survival skills and wow. I just had my mind blown, and I need a place to digest it all before I can move on. (Specifically, I need to finish the sermon I'm supposed to give tomorrow at St. Andrew's, but I can't really get there while there's still Roots School stuff floating about in my head).

It would be too much to write about all the different pieces because we just did SO MUCH! Something I absolutely loved about this class was that pretty much with every topic we learned about we then actually tried. We got time to put into practice the things we learned. For example... We learned about how to catch animals through specific snare and trap designs and then we built them (and then unbuilt them, or caught sticks in them, cause apparently it's illegal to actually set traps and snares unless you're in a survival situation). We learned about boiling water with hot rocks, and then we made water-tight containers using only material from a white pine and then boiled water with rocks. Sweet. The entire week was like that. Everyday was something new centered around the themes of Shelter, Water, Fire, and Food.

Some highlights for me: skinning a rabbit (a sacred, serious, but important act), learning about natural springs, plant drawing & identification (yay for white-man's-foot aka wide-leaf plantain), starting my first bow-drill fire.

But I guess what I'm really interested in writing about is the transition back into modern civilization, because it's not what I expected. Honestly, I haven't been much of a camper, so being all dirty and smelly and grimmy was somewhat of a new sensation, if you will. I slept quite poorly about every other night in the tent (temperature, turning my brain off, getting comfortable all active players in that issue) which made me look forward to coming home to my bed all the more. That's one modern comfort I seem to be stuck to.

But as I drove to Essex from the Roots School I had quite an unexpected reaction. I had the urge to stop and examine roadkill... (!) cause... well... i would know what to do with it and I could tell if it was fresh enough to bother. I had a new appreciation for the tank which is the groundhog that lay dead on the side of the road. I couldn't bring myself to drive faster than 60mph for some reason, so a lot of people passed me, and it was really hard not to judge them... or at least quietly think to myself "My gosh, they probably don't know how to survive. They probably can't make a fire without matches." Well, of course, if someone told them, and gave them an opportunity, I'm sure just about anybody could learn. But still, I thought about the society I was entering: air conditioned, comfortable, full of sugar and noise, and it seemed to me that I preferred the woods. The hot but shady, mildly uncomfortable, incredibly rich and deep woods. I don't really want to use matches now that I know i don't have to. And now that i've had 3 maple cookies, a macaroon, and blueberry jam in my cereal, I think I'd prefer the rice and beans we ate in the woods. (It should be noted that the cooking at the Roots School is worth the price of tuition alone. It's delectable, mostly local, organic, and very happy meats. Very happy. (Thanks Sarah and Benny!)

Already I miss the smell of the cedar campfire, the background noise of the thrushes, the filtered green light that came with being outside pretty much all day. I miss the water. dang.

This class has taken "simple living" to a whole new level, and I'm not sure I'll ever be the same. I hope not, actually. :)

Summertime Courses!

2010-02-17T12:40:00.004-05:00

This summer I'm shaking it up. No more run of the mill summertimes for me - this is the 7th summer since I graduated from college, and my gosh! I haven't had a summer to myself since then. KSTF has had me flying around the country; the Governor's Institute of Vermont has been an institutionalized week of my life in the summer, and truth be told, I need a change.

So the plans are to take a slew of classes that I've been intending to take for some time now, so here's the list of courses:
May 1-2 Root Cellar Design at Yestermorrow
May 8-9 Earth Oven Building at Yestermorrow
May 15-16 Tracking and Awareness at the Root's School
June 19-July2 Hike the Long Trail with MHS Community Connections
July 18-24th Roots Core Skills 1 at the Root's School

Actually, the list looks shorter now for some reason. But I'm ok with that. Clearly May is packed, and I'll spend a lot of time in June hiking to prepare for the Long Trail trip.

I feel like the difference here is that ... I really want to do these things. No one is asking me to do them - I'm electing to do them, which feels really different. Gosh I'm pumped. :)

Hope or Triage or Both?

2009-11-24T20:56:00.013-05:00

For whatever reason I've been battling a sense of impending doom lately. Put a different way, I haven't been feeling much hope lately, I'm using this space to talk through it.

Maybe it's because I just watched the trailer for the new movie The Road, which has pushed my visions of "worst case scenario" a little further down the awful scale. :( I'm sure I'll get over it by tomorrow, but it makes me wonder about the triage of solutions to the pending ecological problems. It makes me want to build a Living Machine in my garage and take a course from the Roots School about wilderness survival, or go to Doe Camp this summer and learn how to handle a gun or a bow & arrow.

I've been wanting to know how to do these things for a long time anyway. It makes me uncomfortable to think that I couldn't survive in the woods on my own.

It also makes me want to go test the water in the stream by my parents' place for contaminants. There's always some funky soapy foam build up in it, and not only do I not know where it comes from, but I don't know what it is, and I wonder if it would be fixed with a simple water filter (the kind that employes layers of sand, and charcoal). I mean, probably not, but if not, why not? And how do you fix it? I know UVM will test your soil for something like $15 and give you a full report on all the heavy metals and composition they find in it. I wonder if there's something similarly available for water. There must be. Sometimes I wish I had more of a biological or chemical background to know how to even begin to know who would do this work.

So my solution to this frustration is to plan action and to learn.

But I'm reminded too of the advice from Jesus (from Matthew 6:25) "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?" But how are we supposed to do that? I guess the reality is that all this planning for some imaginary worst case scenario does feel a little weird.

But that's not the point, abandoning well-advised plans for the sake of "not worrying" doesn't really help us. But instead, maybe it's like what my parents told me when I was nervous for finals: Do your best, and then leave the rest up to God. You can't do a thing about it past trying your best, so there's no point in worrying. It only steals joy from the present.

But then, are my plans well-advised?

Is this the cycle I could so easily get caught in. Is this the best I can do? Is there something more or different I should be doing? This is the part where I have to let go. This is the part where faith helps me live better; where trust in God would help me keep my head and my wits about me (which will ultimately help in any bad situations anyway). As I already know, people (like myself) who are panicked or afraid make poor decisions.

So I guess this post also comes with a prayer for deeper trust in God, for rest and deep breathing after all the planning has been done. The more connected I am to the Source, the better for everyone. :P :)

Bible verses on Ecology

2009-11-11T18:11:00.003-05:00

So I had a somewhat discouraging conversation with a friend about Christian ecology (in that I responded in a way that could have used a much larger helping of love than I showed), but on the plus side a few folks chimed in the facebook post with some helpful references, which I thought would be worth sharing here. So here's hoping that this is useful! :)

2 Chronicles 7:13-14
When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 36:20-21
He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power. The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.

Genesis 6:19
You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.

Genesis 2:15
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

Leviticus 18:26-28
But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out, as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

Leviticus 25:2
'Speak to the Israelites and say to them: "When you enter the land I am going to give you, the land itself must observe a sabbath to the LORD."

Numbers 35:33-34
'Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.'

Isaiah 5:8-10
Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
til no space is left
and you live alone on the land.

The LORD Almighty has declared in my hearing:
"Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants.

A ten-acre vineyard will produce only a bath of wine,
a homer of seed only an ephah of grain."

Jeremiah 3:2-3
Look up to the barren heights and see.
Is there any place where you have not been ravished?
By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers,
sat like a nomad in the desert.
You have defiled the land
with your prostitution and wickedness.

Therefore the showers have been withheld,
and no spring rains have fallen.
Yet you have the brazen look of a prostitute;
you refuse to blush with shame.

Hope this is helpful!

Vshi installations in Montpelier!

2009-11-10T15:48:00.000-05:00

So we had our first two pellet stove installations last week through the vt sustainable heating initiative- super exciting! It's great to see thos work come to fruition and hear the feedback from the recipients. Simply put, they're thrilled and eager to help give back to their community and vshi. Sweet.

And now for lessons learned:
Don't work with vt stove & flag works, they're not nice.
When doing a site visit make sure to check for grounded outlets and floor pitch - leveling takes a little while.
$2000 / installation is probably too low.

Church Garden Best Practices

2009-09-10T08:44:00.005-04:00

So after a fairly successful summer, the church garden has now been sufficiently harvested that it would be difficult to get amounts of anything worthy of preservation. So last Sunday we opened the space to gleaning (there were some amounts of basil, dill, and stray tomatoes, fennel, and some bolting greens).

At first when we would get a harvest of lettuces that really couldn't be preserved I conceded that we ought to give them away a little begrudgingly, but after I gave away summer squash, cabbage, lettuce, and tomatoes at church, I was hooked. I suppose I liked giving food away to the food shelf well enough, which desperately needs fresh produce, but I LOVED giving food away at church. It was so satisfying to go up to the fringe folks who were sticking around and say "hey, would you like some potatoes?" Then they would take them, and leave happy, and if the few data points I have are indicative a trend (and I'll have a few more data points after this coming Sunday), then the folks who have received food as a gift from the garden have a 100% return rate. Hm. :)

As I think about what we would plant for next year, I'm drawn towards thinking about the things which preserved well, were relatively easy to harvest, or which lent themselves to recipes that people knew (e.g. Who knows what the heck to do with fennel bulb?).

The veggies which excelled against these criteria were:
potatoes - they keep so well
carrots - keep well, and we made an awesome soup and made for awesome church-time snacks
plum tomatoes - SO much sauce!
basil - who doesn't love pesto? (only i might make it with some other nut besides pine nuts, cause, well, you can and pine nuts are like THE most expensive nut at the coop).
onions - again keep well, easy to harvest
squash - wow, so prolific, easy to give away, easy to shred and freeze
kale - blanch & freeze in bags
green beans - good thing my mom has a pressure cooker, so we canned a whole bunch of beans
celery - good in the carrot soup

Veggies which I would probably not do next year:
cherry tomatoes - so labor intensive
dill - I don't think we ever harvested this
fennel - what do you do with fennel?
parsley - unless i grew it specifically for companion planting, we didn't harvest it like at all

Somewhere in the middle:
big tomatoes - sure they're big, but I don't think they produced the volume of the plums/juliets

Other things I would do differently:
trellises - basically our trellises sucked. They almost all fell over
string - I think we tied up the tomatoes with like some throw-away string from the ReStore, and it got all stretched out and ineffectual. Next year I'll invest in some twine.
logging the harvest - We were pretty good about recording what went in, but not so good about recording how much was taken out, so we have no real sense of the value added from this project.

Running a church garden has been really good, I'm glad we had people sign up for particular weeks to take care of it so the burden was more spread out. *whew*
Even so I'm not entirely sure if I'll be doing it again next year. We'll see.

Honesty and Humility

2009-09-04T16:39:00.004-04:00

So it's 4:30pm on a Friday and I've decided that grading papers is still my priority to lighten my load for next week. You would think that would be a gritty, unsatisfying decision, but among the stack there came one paper which caught me completely by surprise, and made my extra time entirely worthwhile.

For obvious reasons I can't disclose anything about the student, but I can describe the assignment. It was a graphing practice. It provided several sets of data with the task of determining the function that best described it based on a handful of functions I set out earlier in class. One of the six data sets was a little sneaky: it didn't completely conform to any of the functions I had described. I planned to give full credit for a "quadratic" solution, as that was the closest match that I had provided. But this student came up with the actual solution: that it was y=kx^(1.5). And then he wrote a paragraph about this problem as follows (I don't think it's illegal to share this - besides I was delighted to have read it):

"The graph of data set ____ looks like a parabola or a straight line. I also though that I might have made a mistake drawing it and that it was a square-root. None of these worked, so I asked my father for help. We determined that it followed the equation y=kx^(1.5). Although I worked hard on this problem, the solution is not mine."

Here's what I wrote on his paper:
"Indeed it is also Kepler's solution to the relationship between the orbital radius and period of the planets, more commonly seen as radius^3=period^2, which gives period=radius^(3/2). Your honesty and humility are truly remarkable. Thank you :) "

I will probably be glowing about this kid all weekend.

Soooo... now what? Transitioning into the curriculum

2009-09-01T16:30:00.007-04:00

This the part of the year where I pause a little bit and wonder how the heck do I start the real stuff? I'm perpetually tempted to solicit from students even the most mundane of details, just to prove to myself that they are thinking. But the kinds of questions I'm prone to asking during lecture could be most accurately described as "fill in the blank" for which the context makes it painfully clear what the answer should be: This is not critical thinking.

Today I had a brainwave and since I didn't have a class until half way through the day I had time to make it happen, much to my relief. After setting up the concept chart and supplying them with details about position, displacement, and time, it was time to start thinking about velocity... since there's really not a whole lot you can do with those fundamental measurements (besides perhaps discussing their origins, the nature of the smallest increment, and personal applications, e.g. the length of one's stride or the time it takes to start & stop a timer).

So on to velocity we plowed, and here were the questions I posed in a ppt slide with instructions to work on the questions in groups:
1) What is speed in terms of the items on your concept chart?
2) In what units do we measure speed, and what do those units tell us about what speed is composed of?
3) Write an equation for speed based on your answer to the above.
4) Is this equation always true? When is it not? What are its limitations?

As far as I can tell all the groups came to the correct conclusions, but now I'd like to know which question was most helpful for the creation of the equation which they created?

I'm inspired to ask such a question because of my recent reading of The Teaching Gap, which describes (among other very interesting things) the value Japanese school place on multiple methods. They don't require that all students use the same method to solve a problem, but observe, rather, that statistically speaking certain percentages of students will be prone to solving a problem through a handful of methods. So, of course, I'm very curious to see the distribution of methods the students used to come up with the equation... or perhaps since they worked in groups, I'll have to frame it more like, "Which question helped you personally understand what the equation ought to be?"

Update on the Women in Engineering: We're about to start our first project, so I'll see if I can put together a post-survey regarding their enthusiasm. I'll let you know what I find. :)

What do you do on the First Day of Physics?

2009-08-28T11:42:00.004-04:00

So I'm in the midst of the first day, and since I have no papers to grade or meetings to attend I'm free to reflect a little bit on this beginning.

Historically Experimental Physics has been the hardest of my classes to teach, and this year it's second period, but so far there's an extraordinarily excellent vibe in that class. I mean, I know it's only been one day, but I think the first day is pretty telling about the rest of the year.

So what do you do on the first day of school?

3 things:
Get some information about the kids, their interests, and their folks' contact
Go through preliminary stuff... Syllabus, Safety Contract, the Wiki Contract
Do an Agree/Disagree activity.

This is where we set up a continuum in the room from strongly agree down to strongly disagree, and then put out statements like:
Science is fun.
Scientific progress is good.
One theory is better than another if it explains more phenomena.
The universe is infinitely complex.

I really like it when we get to examine some of the ideas the lay unspoken at the heart of science. Wouldn't it be great if we reverted back to calling science "natural philosophy"? hehehe

So far so good!

VSHI in Montpelier

2009-08-10T10:31:00.003-04:00

Since the Governor's Institute for Engineering I've found at least two other students who were interested in joining me in VSHI work in Montpelier. This is exciting since it's only been one other student and I representing our capitol so far.

This original student and I worked with the head of LIHEAP, Richard Moffi, to send out an interest survey to Montpelier LIHEAP clients, and have since received back several surveys for strong candidates to receive a pellet stove from the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative.

So far I've been on three site visits in Montpelier, some were stronger candidates than others, but man, we've got a bunch more to follow up with before we can make any decisions. After having met some of these families I can see that it's going to be ridiculously hard to turn people down. Oh my gosh - I think I may have caught the bug. All I want to do is help these people.

Transition Vermont

2009-08-07T14:45:00.002-04:00

Although it may not seem like it, my lack of posting does not correlate with a lack of events worthy of blogging about, but rather it's more indicative of my lack of regular internet. Or perhaps it's more indicative of my laptop's failing airport card. (I must remember to get that fixed!)

Anyway, the item worth breaking my blogging fast for today is a website called Transition Vermont, which looks to be a collaboration of all my favorite Peak Oil and Sustainability groups, of course involving Carl Etnier, who has done more for sustainability in Vermont than almost anyone else I can think of.

It looks like a great resource, with a rich calendar of events and forums. (I hope to make it to the bee keeping class on the 15th!)

Women in Engineering

2009-06-29T22:31:00.003-04:00

While at the Governor's Institute of Vermont (Engineering), one of the directors posed a question during a session: "Why is there such a disparity between the number of men and the number of women who go into engineering?" Silent in the back, the standard answers ran in sequence through my head. Women feel they must choose between career and family, women are not encouraged to "tinker" as children... but these answers have felt (and continue to feel) insufficient, and then a new thought crept in.

Earlier in the week we went over the different types of engineering. During this discussion someone told the joke, "what's the difference between mechanical engineering and civil engineering?... Civil Engineers make targets, and Mechanical Engineers make bombs." In a way, it's pretty funny, on another level it's just really awful.

In that moment talking about women engineering, I thought of this joke, and then I thought about the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative and how more than half the group is comprised of women. Just the night before Courtney, one of the VSHI kids, spoke to the group about how doing this work helped give her life meaning, that the significance of helping people kept her motivated. So here's the thought.

At engineering camp presenters say things like "Who here likes to blow things up!?" which of course draws huge applause. But, truth be told, I don't like blowing things up. If I were to guess, I bet there are a lot of women who would agree.

Perhaps one of the barriers to gender equity in engineering is the "bomb culture" billboarded by lots of the rock stars and role models of engineering. If the main motivation for students studying aerospace is "I like to shoot stuff", that may not be sufficient for the average woman.

Instead, I would suggest encouraging a culture of altruism. Build relationships, solve community problems, help your family - through engineering!

Many of the projects I do excite the men more than the women (I can only speak anecdotally here) such as tennis ball launchers, rockets. But I can only think of a couple projects where the women show just as much or more enthusiasm as the men. These are the house-wiring project, in which students construct parallel and series circuitry in a cardboard doll house they also assemble, and bridge building.

Something I'd like to try next year (if I can think of it), I'd like to survey my students after every project to see how into it they were, and see if there is a discrepancy between male and female enthusiasm or interest. ... now I'll just need to remember this post in 2 months. :P :)

Welcome to the Fifth Grade...

2009-06-25T13:00:00.007-04:00

... where "he said/she said" dominates the fragile social culture.

I hesitate to blog about this as people from Montpelier might actually read this, but I think I can keep it anonymous enough to be benign.

Lately there's been some drama among the faculty at school. It's a little awkward to talk about. Frankly, I was oblivious to it at first, but some folks seem pretty upset by it. At our last faculty meeting of the year I definitely got drawn into it, making comments I shouldn't have.

Usually my attitude around faculty meetings is to just not care. If I don't care, then I can't be upset by it. This has been a good method of survival in a system that seems to uniformly makes people bitter, vindictive, and jaded. I've blogged before (I believe) about the need for vigilance against such tendencies, and a red flag went up over my behavior during the last meeting.

The administration during my student teaching experience had a contentious relationship with the faculty, but I'm thankful to report that the administration here has dealt with recent drama as graciously as I can imagine. Now, if only we could figure out how to give each other grace. As a fan of direct communication I am tempted to confront offending teachers and say, "you know when you talk like that you really hurt people", but seeing as it's the end of the year I'm afraid the opportunity has been lost.

So the only solution, then, is to forgive people regardless of where they're at, and start fresh and humbly with a new season next year. And, I might add, I need to not participate in the trashing of other people - for trashing other people.

Modern Physics and the End of the Year

2009-06-15T14:56:00.004-04:00

Exam week is so delightful. I'm not wholly sure the kids would agree, but it sure is cake for me. I've just got to grade and get ready for graduation rehearsal on Wednesday. Oh right, so I'm the senior class advisor this year, which (thus far) has been good on all counts. Even when the seniors pulled their final prank (silly string at the end of the awards ceremony) they had a strong enough collective conscience that they picked it all up when it was over (yay!).

But before I get too far away from the end of the year, I want to pause a bit and reflect on my favorite unit of the year: topics in modern physics. During this unit I start with a series of 4 lectures because... well... everyone needs to have at least a few foundational pieces in place before they can go forward. These include: Special Relativity, Young's Double Slit Experiment, An Electron in a Box, and Entanglement. From there the kids are assigned certain topics to research and report back to the class on their findings. These topics include:

Black Holes, Wormholes, and Hawking Radiation

General Relativity and the curvature of space time

Fractals, Chaos Theory, and Conway's Game of Life

String Theories, M-Theory and other Theories of Everything

Supersymmetry and the subatomic zoo

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem

AI and the physics of consciousness

Superconductors

Quantum Computing

I think there's more, but that's the short list. Anyway, I frequently feel hesitant to teach this stuff because well... it might be different in 5 years, and who knows if it's even real? Well, the response I got from the kids was remarkably positive. They said it was "the most interesting unit all semester" and that it ought to be longer next year. Interesting. It's last in the semester for a reason, namely as a preventative measure for senioritis. So it has the unfortunate fate of having whatever time it can be afforded before the end of the year and no more, really. But I suppose that's an appropriate fate for a topic whose validity depends on every successive issue of Scientific American.

National Board Certification Re-takes

2009-05-21T07:47:00.004-04:00

Last Monday I retook two sections of my National Board Certification exam. And I think I did really well. Yay!

I retook the sections about Breadth of Knowledge and Connections in Science. In case you're in a similar position, here's what I did.

Some National Board Certified science teachers recommended that I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's wicked long and mostly focused on biological subjects, but it certainly felt thorough. I learned tons and felt like that was pretty decent studying. Another book that was recommended but didn't have time to read was Science Matters by James Trefil. Bill Bryson's book took me like three months to complete, but ironically some of the best studying I did was within 24hrs of the test.

I found a short list of "major themes" in science and then attempted to relate each of these themes to the three sciences I don't teach: bio, chem, and earth sci. Just this mental exercise helped immensely as some of the connections I thought of turned out to be exact questions on the test. So there we are. *whew*

Next November will tell if I was right!

Montpelier Public Wi-Fi

2009-05-01T14:12:00.005-04:00

What if Montpelier provided free wireless access to the entire city? That'd be sweet, right? NYC can do it, why not us?

Well, if my memory serves me correctly, we already voted on it on town meeting day and gave approval for someone to go ahead and do it. My understanding is that there wasn't money set aside for the project, but that basically we gave them permission to include it in our taxes.

Only thing is, no one's done it yet.

Is this an opportunity for some highly geeky physics? This could be a super sweet project for a bunch of geeky kids to take on.
Where do you put wireless routers?
What signal strength would be needed, or what is the radius of each router?
Are there places that lend themselves more easily to router placements than others?
How much with this cost? and the biggie:
How much backlash will we get from Comcast?

What if it was a municipally own/regulated utility like water or electricity? It's like extending the library into people's homes.

Now we've just got to make sure that we're not inadvertently destroy bee populations with wireless devices, and maybe sort through the censorship issues raised by state-sponsored internet transfers of porn. Hmmm... this is sounding messier.

The Future of Food: Monsanto vs. the Common Man

2009-04-29T19:42:00.006-04:00

I just watched The Future of Food on hulu and wow am I fired up! It has given me a clearer perspective on Monsanto and genetically modified anythings. I will leave it to the documentary to explain the horrifying details, but I need to clear my head a little bit, because I'm not sure I'll be able to function as a human being if I don't.

The movie seemed to highlight some broken aspects of our society.
1) The US patent system especially in regards to genes and plants.
2) The incestuous relationship between the government and big business, in this case Monsanto. No new laws would be passed to hinder Monsanto because all the politicians in the cabinet either worked for or were largely funded by Monsanto.

Wikipedia has a quick list of things Monsanto has been involved with over the last 100 years, as well as a list of board members and employees who are or have held political office. (Some of this might sound surprising, but I assure you there were no "flags" on this Wikipedia entry):
The Manhattan Project
DDT
Agent Orange
Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and rBGH
styrofoam manufacturing

And then there's all the farming havoc they've caused. I know understand Monsanto to be a bully. Perhaps one of the biggest bullies in the modern world.

So how do you stop a bully? Their legal record is incredible. They have threatened states with law suits if their products are banned. They sue small farmers who are found to have plants with their genetic coding even if the farmers did nothing malicious at all!

University of Vermont has long been involved with Monsanto, as they have funded research into BGH and rBGH. What if UVM turned them down?

What if we were somehow able to change the patent laws about plants and genes. The laws are simply unjust, but I don't know that anyone has been able to articulate exactly why they are "insane", as a farmer from the documentary described.

I don't feel much better. The patent thing is still irking me. I need to do more thinking and research.

Leadership as a Newbie Teacher

2009-04-27T14:12:00.003-04:00

I just got back from Denver, where the 2004 Knowles Science Teaching Fellows had their (sniff) last meeting with just each other. It's been five years that we've gone to these meetings together and we've seen each other go through pre-service, to student teaching, to first year, and for some of us up to our fifth year of teaching. There have been tears of exasperation, many epiphanies, and lots of laughter. We've learned about effective physics and chemistry curricula, inquiry, differentiated instruction, and assessment. So what else is there to learn? We're all becoming quite confident in our own classrooms, so where do you go from here?

Our last meeting with Steve D'Angelis from Maine was focused on Personal Learning Communities (like the DuFour model), and I think I'm the only one from the group currently leading a PLC group at my school. This is mainly because I found out the school was already going to adopt this as a project and they were looking for leaders. As we talked about how to start PLCs at our schools (mainly without administrative support), something really interesting came out: many of us had major mental blocks to the idea of being leaders at our schools.

Some people were just straight up afraid; others didn't want to be the person "telling other people what to do"; still others didn't want to step on anybody's toes. I couldn't say for sure, but I think when this came out Steve changed the agenda for the rest of the weekend. He asked questions like, "What does it mean to be a leader?" and "Do you want to be a leader?" and "How do you picture yourself as a leader in your school? Best case scenario?"

I'm still reflecting on these questions. What makes it difficult for new teachers to become leaders at their schools? There are probably a hundred reasons, but it makes me think about one particular dynamic. Many of us teachers have heard the phrase "we tried that years ago and it didn't work." It demonstrates to me the common faculty dynamic where the jaded lead the new. Perhaps it's related to the teacher's union where age amounts to seniority, and therefore leadership.

Here's my point:
If your most cynical and unimaginative teachers are the ones leading the way, one can only assume the school is destined for mediocrity.

I don't think it's fair to say though that all older teachers are jaded, however. In fact, I would replace cynicism with wisdom in a more idealistic teaching community. And that really should be heeded.

So what shall I conclude? There should be a balance between these two forces: wisdom and imagination, in order to avoid their dopplegangers cynicism and folly, respectively.

(I am, of course, speaking very stereotypically here. So I feel the need to acknowledge that it is certainly possible to have older teachers with imagination and creativity, and younger teachers with a lot of wisdom or cynicism for that matter).

Situation Prediction Reality Explanation

2009-04-12T22:10:00.004-04:00

Lately I've been employing a strategy I learned from a Knowles Fellow. It's a cycle of experimentation where:

I pose a situation

Students predict something

I ask them to vote for their prediction

We try it, and they write down the reality

They write an explanation for what they saw.

This cycle has been highly successful and the students really like it. I have them create a chart which follows those steps:

Situation - Prediction - Reality - Explanation

So far I've used this to examine the motion of marbles on ramps, pendulums, bulbs in series and parallel circuits.

I'm tempted to write about this for an article in some science teaching journal, (my fellowship with KSTF would probably support such an endeavor... maybe I should do it.)

Church Garden Update: Rock Point!

2009-04-07T14:48:00.002-04:00

St. Andrew's finally settled on a location for the new summer project: the church farm/garden. It will be at Rock Point in Burlington (it's behind Burlington High School) which is also near the Bishop Booth Conference Center. This looks to be an excellent match as it fits everything we hope for in the future: multiple biomes, a facility that can host a lot of people if we have a conference, proximity to the Old North End, etc. Wow, that was perfect.

So far the response to this project in general has been polarizing. I heard from one girl after we presented the idea at church, "So I thought I was supposed to move once I graduated in May, but now I know I'm not supposed to." Sweet. This is the most extreme comment I received but other people are similarly excited.

On the flip side some peoples' response has been more like "I don't get it" followed by general disgruntlement. Which is fine - I don't necessarily expect everyone to jump on board all at once or ever. Who knows, maybe it will flop, or maybe it will be freaking amazing.

I think I need to visualize freaking amazing, so that we can better get there....

Organic Garden at the White House

2009-03-22T22:54:00.003-04:00

I found this post about the Obama's planting an organic garden at the White House encouraging.

Lots of great pictures ~

Yum Yum :)

Think Outside the Bottle Taste Test

2009-03-22T21:06:00.004-04:00

So last week my students involved with Think Outside the Bottle volunteered to participate in an event this coming Monday (tomorrow) at the state house. Originally there were going to be a couple speakers, but when we volunteered to do the taste test they agreed that we ought to be the main event. Gah!

That's exciting, but - moment of honesty - it's a little scary. There will be a bunch of press folks there. (I thought I was done with media for the year, but apparently not). So here we go. It's exactly during class time, it's definitely all about sustainability and conservation of matter and energy, and it's something the kids are completely pumped about, so I'm willing to go with it.

Hopefully I don't make a fool of myself or the kids in the process.

Supply Side Jesus Cartoon

2009-03-16T10:29:00.003-04:00

As long as I've got a slightly political bend lately, I may as well throw this reference out there:

Supply Side Jesus is a cartoon that explores how Jesus' ministry would have been different if he had been, well... more politically "right".

It does use some unfortunate strawman tactics, but nonetheless I think it does raise some interesting points. Worth considering.

Professional Learning Communities: Outside the Norms

2009-03-16T08:28:00.006-04:00

All my DuFour PLC training tells me that we're not doing what PLCs are meant to do. Theoretically we're supposed to be designing common assessments, testing students, analyzing the data, and then using the data to change our practice. Then the cycle starts over again.

But no, that's not what we've been doing. Instead I love what we're doing a LOT more. hahaha!

Our big thing as a department is that we want to know what each other teaches. So we chose a topic which we felt like reached into every course, chemical bonds and atomic structure, and we've given brief glimpses about how we teach that topic. It's been highly interesting and engaging. We are learning more about each other, about science, and also making our curricula more cohesive as we use the same vocabulary.

So it may not be strictly what we "should" be doing, but hey, I like it. I'm learning, the department is learning. I'll count that a success, even if it doesn't fit the formula.

Well, we've now come to roughly the end of chemical bonds/atomic structure, and we'll be moving on this coming Wednesday with a new ubiquitous topic: Nature of Science. To start us off is the Earth Science teacher who would apparently appreciate feedback about a particular lesson he always gives to students. Should be interesting!

Why I am not a Conservative

2009-03-10T16:59:00.006-04:00

I realize this may not fall ostensibly under any of the categories I purport to blog about here (Education, Physics, Sustainability, and Faith), but I feel like it does fit in the context of Sustainability, so hang in there with me.

The other day there was this 14 year old "conservative prodigy" on the Fox News channel, who boiled down what it meant to be a Conservative into 4 principles:

1) Respect for the Constitution

2) Respect for Life

3) Reducing the size of government

4) Personal Responsibility

This was fabulously put, because on many of these counts I whole heartedly agree. The issue I had was with the Reduction of the size of the government, and in addition, I don't think Conservatives are really about #4, Personal Responsibility. Let me explain:

I would certainly love to live in a world in which people could govern themselves, and I think as a general educated, moderately moral civilization, we haven't done poorly at that... or perhaps that's just easy to say from my position, in the safest state in the country. But in any case, I don't think it's proper to reduce the size or role of government if there is corruption that needs checking.

I was just reading a review of a Joel Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, which basically contends that Corporations, whose only agenda is to pursue money, bears all the insensitivity and moral character of a deranged person. If corporations are truly to have "personhood" in the legal sense, then the company's "mental health" must be assessed as well, and for many Inc.'s the diagnosis would be "pathological". We have a broken business system, this is why I associate Big Business with Conservativism, because Big Business would like deregulation, lifting of moral and ethical obligations, and Conservatives, who would like to see government reduced, would give it to them.

If Conservatives were really about Personal Responsibility, then they would hold businesses with corporate "personhood" accountable and this means more regulation, not less.

But there's a second reason why I don't think Personal Responsibility is really on the Conservative agenda.

Because of the nature of businesses to make a profit at the cost of its laborers (through cutting health benefits, livable wages, safe working conditions) as well as their tendency to pollute as much as is legal (or more), some people will wind up being poorer than others. This may be seen as the fault of the business, as my previous statements would imply, but ultimately businesses are made up of people, and in the end people are responsible for keeping other people in poverty.

So who is to help out the folks who wind up as "less fortunate" than others? We may say that this is where the church comes in. It's the church's job to take care of people in poverty. Sure. Yes. However, what the church can provide is simply not enough to make up for what corruption has stolen from people in poverty. We ought to be thanking the government for taking forcibly from us what we should have given voluntarily to our neighbor. We may disagree about the functionality of the welfare system, but in the end everyone is looking for better solutions than welfare, and hopefully we will find some. Perhaps Neighborkeepers is one of these solutions, but in the meantime I think it's entirely justifiable to say that our society is better for taking care of its poorest members. I think if Conservatives were really in favor of Personal Responsibility, there would be more support for government programs safeguarding financial and racial equity, and workers rights.

To be fair, I don't consider myself Liberal either, and perhaps if I feel so moved I'll run a critique of Liberal ideology next.

Church Farm Update & Sustainability at St. Andrew's

2009-03-09T21:25:00.003-04:00

As usual, I have lots to update about, but because of recent comments (yay!) :) I'll bend this post towards the relevant topic: Where is St. Andrew's at with our efforts to be and advocate for sustainability.

There's lots on the bill for this summer.

Awesome thing #1: Canoe trip down the Penobscot river, learning about the environment, ending with a stay with the Penobscot tribe and learning about how the land and Western civilization impacts them. As far as I know lots of people are interested in this.

Awesome thing #2: We just started reading Wendell Berry in our Discussion Group, which (of course) has sparked lots of fascinating conversation.

Awesome thing #3 (and this one is my baby) hehehehe: We're hoping to partner with another local church - specifically North Avenue Alliance Church, which has land, to start a "church farm".

This is a major part of our vision for the future of our church. We're finding that our big thing is helping to fix broken systems in our community, and one of those systems is food and cycles of poverty, and so... let's address them both and start a farm!

We went back and forth about the models for making this work:

Do we do family-sized plots and let people be responsible for their own square of earth? or do we let the whole space be planned by people who know how to do agriculture and then get volunteers to dig in the dirt on "volunteer days". I think it will be the latter. Hopefully we'll get connected with NeighborKeepers to involve people in poverty. Then the food will go towards the people who helped (they'll get paid according to the hours they spend perhaps?), cooking classes, and canning classes. I also hope we get to include some seed-saving classes.

Or... perhaps in order to not duplicate what's already happening in our community, we might collaborate with a group like Burlington Community Gardens, or Permaculture Burlington.

So now, I've just got to finish the proposal and get it to North Ave's elder board before the 3rd Monday of the month(!).

Vermont Energy Education Program

2009-03-07T16:54:00.002-05:00

So the Vermont Energy Education Program came to my classroom on Friday and gave a presentation called Energy Efficiency. My friend Seth, who plays a mean game of ultimate, was the representative presenting to my classes, and I think it went really well.

Here are some things I learned:

16oz. of Uranium (enough to fill a normal water bottle) is enough "fuel" to supply the average American household with enough electricity to last 50 years!
The first battery (known to Western culture) was invented in 1799.
In 1820, Mr. Orstead was demonstrating his battery to friends at a party when he noticed that the a compass sitting nearby on the table reacted every time he connected or disconnected the leads of his battery. Gosh I love accidental discoveries! ha!

From this demo I'm feeling a little inspired to build a couple pieces of equipment:

An ammeter connected to a coil of wire on a hollow cylinder, and then get a cow magnet to drop through it. As long as the ammeter has a precise enough sensitivity it should demonstrate a changing magnetic field generating electricity.
A spinning wheel connected to a stout magnet, which would spin near two coils of wire. Seth had one that lit up some LEDs. Perhaps I should ask him about this before I jump into making one.

I think the kids appreciated the mix of toys to play with (hand-crank generators, shake-powered flashlights, etc.) and overheads and discussion questions. I could definitely see inviting him back next year.

Renewable Energy Projects

2009-03-02T07:25:00.006-05:00

As my vacation winds down, I think increasingly about the classes I'll jump back into on Wednesday. When I left them we were two days into talking about renewable energy projects. I offered a menu of project ideas, plus an opening for students to come up with their own. So far, though, the feedback has been "Can we do all of these?!" I am seriously tempted to cancel the rest of the semester's curriculum to do that, but I also feel like people may get sick of these projects. Anyway, here's the menu of projects listed from simplest and most doable to most difficult to implement (roughly). Any suggestions are welcome as well.

Light Loggers - Donald, my intern, and I placed light loggers in a few rooms around the school which recorded when there was motion in a room and when the lights were on. The goal would be to see *how* worthwhile it would be to install motion-sensors on the lights.

DDC Boiler Control - The boiler room is controlled by a Digital Display Controller (DDC). We could monitor the temperatures in each room in the whole school and see which rooms are perpetually too cold, and which are too hot. That would ultimately lead us to going over some of the duct joints with aluminum tape to prevent leaks. We could even then see if it made any measurable difference.

Solar Hot Water Panel - Turns out the cafeteria's hot water comes from an electric hot water tank located under the cafeteria. We could run a calculation to see *how* worthwhile it would be to install a solar hot water panel above the cafeteria. As I'm told solar hot water has a higher return on investment than photovoltaics. If our conclusions showed that it would be of significant value, then, we could propose this to principal, head custodian, head of facilities. Our high school recently won $10,000 from AARP for being awesome at sustainability (mainly because of our greenhouse, and the biology curriculum's dedication to growing food for the cafeteria there). That money isn't earmarked for anything, and in keeping with the spirit with which we won it, this may be an entirely appropriate use of it. But we'll see.

Operation Plastic Removal, Think Outside the Bottle, Plastic Bag Fee Statewide or Countywide - In the fall my 7th period physics students were moved to spread the word about BPA in water bottles like Nalgene. They formed a group they ended up calling Operation Plastic Removal. The wrote a mission statement, made a facebook group, made a video, and a tee-shirt design, which many students are excited to purchase. Its sort of taken on a life of its own. For a while I squelched it because we had to move on in the curriculum, but now that we're back to renewable energy, it's now appropriate to return I believe. There are many directions we could take this.

1) We could work with Think Outside the Bottle, who has recently had a campaign to get municipal facilities to cancel their agreements with bottled water companies. According to a rumor I heard a representative from Think Outside the Bottle was going to target Vermont's Statehouse next.

2) Students from Mount Abe in Bristol are pushing for a statewide plastic bag fee. A version of such a bill has been introduced in both the house and senate, but according to an environmental lobbyist friend of mine, she says that no one is talking about it. Sad face. However, (hehehehe) it sounds like the Central Vermont Solid Waste District was eager for ideas at their most recent board meeting. They have a zero-waste policy which helps guide their decisions, and this would fall right in line with that. It looks like there might be a good opportunity here. It would be easier to go to a statewide fee or ban after it had been piloted at the county level.

3) There is a bill with Natural Resources and Energy Committee that would ban DECA (a particularly toxic flame retardant) as well as BPA in baby-bottles and in the lining of baby food containers. According to my friend people *are* talking about this bill and it's likely to pass. Nonetheless, I think the kids would be thrilled to go there and be a part of the discussion.

Pellet Stoves for Low Income Families in Washington County - I've been working with a group of students and teachers calling themselves the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative whose main goal has been to reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned as heating fuel in Vermont, and their specific action to do this has been to raise money to switch LIHEAP recipients (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) from kerosene, propane, and fuel oil to pellet heat systems. Pellets are cheaper and (in my opinion) will continue to track lower than fuel oil per BTU, so people with capital to make a switch will do that, but those without capital will have to continue burning the more expensive fuel oil. And if sustainability is to become our reality it must be accessible to the poorest in our community. So this group has raised money to switch LIHEAP recipients in Addison County, but why couldn't we do the same in Washington County? Many students wanted to do this.

Wind Energy on State Owned Land and/or ski resorts - Vermont Representative, Rachel Weston is sitting on a bill that would open up state land for renewable energy development. Primarily this would mean people could put wind turbines on ridge lines - there would be special exceptions for particularly well-known vistas, and all the regular rules would apply: not in a migration area, not interrupting endangered species habitat, etc. A friend of mine came up with an interesting amendment to this bill - what if there were wind turbines at ski resorts - they're already (in my view) ecological disaster areas, visually unnatural, they're easily accessible, and ski resorts could get a little green-washing to boot! Ok... probably I shouldn't frame it that way if we move forward with this, but you get the idea. :)

Wow. That was a lot of writing. I hope you can see why the kids are excited about this. I'm excited as well ~ we'll see what can be achieved in the next few months.

Vermont Community Energy Mobilization Project and a Recap

2009-02-27T14:27:00.006-05:00

My gosh it's been a lot time since I posted anything here - over a month, in fact.

I'll admit, part of my absence has been due to the new filtering system at the school combined with a shoddy internet connection at home, in addition to my own lack of motivation to post. Which is not to say that there hasn't been anything interesting going on. So let's recap the last month or so.

In my classes we did egg bungee jumping - the goal is to get the egg as close to the ground as possible without breaking (pictured above).
My intern is two days into his soloing period with my largest class.
I'm agreed to work with the Vermont Community Energy Mobilization (VCEM) project with my students (more on that later).
I'm working with the Vermont Energy Education Program (VEEP) to do some school energy auditing
We had the Governor's Institute of Vermont Winter Weekend again.
And now we're on break until next Wednesday (yay!)

I think my body knows that it's vacation and plans to get sick then on purpose, which is fine with me ~ I'd rather be sick now than have to take time off from school.

So the Vermont Community Energy Mobilization (VCEM) is a program put on by Efficiency Vermont where volunteers get trained (3 hrs worth) and then at a later date, like some Saturday, all the volunteers meet at some central location, Efficiency Vermont gives them a ton of materials and some housing assignments (they know you're coming), and off you go. You actually go to people's houses and install

up to 5 CFLs per house
a programmable thermostat
insulation for electric hot water heaters
6' of pipe insulation for hot water pipes
low-flow shower heads and faucet attachments, etc.
In addition, volunteers collect information about the house's foundation, attic insulation, refrigerator, as well as family's willingness to receive a call from Efficiency Vermont about those items.

So the idea is to get students involved. Teams composed of 2 students (minimum) and 1 adult (minimum) could go do this work in people's homes. I've scheduled the training to take place during school hrs, but the volunteer days will almost certainly be on a Saturday, so how do I get students to show up on a Saturday? Offer it as an alternative to the Final Exam. Yep. This plus a write up about how much energy they saved and what it was like for them and BOOM! Done. Final is over. I had so many kids volunteering. This is going to be great.

Deforestation and Climate Change

2008-12-24T09:10:00.005-05:00

Last night I had dinner with some musician friends from High School (thanks Facebook for making such a meeting possible!). And there were only two of us who had left the fine arts world for science. My friend Abbie (who used to play Oboe in the Vermont Youth Orchestra) has been working on the international politics of global climate change. Her most recent Masters Degree (she now has two) in Environmental Studies led her to a thesis regarding the importance of including deforestation policy in climate change talks. According to her 1/5th of the world's Green House Gas emissions come from deforestation, slash & burn, in the rainforest. And that's the cheapest thing to fix. Instead of building wind turbines, or switching to biodiesel, we could just not destroy forest land for agricultural use.

According to Abbie, slash & burn in the Amazon was, once upon a time, a sustainable technique used by natives for agriculture. A small population would clear an area of forest, but the land was so poor that it could only support them for a handful of years, after which they'd pick up camp, move to another location and do the same thing until, after about a 30 year period they would end up at the original plot.

Abbie's thought is that a high carbon-emitting country could pay a highly forested-country to not cut down their forest land as a way to offset or sequester their carbon.

This plan was opposed by Abbie's friend who works first-hand with Brazilian farmers saying that in such a case, one country basically pays the government of another country and the farmers who need jobs are left with nothing.

Here's as fundamental question: how can we both preserve forest land and create jobs for native peoples?

When a french-horn playing friend asked, "so what's an acre of forest worth?" Abbie replied that it depends on the type of forest and how much carbon is sequestered there. For some forest areas that have been burned it may take on the order of 50 years to gain back the carbon lost to decay or burning. However, the peat forests in Indonesia which are incredibly carbon dense, she said once those have been filled in for agriculture, the space will *never* recapture all the carbon it once held. And ironically, the agriculture in Indonesia is largely for Palm Oil, which is used in many products, but also biodeisel. Apparently the EU just put out a mandate that some percentage of all transportation fuel must be biodeisel. So this mandate is creating a market for a horribly carbon-unfriend practice. Bleh! So complicated!

All this stuff sounds fairly depressing and too big to handle, but I'd like to propose that it's not too big. It's all just policy. Let's change the mindset. I think, globally our morals are shifting, so what should they be? Look at whole systems, give back what you take, businesses need morals too, what do people need?, progress at what cost? hmmm I feel another post coming on... :)

On another note entirely:
Last night I had a dream that my students were presenting their original calculations regarding energy and climate change at a church and WCAX was there and wanted to know if we wanted to use their microphones or if we should use our own. I came up to give an introduction to the presentations when I woke up, and as I did the phrase throbbing in my head was:

"The Rich want to Drive. The Poor want to Eat."

Remembering Romaine Tenney: "The Man Who Would Not Be Moved"

2008-12-12T00:36:00.010-05:00

I heard this story from my mom last night, which I felt was so compelling that we did a little more research and found an article regarding the events in an old newsletter. Here's my version.

In Ascutney Vermont back in the 60's there lived an old man who had a small farm with a gorgeous 19th century gingerbread farm house and a barn across the road. Romaine Tenney, who had been born in the house was the only one of nine siblings still living there, working the farm, which had 40 cows. He was quoted as saying "I was born in this house and I'll die in this house."

Mr. Tenney milked his cows by hand even in 1964. After a little research I found an article in a newsletter from the Weathersfield Historical Society by Edith F. Hunter which states, "He did not approve of electricity, daylight savings time, or gasoline powered vehicles. He heated his house with wood stoves, lighted with kerosine lamps, and did his farming with horses." Mom says she remembers him because he used to rent pasture land from her parents' farm, and he would drive his cows up the road to Weathersfield and their farm, always walking along behind the cows.

"In the early 1960's I-91 was being constructed" the article says. "Many things stood in its way - rocky hills that had to be dynamited, wetlands that had to be filled in, houses and barns that had to be moved or destroyed. One of those houses... was the farm of Romaine Tenney in Ascutney." Tenney resisted all offers from I-91 reps. They offered him almost ten times what the property was worth according to town records, and he wouldn't budge. They offered to move the house, but that was eventually deemed unfeasible.

As I-91 made its progress closer to Tenney's property neighbors offered to help him move, the local school offered to donate large boxes so he could move his belongings, to which Tenney replied, "Perhaps I can use them, or at least they will burn well."

As my mom was telling me this story, I thought it was going to end, "and that's why there's a funny little bend in I-91", but no, that's not how the story ends.

Again from the article: "On Friday, Sept. 11, [1964] the county sheriff came with a court order to remove Romaine Tenny's possessions, and brought along four helpers and two trucks to get the job done." Apparently these movers just started working, moving stuff around all day.

Later that night, after another man named Fitch had dropped off his children's baby sitter he drove by the house and noticed the interior was "all aglow", and there was a strange light inside the barn. He raced to the fire department, but when they arrived they could not break down the door because it had been "spiked" shut. Even if they could have gone in it would have been unsafe as the building was structurally unsound at that point as the fire consumed the house.

Tenney's dogs and cows had been set loose outside the barn, which also burned to the ground.
The next morning, inside the house they found what they believed to be human remains in a bedroom with a .32 caliber rifle, revolver, and exploded shells, although it was unclear if the shells exploded from the fire and the barrels of both the revolver and rifle had been melted shut.

When Mom drives down 91 she knows exactly where the house was and remembers Mr. Tenney as she drives inches above where his house once stood.

Imminent domain is maybe one of the scariest laws I can think of - it symbolizes all that I don't love about forms of government with high level of intervention such as socialism and communism. This also means that despite the fact that I wish certain properties in Montpelier would be managed differently, I respect the fact that it's not my decision and the state, the "will of the people", should not force a change.

True as this story is, it serves as a fable or archetypal myth conveying sentiments which I believe many Vermonters identify with. The reclusive old ludite harrassed by the government in a fit of depression gives in and destroys something beautiful in a final catastrophic statement about progress. Where are we going? Is it somewhere good? Who decides what is good and what is meant by "progress"?

These are difficult questions that I believe many Vermonters are currently struggling with. I hear it in conversations at church, at school, and with students. When students gave me a positive reaction to the possibility of an electro-magnetic pulse bomb going off over America, that certainly gave me pause to question our current state of technology.

The story also raises questions about states rights vs. the rights of individuals. Who's will is more important: those of property owners, or the collective majority's will, the rich foreigner's will or the poor native's will. I believe it's part of the state's job to look out for the rights of its poor constituency.

Sustainability Rally and VECAN Conference

2008-12-08T11:02:00.005-05:00

The last few days have been just crammed with ... wow - great, bad, wonderful, horrible stuff.

Let's start with the highlights:
Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network (VECAN) conference at Vermont Technical College in Randolph. That was just awesome. I went to regional policy session first: not that interesting, but good to know, and meanwhile I found myself brainstorming about other things. Then I dialogued with a VTC prof with whom I'd been meaning to connect, Joan Hall-Richmond. We're both interested in engaging students in the weatherization process. She might also be interested in the Summer of Solutions program (which I'm not sure if I'll do yet).

Then I got to chat with Ken Jones, which was great (as usual), then a final session led by the "ethical consciousness director" for Seventh Generation, Gregor Barnum. There were other people presenting, but he was mainly the show. And he was really good - gosh, he was funny, but I enjoyed his presentation on the Low Carbon Diet workbook very much. I've already proposed doing it with my environmental Bible study group at St. Andrew's.

And finally instead of hearing another speaker I connected with Kimberly Hagen of VEEP (Vermont Energy Education Program?) so she's planning to come to my class to do some energy demonstrations, which I'm completely stoked about.

After the conference I went to a friends house for a potluck followed by a contra dance in Montpelier. And wow. I had never been to the one in Montpelier before, but it was packed with spectrum of ages: people my age, high school-aged folks, middle aged, and more gray-haired folk. It was also one of the few events that I've been to at which there were more men than women. *gasp!* Anyway, I had a ball - thanks for entertaining this paragraph of non-physics related material.

On Friday of the weekend I went to a rally with a bunch of (mostly) college kids, followed by hanging out with legislators and getting a feel for the up coming session and students were able to discuss issues they cared about. It was great.

So now... instead of relating the low points of the weekend, how about we'll frame it as things I've learned:

From the rally:
If I'm not in charge, I should not pick up other people's garbage.
Rely most heavily on adults rather than students to get things done.
I just need to be a confident leader and people will follow.
It's important to keep an open hand and let things evolve as they will evolve. I can't control outcomes.
Having friends around can help me breathe in the midst of chaos.

From the press:
Be careful about what you say to reporters.
Don't involve the media unless you really believe in what's happening.

From the aftermath of the article:
It's best to sweep up miscommunications right away so that feelings are not hurt.

If you'd like to read the article it's here (it had some less than bright implications about our relationship with the cafeteria).

Altogether I'd say it was a successful weekend even with all the madness with the media. We'll just chalk that up to my own education.

Is Your Life Sustainable? Reflections on busy-ness

2008-12-02T20:17:00.004-05:00

This evening I met with one of the pastors of St. Andrew's over tea at Uncommon Ground in Burlington, and I told him all about the latest excitments in my life:

Recent trip to Chicago for a Knowles Science Teaching fellows meeting; I just got interviewed by a woman from the Bridge for an upcoming article about Capitol Area Neighborhoods; VSHI is hosting a rally for sustainability this Friday and KSTF's advertising company caught wind of it and so they've managed to interest the Times Argus sometime before the rally; and apparently Vermont Magazine is interested in an interview in the near future.

Meanwhile I'm working on weatherizing the homes of St. Andrew's goers, visioning where St. Andrew's should go next, and just today I met up with a guy from the Roots school in Calais which teaches primitive and survival skills. I'd really like to have him come to my classroom to teach students how to make fire, in conjunction with our unit on force and friction.

In the course of conversation he said, "Do you think your life is sustainable?"

I said immediately, "no", but I was really just referencing the gasoline in my car and the propane heating my house. Of course, that's not what he meant, and so it gave me pause to wonder if I could continually bite off more than I could chew indefinitely. Maybe. I've been doing it for so long that I don't know what else I would do, how else I would live.

Maybe if I ever decide to date someone, then maybe I'll slow down. What's more important relationships or changing the world?

Montpelier: Transition Town Meeting

2008-11-25T21:09:00.002-05:00

I just returned from the Montpelier Transition Town Meeting where Transition Town Handbook author Naresh Giangrande from Totnes, UK spoke about how to transition to a post peak-oil community. It was very much about relocalization, addressing the community as a whole. A couple interesting points he brought up:

1) He uses human happiness metrics as an indicator of success (along with lbs of CO2 emissions averted).
2) For those who don’t have access to land to grow their own food, he and his team are matching up people with land and would like it to be worked with people who don’t have land and are willing to grow things. Pretty cool solution.
3) He noted that “common or shared things” will become more important, like garden spaces, tools, etc.

For my readers not in Vermont, oh gosh how I wish you could’ve seen the folks who attended. They were the best of Vermonters: The Cynic from Barre, the mustache-wearing soft spoken fellow who wore a black hat and coat and carried a long walking stick with colored string wrapped around the end of it, the bright-eyed wrinkly old farmers with no teeth left to articulate their questions, the alert high school activist, the 20-something bearded fleece wearer who reeked of pot when he came in, and my friend Nicko the heirloom tree farmer. There were a lot of suspenders, flannel, and fleece. I don’t know why I find it important to note what everyone was wearing, except for that perhaps it does give us a sense of identity and shared culture – which I hear will be important in the post-carbon society.

I do have one bone to pick with Mr. Giangrande, which is specifically about what a transition town is. He said it was a community that used “much less” energy and “much fewer” resources than what we do now. I disagree. I’m shooting for sustainability.

At least two friends have asked me in the last month “What is sustainability? Everybody talks about it, but I’m not sure I know what it means”. Fair enough, I think it’s overused, but here’s what I mean:

In order for a process to be sustainable it may only take resources at a rate that they may be replenished, and if the resource is non-renewable, then it shouldn’t be taken. This seems rather negative, let’s spin it more positively: A sustainable community uses resources at a rate that can be sustained indefinitely because they are harvested less than or equal to the rate at which they are replenished. Hm. Does that make sense? That seemed to take more words than I had hoped.

I would like to see some metric of success developed around that.

National Board Certification: A Humble Post

2008-11-23T21:46:00.005-05:00

Soooooo... some of you may know that last spring I applied for National Board Certification and in case you didn't guess from the title of the post, I didn't get it. Sad face.

It was definitely tough news since I received it in the beginning hours of a day-long training session with my other Knowles Science Teaching fellows, and Casey (a fabulous physics teacher, and Knowles fellow) from California did get it.

No, I didn't cry - I wanted to at times, but mainly I had to fairly quickly digest the details of my failure, accept it, let it go, and move on. Of course everyone was sad to hear it and the air in the room was understandably tense until the next break when I got to explain to folks the details of my failure.

I had a really strong portfolio (representing about 90% of the work), but my test score was abysmal. I knew coming out of that test that I had bombed it, and I knew ahead of time that if I didn't get it it would be because of the test. So at least I anticipated that piece correctly.

Here's the good news, my portfolio scores will be kept for 2 years during which time I have the opportunity to re-do any pieces I wish to redo for the required score of 275, which I only missed by 6 points. So here's what I'll do: I'll schedule another testing, study my butt off, and I probably couldn't help but do well a second time around.

Aaaaaand back to the bad news. Now I've got to break it to people at school, family, colleagues, students that I didn't get it. :P Not really looking forward to that. However, here's a story to go with this news:

It's like my own grading policy is being applied to me. I let my students redo any piece of work within a certain time limit, and now, I have that same opportunity as well. Learning will occur and I'll get better and I'll have a second chance to show it. There's something satisfying about the reflexive or pleasantly ironic nature of that thought. And I think my students will appreciate it as well.

What if VSHI went National?

2008-11-12T17:10:00.004-05:00

When we met with Peter Welch we asked him if we could go National with this program, if we could come to Washington DC to do some lobbying. And he jokingly said, "No", and added that we didn't need his permission to lobby in Washington. The only thing is, we don't know how to lobby in Washington. :(

I was talking with Bart my bus buddy today about this and he recommended getting someone with that kind of experience on the board of VSHI since we are, finally, a non-profit. Hm.

I guess we have a board. Sort of. It's Tom, the students, and myself. But we don't have bi-laws or regular monthly meetings. Anyway, talking with Bart made it seem possible to lobby in Washington, which brings up the question, what specific things are we looking for?

1) $100,000,000 for research grants regarding sustainable heating and cooling systems available to university students to do research.

2) 1% of each state's current LIHEAP funding to go towards helping low income families transition to sustainable heating/cooling systems.

This is what we've got so far - there are a few more details, but maybe they'll change. Now we just need to figure out how to get this in a bill or ... something. (?)

Peter Welch, David Sharpe converge on a LIHEAP-VSHI recipient home

2008-11-11T21:27:00.003-05:00

This past Thursday the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative met with Vermont Congressman Peter Welch, and Vermont State senator from Addison County David Sharpe.

They and VSHI members from UVM, Mt. Abe, and Montpelier gathered at the home of a LIHEAP recipient whom we had given a stove. Peter Welch seemed enthusiastic about our work, and David Sharpe hopes to write some legislation to change the way LIHEAP is funded. He encouraged us to move now rather than wait for the next legislative session to begin.

We made the Addison Independent paper - pretty cool, but again I am eager for action rather than talk.

I was just on a conference call with Tim DenHerder-Thomas from MacAllister University along with Tom and Jessie-Ruth. The three of us may play host to Tim's new program called Summer of Solutions, an opportunity for high school and college students to spend their summer working on projects like the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. That would be great. Last summer VSHI was basically my second job, and this might actually allow me to delegate some responsibility and make me freer. Perhaps that's a pipe dream, but I'm not committed yet, so I have some time to mull over it.

Physics War 2008: How it all went down

2008-11-10T21:04:00.004-05:00

Oh man - this was by far the best Physics War yet. It was so exciting.

So here's the story:

Within the first 5 minutes Russia had taken over Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran; India had taken over China; and France took over Libya and Iraq. America (far away from everyone) just lobbed tennis balls without any success. The UK pretty much was just hanging out occassionally launching at Russia.

Then Russia took out China, which gave them control of almost all the launchers from the Asian continent. France held Iraq and Libya, but that's it. So it was Russia vs. France with UK's help. Libya got the winning hit against Russia, thus delivering them to France. So it was down to France, the UK, and the US.

France and the UK had a running pact since they were right next to each other so the UK and France (with everyone else's launcher) were all launching at the US. Only this is... the UK wasn't reeeally launching at them, because secretly they had made a pact with US. So they were like intentionally missing, but shooting enough to keep up appearances.

So then during a ceasefire, the UK went to the US and said, "we have 7 more shots left, and France only has 3, so we'll probably take over France and then it'll just be us two. So how about when that happens at that point we put down our arms and agree to split the m&m's 50/50?" The US wanted like 60/40, but the UK said, "We can just walk away; we don't need to make this deal." So the US said, "Fine. 50/50".

So then the UK turns on France and France is like "WHAT? I thought we had a pact!?" And so France and the whole rest of the world starts launching at the UK. And the UK gets his 4 more times and France gets hit 2 more times. And then out of no where, the US lobs the winning tennis ball that takes out France that for theirs last hit. The US now controls all the launchers except the UK.

Student energy and tension are so high; everyone is just buzzing. I don't think everyone's judgement was fully intact. The UK said to the US, "How about, we'll commit suicide and we'll go back to that original deal: 50/50." and the US said, "Fine." So that's how it ended. UK knocked over its own can enough times to be defeated - the US won and also made good on their deal later that day giving the UK team half the m&ms.

Highly exciting.

What is TA for? Silliness.

2008-11-01T07:58:00.002-04:00

Who knew that Frisbee skills would come in handy during school. Ok, well, maybe not Frisbee skills specifically, but post-Ultimate team building games. Speifically: Wa.

There’s no good way to explain Wa over the internet, but suffice it to say you stand in a circle and pass the “Wa” around if you mess up you’re out.

In the middle of the day is this funny 2 minute period called “TA” or Teacher Advisory. It’s like homeroom, where students from all grades come together and hang out and hear announcements. I have often felt a little funny about this time because its purpose is different depending on which teacher you talk to, and I never really feel like I know what to say to kids during this time.

Today, however, TA was a great success because I taught them Wa. They LOVE it and are excited to play it next time.

… Some days it’s in the little things…

Physics War 2008

2008-10-22T15:06:00.004-04:00

The physics war is so much a part of the culture here and my class that I will never be able to stop doing this project. It is for this project that students sign up for my class.

The basic idea is that groups of 4 students get a length of PVC piping, a 2x4, and some surgical tubing (plus a few other nuts and bolts) which is built into basically a giant slingshot with a barrel. It's ... kind of awesome. :) hahaha. The students do a lab where we measure the angle and the corresponding range and explain their results based on the range equation.

This all culminates with a class vs. class physics war where each class has tin cans and they try to knock over other class' cans with tennis balls launched out of their slingshots. The four classes were in four corners of a field with the cans out in front of them. This is then followed with a panel discussion on war. As recommended by my mentor teacher, Tom Tailer, I invited an army recruiter, a returned soldier, a war veteran, and a pacifist and the students could ask them questions.

Well, to be honest, the panel discussion the last couple years has been remarkably lame, only barely physics related, and not nearly as controvertial as I had hoped. So this year I'm shifting. I'm going to make the war part more like Tom's and the post-war debrief less like Tom's.

Tom gives the groups an accuracy test and whoever gets the longest accurately-tested range gets the first choice of country. Yes. Tom sets up the soccer field like a map of the world and the countries available for choosing are known or suspected nuclear powers. Countries can invade each other and take each other's resources, which provides a motivation for who to aim at.

Now, he buys his students like pizza and rice and other "culturally typical" foods, but I wasn't quite ready to buy like eight pizzas for my students. :P So instead I've come up with my own unit of physics war capital: m&m's.

Yes, every country will receive an amount of m&m's proportional to that country's GDP. In order to invade another country (thus taking their m&m's) the aggressing country must knock over that country's can a number of times proportional to that country's millitary strength, measured in dollars spent on millitary.

If they one country invades another they get to take that country's m&m supply.

Meanwhile, I'm morphing the panel discussion into a student debate. We might debate in our own classes questions like "When is war justified?", "What is proper procedure for introducing weapon based on new technology?" (Tazers, EMP bombs, nukes, etc.), "Is it ok to perform medical testing of any kind on prisoners of war?" (The students came up with that last one).

So there we are. I'm pretty excited about it. It should all be going down either Halloween or the Thursday after Halloween. Ohhhh my it will be cold! :/

Weatherization Training in Physics Class

2008-10-16T16:45:00.006-04:00

The Ken Jones-led "Weatherization Training at School" was a total success. I definitely need to write him a thank you note. Students learned about how thermodynamics principles connected to home heating, and got to see weather stripping and where on a door/window it goes. We did some experiments with tin foil boxes and ice cubes - it was great. Specifically we built two boxes out of tin foil. One went over in a corner away from everything. One went on the vent, which was spewing room-temperature air. So which melted first? The one on the vent. Why? Convection. BAM! Students learned that convection is just as important as conduction to account for the heat loss in a house.

Some interesting nuggets:

A 1/8" gap around a door (which is typical) is the same area as a 4" hole in your wall. Seal that up!
Frequently the holes that are cut for cable to enter a house are not sufficiently sealed up/insulated.
The "pink stuff" is not as awesome as people once thought. Apparently it's good for preventing conduction, but is quite awful at preventing convection. You can blow air right through it, and so if there's a way for air to get into the outside part of your wall, and there's an opening to the outside somewhere higher up, it can create a heat pump through the walls of your house!
The best windows ever made (for insulation purposes) have an R of 3.5. Whereas regular 1" foam insulation (with tin-foil on the sides) is R: 7.5

Ok that's it for now :)

Update from the NEGEF Retreat

2008-10-10T21:36:00.003-04:00

So the reality is I'm exhausted right now and it's not even 10pm. That's preposterous.
In considering where my exhaustion comes from I must site something rather unusual: over-inspiration. Sometimes I think there are just SO many great ideas in the world they wear me out.

I'm currently at the New England Grass Roots Environment Fund annual retreat for grantees. They gave us a grant for the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative.

So let's make a list of all the good ideas that have been thrown at me and apparently are sticking:
1) Carl Etnier (of the Post-Carbon Sustainability Network, WGDR, and WDEV) proposed that he and I lead a professional development workshop for physics teachers about peak oil. We could teach it through Yestermorrow, which he's got some connections with. So I was like... dang. Yea. ok.
2) I just found another young professional Christian person in Montpelier (this is quite rare). I'm now up to 5 of us, and that may just constitute a critical mass to start a discussion group. Focusing quesitons: what does it mean to be a Christian? What is church?
3)....

I don't think I've blogged about this at all...

Well... here we go: St. Andrew's Christian Church of Burlington is thinking about starting a church farm. We've started a dialogue with St. Michael's College to see if we can team up with them to use their land since we've got people... but no land.

Anyway here there are at least 2 Burlington-based community garden groups. They want to work with low income families. We want to work with low-income families. BAM! We should team up. Meanwhile there are at least 3 other people here who are connected to church-based gardens. Turns out this is not a new idea. *gasp!* :) So it will be great to take back their contact info so we can ask them questions like "What have you learned from this process? What would you do differently? How do you divide up the harvest? Do you have private plots?"

Meanwhile, I remain feeling over-committed and sleep deprived. And it's only 10:04pm. So I'm going to go to sleep. Cheers, friends!

Cleaning up after the sub...

2008-10-06T16:14:00.002-04:00

It's the reason teachers cringe at the thought of a sick day: Sub Plans.

There's no telling who you'll have, and so sub plans must be idiot proof. Not that subs are idiots - I have a lot of respect for anyone who is willing to subject themselves to the great terror students unleash on a spineless substitute. Nonetheless, I would not volunteer myself to teach something like Art, or Biology, or Band. I could get by, but my gosh, nothing would really get done. Even if my students were a little uncomfortable with how it all went down the upshot of these last two days was that everything I asked for did get turned in (yay!).

Sorry ~ yea, this venting is more for me than for you...

And now for more cleaning up of another kind:
During the faculty meeting today a student came up to me and said, "We found this on top of a locker in the boys locker room". It was a stack of cards I had kept in a wallet that went missing last spring. I assumed I had lost it. But as of this afternoon I've come to accept that it was stolen. :( . It shouldn't matter cause it's water under the bridge by now. But wow. weird. I might have lost like $5 or so, but I at least I got back my library card and an un-used bus pass (the credit and debit cards got canceled shortly after it went missing). After reviewing last year's roster I've got it down to a short list of 4 and shorter list of 2 possible people. I guess I should report it to the assistant principal and let it go from there.

I guess I'll not be bringing my wallet to school anymore :P

In other news, in the last week like 3 people have asked me if I've sold my car yet. Wow. Thanks for checking in with me about that. Yea - no. :P Not at all. I've had more conversations about it, and the goal is really live a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle, but I own my car completely, so I could just let it sit somewhere. I might have to park it far away to force me to actually find transportation solutions. This is the running option right now. But as Carolyn K observed this weekend "my values are in conflict".

Professional Learning Communities with the DuFours

2008-10-05T10:13:00.003-04:00

I just returned yesterday from Montreal where a crew from the school district heard Rick and Becky DuFour speak on their rendition of the "Professional Learning Community" model of education. Everything they said was dead on ~ their model makes sense and they have the data to back that up. However, I do feel like it's difficult to apply their model to a small school.

My understanding of their model (in a nutshell) is to have teachers who teach the same course or content administer the same test to their students, and then they'd have data by which they can assess how effective their teaching is. Then teachers can ask each other for help with their areas of weakness.

Sweet. Basing decisions on data seems like a good idea. :)

But how do you do this in a small school? I am the only one teaching my content area. So here are our options (which I have to think a bit about since I'm the PLC leader for the science department):

1) The science teachers talk about the big ideas of science that connect us, and we collect data on those things: inquiry, ethics, sustainability, etc.

2) We find people in the region who teach our same course and we collaborate with them about our actual content, administer similar tests and compare data to each other to see our strengths/weaknesses and then learn from each other.

I'd like to pursue both options, but for now option 1 will be the most easy to implement. I do feel like it might feel somewhat contrived, if we find that we may not actually have that much in common - or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll surprise myself.

In any case, I miss my kids. I hate having to write sub plans :(

Operation Plastic Removal

2008-10-01T21:50:00.003-04:00

A lot has been going on here, but I really should keep it short because I need to get up early early tomorrow to meet a carpool to drive to Montreal for a training in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). Turns out I'm the leader of my department's PLC, which I suppose is a little like being science department chair. Gah. I just thought about that for realsies today, and it kinda scared me a little bit cause, man, I don't like being in charge. :P bleh. Nonetheless I find myself going to this training tomorrow to become a better PLC leader. Yea.

Meanwhile the Period 7-8 physics class has formed an organization they've named Operation Plastic Removal, or OPR. There's also now officially a facebook group (but I think you have to be invited to join - sorry guys).

The OPR news is that the cafeteria wants nothing to do with renting bottles. This made us pause a bit and re-evaluate what our goals were. We determined that a suitable solution would be to sell mason jars with full screw-top lids. Simultaneously a student came up with a REALLY sweet t-shirt design based on an SNL skit about Sofa King Cool. ha. It's a funny shirt (if you don't get it just say it 5 times really fast). Aaaaand it also involves mason jars. Nice. We'll definitely sell a bunch. I want one and I don't even swear. So we figured we could sell these T-shirts and give away mason jars with them. In addition we could sell Mason Jars alone for 50 cents (cheaper than buying water in the cafeteria).

At this point no one has done the financial analysis to estimate payback time, but that may be a next step, right along with the taste test scheduled for tomorrow - to determine which water fountain in the school is the tastiest.

Meanwhile, what will this have to do with physics? haha - you thought I'd forgotten. Well, what's the downside of mason jars? They break. So what I'd love to do is get different thickness socks, or beer cozies, or the like, and do some impact/impulse/crash test measurements to see what impulse they can withstand. This is totally momentum, force, impact, change in motion ~ basically a physics fiesta. (Ok, now I'm starting to sound like my students, so it's time to go to bed).

Cheers*

ORE, CAN, and Service Learning

2008-09-25T11:05:00.005-04:00

First for some odds and ends:
I think I'm going to video tape the students' water rockets and analyze them in Logger Pro. hahaha. This is going to be awesome. We'll predict the velocity vs. time graphs ahead of time, and then compare them to what we actually get. Yes!

Service Learning (not to be confused with Community Service or Community Based Learning) is addressing authentic community questions/problems through topics embedded in the curriculum. The Service Learning Team in our district is attempting to increase the number of teachers participating in Service Learning type projects, and one of the biggest sticking points we have (and there are a few) is connecting community problems with teacher's curricula. Teachers are often simply unaware of the needs in our community.

Enter the Onion River Exchange (ORE) and Capitol Area Neighborhoods (CAN).

ORE is a time bank, where people offer services (I offer physics tutoring and wine-making help) and needs (ex: could I borrow your car every Sunday? your vacuum?). Basically it's a list of needs in the community.

CAN is a network of Montpelier neighborhoods attempting to plan for winter heating and financial crisis. We're canvassing this weekend, knocking on every door to make sure that people have information about 211, the energy/heating hotline, local foodshelves, etc. We'll do some asset mapping, meaning we'll give out a survey which asks questions like "Do you have a shovel? Snow blower? Are you willing to help a neighbor without a snowblower? Would you like help shoveling?" and my favorite "Do you have expertise in plumbing ... so we can call you at 3am when someone's pipes burst?" I'm TOTALLY excited about getting my neighborhood more connected.

These are two groups that will be very in touch with the needs in our community, which makes them an easy place to look for curriculum connections.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with Ken Jones for ideas of how to connect weatherizing with thermodynamics, so I'll more ideas then, but for now I'm thinking we'll need to put out a survey to student's families to see if there is any interest in us going to their homes to weatherize. There is a residual question about who would get priority for weatherizing materials and labor - first come first serve is easy, but it would have to be dependent on a pre-labor site visit to make sure it's the kind of work we can do, and safe (no viscious dogs or verbally abusive grandmothers, stable floors, and no asbestos, etc.).

Enjoy the lovely day! :)

Impromptu Project: Renting Students Water Bottles

2008-09-24T14:50:00.006-04:00

All day today I've been building rockets with my physics students. We're going to use them to as an excuse to run some calculations about acceleration with real data, and also I get to work in some rather tangential physics-related topics: center of gravity, center of drag, gyroscopic motion (rifling), as well as Newton's 3rd Law. It felt awfully like a nonsequitor though to jump in to these other topics while acceleration was the supposed to be the purpose. I could do rockets with Newton's 3rd Law, but really... by the time I get to Newton's 3rd law launching rockets outdoors is unpleasantly chill.

I didn't think 8th period would be much different, but a dialogue from yesterday came up at the beginning of class. We make these rockets out of water bottles from the recycling, and yesterday it came up how plastics have BPA and it's so silly that people buy these bottles over and over, when they could just bring their own.

So today, the kids came up with the idea to rent BPA-free Nalgenes or Kleen Kanteens in the cafeteria to students who forgot to bring bottles of their own, and it'd be cheaper than buying water. Yay! I said, "To heck with the rockets! This is way more interesting". So we spent the entire class hashing out a mission statement, we called Kleen Kanteen and they said they could get us a 30% discount on a <100 shipment of bottles (amount tbd), and we spoke with Debbie the kitchen lady about what we should consider before we go to Betty the head kitchen lady.

This. Is. Awesome.

I'm so excited to see how it all turns out. We really need Betty to be on board, because I do NOT want to wash water bottles after school :( :P

To do this I think we need to show her that this system will pay for itself and how soon that will be, factoring in: extra washing time/man power, soap, initial cost of bottles, and proposed cost of renting a bottle, approximation on how much this would reduce her Dasani water profits.

Meanwhile we should also calculate the increase of local water consumption, ultimately going back to the local utility and staying in Montpelier. I think the students would like to do a taste test of the drinking fountains in the school as compared to Dasani water. My hypothesis: no one will be able to tell the difference when they're all at room temperature.

This is all great. Yummy. Wonderful.
However, at the end of the day I am left feeling a little silly... how will I justify that they are learning physics by doing this?

I could call it a gigantic Fermi problem that got out of control. I could call it chemistry - oh wait, that doesn't work. I could say it's energy. I could say it's unit analysis. Or better yet: Vital Results! haha :) As long as they sufficiently learn about acceleration in the same amount of time as the other students I will be happy. Suggestions welcome... :)

Scientific Election Issues

2008-09-23T09:09:00.005-04:00

In case you're interested, I was just sent a link to McCain and Obama's answers to the "top 14 science questions facing America". Fascinating reading... perhaps I'll post more thoughts later.
http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=42

I Hate Giving Homework

2008-09-22T14:03:00.004-04:00

It's true. I can't deny it. I don't want to give it or grade it or find out why kids haven't done it. I might even go so far as to say I'm philosophically against it.

Or at least I was.

I think I may be changing my mind.

I have found homework to be the great divider among socio-economic classes. Those who "have" get it done, those who "don't" don't get it done. I don't have control over what happens to students outside of class; I'm not right there to answer questions; they don't have each other to lean on; it's just setting them up to fail. On top of that I would say that it's healthy to have a separation between work and play in one's adult career, so why should that not be true of student's life? I believe it to be hypocritical for a union teacher to refuse to cut into their own family time to grade or help the school out, and then assign homework.

(This is what the one side of me says - the side that loves my family, that's grateful to my Dad for not bringing work home. It's also the part of me that's lazy and unorganized).

Which brings us to today...

I have like 4 worksheets about acceleration I'd like to do. But... bleh. They're worksheets, and honestly, I burn out on worksheets. The students burn out on worksheets. :( I'd rather build rockets and do labs.

Solution: I should looking at what worksheets are really worth their time, and then which worksheets can be optional. I'll make the worthwhile ones homework and the redundant ones optional, so that we can do rockets during class.

Also, for the most part students haven't really had many questions on the class blogs, probably because I don't give much/any homework - and if I did this there would no doubt be questions. And then they'd get to teach each other. Yay :)

Planning Community-Relevant Projects

2008-09-22T11:23:00.005-04:00

So I've got a couple ideas about projects to do with the kiddos that would be active, hands-on, and more or less relevant to their lives.

1) I've contact the Roots School (in Central Vermont), they teach primitive skills, and I think my low level students would TOTALLY appreciate knowing how to build a fire from nothing. Some of them already do, but I would love to teach that in the context of friction, forces, and thermodynamics. How awesome would that be? A teacher from Roots has already responded, so now it's time to plan a bit how it relates to physics, and also figure out where on school grounds this would be "okay" to do.

2) Button-Up Vermont holds workshops to help people do low and no-cost weatherizing solutions. Again as a part of my thermodynamics we could learn how to weatherize people's houses and then ... well... go do it! Tomorrow is Open House, so I'm hoping to solicit families who'd be willing to have us visit their house to do some weatherization work. .... potentially... i mean... assuming we're not busting through walls to insulate places and accidentally encountering asbestos. I'd want to check out the house ahead of time and figure out what work needed to be done and make sure that was within our capabilities as a class. I've already contacted a few people about this and it looks like something will emerge after we meet to nail down more details. (yay!)

Class blog: why isn't Experimental Physics blogging?

2008-09-17T16:23:00.004-04:00

It's been about a week since I assigned my experimental physics students to post on their blog, and well, they no one had. A few people left comments, but that's it. So today I opened up that conversation, why weren't they posting? What should we do about it? Is it something that people still want to do? Admittedly it was a little scary to put that out there as a question: "Is this something you guys still want to do?" And to my delight and relief they said, "Yes, but let's start over."
"So how should we start over?"
"Well, I know you showed us on the projector how to post, but honestly, it goes in one ear and out the other just to watch it - errr in one eye and out my ear. I have to do it. So I say let's go down to the computer lab and all post, and then we'll know how to do it."

Brilliant. Thanks to Ben for completely reading my mind and proposing exactly what I was hoping to do.

So I had them ALL post something about peak oil - the content we had just barely covered, so this was a way for them to apply to their lives what they'd just learned about - and the answers were fascinating, funny, and unexpected. For the first few (ones I read while they were still in class) I asked them to edit their punctuation/grammar, but the later ones I just couldn't get to. I think you can really tell who's I caught and sent back for fixing and those I didn't. We really need to work on writing in this school :P

Anyway, it was encouraging to me that they all posted today, and perhaps tomorrow I'll put an assignment out there to read people's posts and comment on someone else's thoughts. I wonder if they will do it on their own time.

Caring for the Earth Conference and Shelburne Farms Harvest Festival

2008-09-15T19:42:00.006-04:00

I haven't posted about VSHI in a little while - I suppose that's because we've been working out bugs on the VSHI donation website (carbon offsets) as well as the Addison County LIHEAP Pilot Project. We're hoping to do a massive media-oriented installation next month, and that will hopefully be good for donations as well.

Meanwhile, there are a few conferences coming up worth mentioning.

Caring for the Earth Conference at the Bishop Booth Conference Center in Burlington
October 26-28th, Registration: $40
It's all about faith communities coming together to address global climate change. We'll be looking into the future and see how we can move towards sustainability and help facilitate that transition, so I'm pretty stoked about it. Also VSHI is the very first presentation of the conference and everyone will be there: Gah! Exciting!

30th Annual Shelburne Farms Harvest Festival and Energy Fair
September 20th, Adults: $6, Children $4
There will be music and hayrides and fresh foods, like any good harvest festival should. But I'm sure among other valuable energy information, I'm told there will be a demonstration of grass-tablet making (grass tablets are less energy-intensive to produce), as well as a home-made gasification burner by Ethan Dressigacker (sp?), a teenage heating entrepreneur.

Class Blogs: Punctuation and Grammar

2008-09-11T16:28:00.004-04:00

So I was already thinking about how to handle bad grammar/spelling on the class blogs when I went into a 504 meeting today. The parents were very concerned that their student was not getting the grammar and spelling support necessary for good writing in the real world, and that papers for classes other than English ought to grade these aspects as well.

I say: Fair Enough. Thus far I have not really paid much attention to grammar/spelling in, well, anything - mainly because I don't necessarily pride myself as being a good grammaricist or speller (case in point, eh?). However, I don't think my punctuation holds me back from communicating effectively, and there are some really whopping glaring errors in the student entries.

I think I'm coming out with an addition to the requirements for a good blog/post (not just a clarification):
"If your post/comment has egregious spelling or grammar problems I won't approve it, and you'll need to fix the errors before it can be approved."

Class blog: content vs. daily log of activities

2008-09-11T08:07:00.003-04:00

The class blogs are "running" now, in that students are posting, but it's not so far what I'd hoped for. It's more like a running log of "what we did" rather than what we're learning. :( Shockingly enough, the first model post that I did was more like a log than what we learned, perhaps because we were only doing introductory, nature of science, stuff, so it didn't feel like "content", but really that just means that I didn't identify what from the nature of science we were learning.

I should say that whatever notes were given that day should be a part of the day's post. Hm. That might be an awkward conversation: adding requirements after I've passed out the guidelines. Well... it's not really adding a requirement, it's that I need to clarify the requirement to post about "what we learned".

Meanwhile, I just had Experimental Physics class choose days, and they seem as into it as the other classes, which I find encouraging.

Student Posting Guidelines and Goals

2008-09-05T15:06:00.005-04:00

So far I've shown them all how to log in and write an entry. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I gave them an assignment "look up peak oil, and leave a comment to this post about 'what is peak oil?' in your own words" that they all left entries and not comments. huh. Certainly these are bright kids, but I just didn't teach them how to leave a "comment" and so they did what I had shown them.

Meanwhile, I need to come up with a brief sheet about goals for blog use and guidelines for a good entry or comment.
Why am I having them do this? Why is it important?
1) I want them to learn from each other. This is a place to ask questions.
2) I want give them the opportunity to teach each other. I want them to be able to communicate their learning. It's about decentralizing the source of knowledge.
3) I want them to know how to use this technology (as April said) safely and effectively.

Guidelines for a good post:
1) Include content (ex: acceleration is..., the equation for velocity is...)
2) Include general activities (ex: today we did an Agree/Disagree activity)
3) Include homework
4) Tie in outside sources, other websites, pictures (make sure to site them!), java applets, whatever that helps explain the content.
5) Sign your first name at the end!
6) follows rules from the contract - respectful and clean, science-relevant, no last names, locations, or other identifying qualities, make sure you've dealt appropriately with any copyright issues.

Guidelines for a good comment:
Either
1) ask a question about physics or
2) attempt to answer someone else's question about physics,
3) it can be just something cool that you found on the internet that's relevant to science, the post, or what we're doing in class.
Aaaaand it must follow all the rules from the contract.

Perhaps I'll have people post 2x a week either a post or a comment. Should it be more? 2x a week would be like 8x a month, that's a fair amount, eh?

Agree/Disagree and Facebook

2008-09-05T10:27:00.006-04:00

Yesterday and today I've been doing an Agree/Disagree activity, which is where I put a statement on the board and then students move themselves to sign that indicates how they feel about that statement: Strong Agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree. And then they discuss their opinions.

So for your reading enjoyment, here are the statements I put on the board.

I like science.
Scientific Progress is “good”.
One theory is “truer” than another theory if it can explain more observable phenomena. -Karl Popper (my paraphrase)
There is no rule in physics that is not violated at some time or other. - Paul Feyerabend
There’s no such thing as neutral observation. - Thomas Kuhn
If humanity continued forever, someday we would know everything there is to know.
Someday soon we will run out of oil.
Vermont should build wind farms.
The world has more people than it can sustainably support.

They had a hard time with the Paul Feyerabend quote citing that they just didn't know. So I'll probably change that to some other Paul Feyerabend quote.

Also I took an informal poll about what Web 2.0 sites my students were familiar with:
many had experience with myspace,
none one was familiar with livejournal or xanga,
EVERYfreaking one of them has facebook, which is good to know since I now know what common language to use, e.g. "the wall", applications, commenting, "it's like writing a note", etc.

Interestingly, I only know of 3 other teachers in the whole district who have facebook accounts (total of 4), two of us at the high school, one at the middle school, one's the middle school tech coordinator lady. Hmmmm... what does that say? That we live in different technological worlds? For many that's probably true.

Class blogs & Beginnings

2008-09-04T12:53:00.007-04:00

I've started the class blogs, and I've learned a bit already:
1) I'm torn about letting them choose usernames. I've got to filter them for appropriateness, and then give them a password. I'm email the web address, their username and password to each of them, but wow, that's taking a long time :P Probably I could write a program to do it for me, but that might actually take more time still! So I should just tell them that their username is their first name and then just write out their password. The set-up process is just taking more time than anticipated.

2) Thus far, in my syllabus and for this blog I've been using my personal email address, and it's occurring to me now that... maybe i should use my work address. About half way through emailing students I switched.

3) I still haven't decided how to go about the schedule of student's blogging/the amount of posting and comments I expect.

In general the classes so far (including my gigantic class and experimental physics) seem really great. They're a good mix of attentive and talkative and respectful. It feels good to have finally met them all.

Meanwhile here are the links to the classblogs! The students haven't started posting there yet cause they don't all have their passwords/usernames yet, but feel free to check 'em out nonetheless!

Period 1
Period 5
Period 6
Period 7

Breaking the Addiction

2008-08-30T14:10:00.007-04:00

Accepting that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery...

I've lived with Luwanda the Honda Civic for about 5 years now. It's been a really great time and I've been remarkably thankful for her faithful service to me - I mean we've had our rough moments, but overall I'd say we've treated each other fairly well.

But I think it's getting close to that time...

"Oh, she's probably got a lot of miles" you're thinking - well, not really: not quite 100,000. Anyone that drives a Honda knows that's not nearly its expected lifetime. So why am I thinking about selling my perfectly good car?

(It is increasingly a moral issue for me.)

I am tired of participating in the system that requires oil consumption. There must be an alternative way of living. I don't necessarily anticipate anything truly replacing my car, which ultimately means less mobility, but I see that as a small price to pay for not having war, loss of habitat, international debt, and climate change on my conscience. I am opting out.

So then... how do I proceed? How do my commitments change?

(Let's start with what doesn't need to change, eh?)
I have the luxury of living in a rural/downtown. This means I can bike to my CSA, I live right next to a food Coop. I am within walking distance of 2 movie theatres, bike repair, bottle recycling, my job, ultimate frisbee pick-up, multiple restaurants & bars, including music venues, library, etc. And now... back to what does need to change.

The three reasons I need a car:

To see my family in Essex.
To get to my church in Burlington
To get to parties in Plainfield

Solutions:

Family in Essex: I can take the bus, they can pick me up or I can ride my bike from the bus stop (that would take ~1hr)
Church in Burlington: I'm not sure I've got this figured out yet... I could take the bus up on Friday into Burlington, stay overnight Saturday and Sunday, take the bus back on Monday. Or, take the bus up on Friday, sign out one of the "shared cars" from CarShareVermont and stay overnight in Essex. Start a Carshare in Montpelier and sign it out for Sunday only.
Parties in Plainfield: I'll just have to meet some people from Montpelier traveling out that way any time there's a party and ... probably plan on camping more.

Or I just don't go to church in Burlington. Or I don't party in Plainfield. Or I see my family less.
These are all possibilities, and possibilities I'm willing to accept.

Thoughts before starting the new year...

2008-08-25T16:43:00.003-04:00

Today was our first day of inservice and though I don't have any inspired thoughts from that, I do have to say that the beginning of the school year feels a little rushed into - like I haven't really relaxed completely this summer enough to become eager for the beginning of school.

Maybe this means I need a massage. Maybe it means I need to pick more berries, or go to Bolton Falls again, but it might just mean that my life is busy and at no point will it naturally become un-busy without my intentionally making it so.

So here we go diving in to the new year, and in the next few days the projects I see looming in the distance will, with any luck, snap into focus. The key here is to keep the conversations going with the right people, and also to keep an open hand as the projects change, emerge, and develop into something I hadn't anticipated at all. If I clamp down too soon it will ruin the dream before it's fully formed and before it has increased its potency to the point of being a reality.

I'm writing this out here perhaps in part for you, but really for me - because I need to hear it. Keep the open hand, let it emerge, but don't drop it either.

Last year's projects were... admittedly less than impressive and I believe it's because it was too much about me, and insisting upon making a difference in the world. But it's funny how picky reality is, and how the dialogue between imagination and reality end up with a manifestation that is somewhere in between...

Ok - enough blabbering about abstract things ~

In other news my intern from last year got a job near by and her first day with students was today, and so I'm eager to hear from her how it went.
Cheers!

VPT with Senator Bill Doyle

2008-08-18T19:59:00.004-04:00

Last week was Jackie and Ashley's last week as enVision Montpelier's Americore Vistas, so there was a going away party for them, and at that party I got to meet Senator Bill Doyle who's like 86 and still loves being a senator. We talked for a while about physics teaching and then he was like, "I have a weekly television program where I interview people. How'd you like to be on my show? Does next week work for you?"

Why sure!

So this past week I brought a bunch of physics toys (thanks to the help of the ever-helpful Eli Rosenberg) and we talked about energy and heating and it was lots of fun. We started getting into the heat issue some after the show and he was like "This is very important and relevant stuff. How'd you like to bring two other people and be on my show again next week?" Of course, sir, I'm sure they'd love to.

I never thought I'd *ever* be on one of those public access channels. I hope they put some psychodelic pictures behind us.

Pellet Production Coops?

2008-07-31T17:41:00.002-04:00

With the LIHEAP pilot project up and "running" I have recently been turning my attention towards production, which is an entirely different beast it seems.

The in-state pellet production plants I have heard of are scattered, but for kicks let's list them here:
The Burlington Free Press recently reported on a new start up in North Troy, VT. It would site on 10 acres of land.
There's Rick Barstow of Adamant, VT who plans to sell grass pellets this fall.
Roy Petraw has a small-scale pelletizer (though i've misspelled his name).
Andy Boutin may be going into this business
And the Rutland-owned Bixby folks may produce pellets this season.

All that is to say, there's just a handful of entrepreneurs at this point. Ideally, pellet manufacture plants would be a farmer/logger-owned co-op to ensure that they get a fair price for their product. But where do you start? No one's really got a sellable grass pellet at this point, so where do we start?

Well, there's one player I left out which is a family from Addison County. If I can find enough investors he'll issue bonds (or something like that), so that he can purchase the necessary equipment and begin production. Within a few years the bonds will have expired and the investors will have made a better-than-bank interest, and the family will be free to take on other partner-owners who would also have material to be pelletized. So basically we'll move from single-supplier to multiple supplier, from wood-pellet to mixed pellet, and from investor-owned to farmer/logger-owned, which all seems yummy to me.

Of course... it all sounds so simple right now... :)

KSTF Summer Meeting 2008

2008-07-28T20:31:00.003-04:00

I just got back from the KSTF Summer Meeting with all the fellows, and while it was amazing for many different reasons, ultimately what matters is how this will affect my classroom. There are three major things that I’m taking away from this meeting, two of which came unexpectedly after all the official sessions were over, after the post meeting games were played and I decided by chance to go to the bar.

Take away piece #1 from April Luehman’s session on Blogging for the Classroom
I’m starting class blogs.
Yes. Blogs – plural. One for each, and inspired by April’s model, I’d like to have the onus of authorship distributed to the students. “We are co-constructing a physics textbook for the world” as April likes to say. So every day a different student will be responsible for blogging the day’s notes, and jotting down some notes as to what we did. Then students will be required to participate through commenting at least 2x a month either by asking or answering a question. Parents will have access to this but not authorship rights. And all comments have to be approved by me, the admin, before they actually get posted to reduce spam.

Prior to students blogging, they’ll need to sign a safety and civility contract - cause we don’t want them posting last names, or non-relevant material. I’ve stolen April’s contract to base mine off of.

I requested a site through April, which will be free which includes unlimited storage space and access to surveys (which is usually NOT free), so I can do online homework. She hasn’t sent me the approval yet, but I’m excited to get started setting that up.

We need to be teaching the next generation responsible online conduct, and so what better way than … in school! Likewise, this model of blog use is very postmodern in that the students are both the teachers and the learners, and the motivation for learning physics comes through personal relationships.

Other examples of class blogs: Accelerated 8th Grade Blog, PIB Physical Science

Take away piece #2 from Glen Botha of San Francisco
I’m adopting Glen’s electricity project
Glen said that he bought something called the Kilowatt on ebay for $20.00 which you can put around the electric cord of any appliance and it will tell you how much current is flowing through it. He was then able to determine at his own apartment that he pays $7 a month for his tevo, and that its standby mode doesn’t really change the rate of electricity use.

He listed every single appliance in his house, its wattage and an approximation of how many hours it’s on per day or per month, and then calculated what his electric bill should have been, and then compared it to what his electric bill actually was.

Then. He made his students go through that process: list every appliance, its wattage and hours of use, and predict your electric bill and then compare to the actual bill.

He did the same for his gas bill, which was $10-12 every month, even for months during which he was gone all month. His bill never changed! So he called them up to ask why that was, and they said it was probably he pilot light. So he researched pilot lights and found out that the amount of therms required to run a pilot light amounted to approximately $11/month. He had found it! They suggested he have someone come turn off the pilot light since in SF, CA they never need heat (it’s not connected to their hot water). The guy came over and instead suggested he cancel is heat – and so that is what he did.

Through doing this project with his class, Glen’s students discovered that for some households their xBox360 cost them more than their refrigerator per month. He said one student started limiting his play to a couple hours a week, motivated not by his mother, or that it’s not good for him, but because his family was really poor and it cost them some quantifiable amount of money to play. He found out that some students who were paying $400/month in electric bills were eligible for a more cheaper rate and was able to lower it to $80/month. He did have to get parents to sign a waiver to release their electric bill and he only had one parent object, so he gave the student his own apartment to analyze.

Take away piece #3 also from Glen Botha of San Francisco
I’d like to further develop Glen’s idea of informing consumers.

What if… What IF! Oi! What if it was commonplace to the informative technology currently found in hybrids in other types of regular fuel cars? People would be able to see that they get significantly better gas mileage at 65 mph than 80 mph. People would see that accelerating rapidly wastes gas, and we could probably reduce gas consumption by a measurable amount simply by making that information immediately available to people.

Likewise, why is my electric meter on the outside of my house in a unit of measure that is not easily interpreted by the layperson? What if instead we put electric meters on the inside of houses and have them read out in dollars per minute or per hour – something that means more to the average person. And they’d be able to see rate of their consumption change by exactly some dollar amount when they shut off a light or unplugged their tevo or turned on their toaster.

Does this device exist? oh yes, yes it does. But why haven't I heard of it. Perhaps I should get one, eh?
Bottom line: Information Is Power.

Project Porchlight at St. Andrew's Christian Church

2008-07-25T11:45:00.003-04:00

The other day I ran into Heidi of Project Porchlight, and I mentioned to her that my church would be game for helping pass out compact fluorescent light bulbs (that’s their mission – in order to reduce the demand on the grid and lower our carbon footprint). She suggested that instead of holding a special training for us and giving us a route to go canvas/give away bulbs, she recommended that I just take a bag of bulbs and give them away at my church. Ha! Ok! :)

So this past Sunday, St. Andrew’s Christian Church of Burlington had a collaborative outdoor worship service with Colchester Baptist and First Baptist Church of Burlington (whose basement we currently use) and I gave away compact fluorescent light bulbs. People loved it. (Of course they loved it! They were free, and they’ll save people money, and they’ll help the environment).

I’ve been impressed lately with two things (one of which I'll blog about later): I believe consumers would more easily drive the market towards sustainable choices if sustainable choices were available. For example, if I could choose to have my laptop shipped in sustainable packaging instead of Styrofoam packing peanuts (even if it was like $2 more) I’d choose that. If I could choose biodegradable shopping bags over conventional shopping bags, I’d choose that too. If I could go to a restaurant and have the choice of locally produced or organic food options I would hands-down no question choose that. But I feel that many times those choices just don’t exist. I see it as my job as a consumer to demand better options. This is also effectively what the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative has been doing: creating opportunity for sustainable living where it previously was not an option. Everyone deserves the opportunity to live without polluting. And if polluting is, well, sin, then I believe it is the role of the church to help facilitate these kinds of opportunities. We should be helping people out of their environmental transgressions.

Starting a Farmer's Biomass Cooperative?

2008-07-20T22:42:00.001-04:00

Lately I've been dreaming of starting a farmer-owned coop of pellet production, so that even Vermont's micro farmers with just a few acres can ultimately commit to the commercial scale demands for biomass heat and get some share of the profits.

This is of course way beyond the scope of anything I think I've done so far. But then... so is everything else VSHI has accomplished.

I've started dialoging with a few people about the idea and so far the feedback is positive. I've spoken with my CSA farmer (Joe at Screamin' Ridge Farm in Montpelier), pellet guru Andy Boutin, and my roommate the law school student. From all I've gathered from them, it sounds like the next steps are to
1) contact the Sustainable Jobs Fund
2) contact Casella the Garbage and Recycling collectors
and
3) go visit Andy Boutin's set up.

Meanwhile, I should probably track down David Zuckerman and run the idea by him and Jessie's mom from the Extension service.

... sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be done with this project ... :P :)

An Update on VSHI

2008-07-18T10:33:00.002-04:00

Things in the world of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative have been cruising for some time now. So here's where we're at:

The director of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program sent out a survey to its petroleum consuming recipients, soliciting interest in our pilot program. So far we've received more than 40 surveys back indicating interest (yay!). Now all we need is money to buy them stoves.

How do we get money to buy them stoves? That's where the Carbon Offset Program comes in. Since we're specifically targeting fossil-fuel users and converting them to biomass heat, this warrants a carbon offset since the biomass is a short-carbon-cycle fuel and the fossil fuels are long-carbon-cycle.

At the moment we're selling offsets for $25/ton, but that may be lowered. We've done the calculation like four times, and it comes out slightly differently each time depending on our assumptions. So it will probably end up somewhere in the range of $9-25/ton. The page is about 90% done, and we're hoping to get some big name corporations and legislators to participate. Until everything is up and running I don't expect it to generate a lot of money.

Just a piece on the logistics: Families who receive a stove will be asked to pay us a down payment + whatever they can afford per month until they've paid off the stove. Thus it's not so much a grant as it is a no-interest loan.

Meanwhile I'm meeting today with Garth of CVCLT to discuss how to engage landlords in this transition as well as brainstorming how to convert my condo complex, the apartment complex next door and across the street. Actually I should probably go so I'm not late :) Wish me luck!

Collaborating with other Physics Teachers

2008-07-17T22:31:00.006-04:00

After the 7am-11pm intense week at Engineering Camp I flew to Portland, Oregon to meet up with two other Knowles Fellow physics teachers (Zach Ronneberg, and Bradford Hill) to work on streamlining our curricula, adding essential questions, and exchanging ideas in general. And basically it was a wicked sweet time.

As a result of this week I will be:

adding a unit on thermo, where we'll build some kind of cool sun-energy device like a solar oven, hot dog cooker, or parabolic trough type device. We'll heat up water, use Q=cm(T2-T1). It'll be great.
using OmniOutliner to track my curriculum (hazaa!)
Oh yea we built these IR diode devices to use in conjunction with a Wii remote to function like a SmartBoard, only for about $50 instead of $2,000. hAha!
I've got a ton of essential questions now
My unit on Egg Bungee Jumping is now "differentiated"
I've decided to go with the "learning is not optional" motto. So that when students get done they still have to work on something - even if it's grabbing a Scientific American from the back of the room. This is critical for differentiated instruction to be functional.

Other things I learned include: Portland O is pretty much just like Vermont only more populated. Similar values. Similar zoning laws. Similar lifestyles (frisbee, raspberry picking, Subaru-driving).

I'd say at least 30% of the benefit of being a Knowles Fellow is hanging out with other Knowles Fellows, cause they're so driven, interesting, and bursting with ideas. So that made this trip one of the best Summer Professional Development things I've done through Knowles yet.

Governor's Institute of Vermont for Engineering

2008-07-17T19:43:00.007-04:00

Yet again, I've spent too much time away from blogging and more than I can communicate has transpired.

So let's start with the the Governor's Institute of Vermont for Engineering. (more pictures available at this website!)

This was a packed week of fast paced, hard-playing, frisbee-loving, explosion-watching, and project-building. 130 kids, half from VT, half from around the country and the world gathered at UVM to study aeronautical engineering, robotics, or renewable energy systems and sustainability. We had presentations from such illustrious figures as John Cohn, Kerri Bernstein, and Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, all the while working on some project of their choosing. I worked with the Renewable Energy and Sustainability strand, which had a lot of fascinating projects. Here are a few sketches of my favorite projects:

1) The 4-inch Nozzle Boys
A guy in Montpelier has developed a retro-fit for your home fuel oil burner to burn pellets instead. Unfortunately, you need a 6-inch nozzle to make that happen, and most standard oil burners have a 4-inch nozzle. So these guys took a 4-inch pipe and burned pellets through it to see how efficient that process could be. Well... I should say, most of the work was done in the construction of the device and not the data taking, but they did learn a whole lot through building it. We actually got Jock Gill and Andy Boutin to come up and play with these guys for a couple days, and they had a blast!

2) the solar trough
This group constructed a parabolic trough, lined it with sections of flat mirror and then put a copper pipe along the focal line. They measured the temperature increase over time and the observed the drop in water level over time, and were able to do some yummy calculations from that. I just heard today that an article using a similar principle was published in a recent version of IEEE, only the device was a mile long, but could generate an enormous amount of power.

3) Emergency Stoves or Stoves for Humanity
The problem: in emergency situations people gather fuel to burn in open fires which are not very efficient. If you have two large tin or steel cans you can remedy this. So this group focused on a simple two-can stove design that could be built using only a bottle opener and a can opener (which one would assume you'd also have), and created a cartoon that could be printed on the cans (without words) so that people anywhere would understand how to construct such a device.

4) UNPAC
The United Packaging Adjustment Cooperative came out of this group, which was inspired by Dawn Densmore of UVM. She has been working to reduce packaging in the US through working towards requiring packaging information to be printed on the package. The students designed a logo that could published on a label that would include the %recycled content, the %recyclability, the average distance traveled by the product, and the %of the package by weight compared to the product - all hoping that the information available will pressure industries to package products more reasonably.

All these groups and more were judged by a panel at the University Mall in Burlington and given awards in a variety of areas. Sssshhh don't tell, but my dad and ex-boyfriend were on the panel *gasp*!

I got a real kick when one of the kids was like "check out that guy's beard", referring to my dad, "tell me you don't want that beard! That is so cool". Haha. Thanks kid.

My other favorite moment was the Condiment Duel at the Sandbar State Park, where Andrew challenged me to a duel so I got to use strawberry sauce and i made him use whipped cream.

Force Concept Inventory Results for Year 1

2008-06-18T11:50:00.003-04:00

This year I gave my students a physics exam called the Force Concept Inventory (available here). The idea is to give this Newtonian Mechanics test at the beginning of the year before anything has been taught, and then again after you've finished Newtonian Mechanics as a way to measure student progress, effective teaching, growth as a teacher over the scale of years.

This is the first year I'd ever given this test, so I didn't expect high results, especially considering we didn't cover centripetal motion at all. Something else to note is that I did not actually give the test at the beginning of the year, I gave it just before we covered "force", so the point gain is artificially low. I just tallied the results yesterday, and had some rather interesting discoveries.

For my classical physics class students gained about 3.5 points (out of 30), I only had one student regress, and I had 2 or 3 receive the same score. Those students who remained the same or regressed were mostly in the same class and I would normally consider them "bright" students, however they were singularly difficult students for me to connect with. Bright, but unfortunately apathetic, or perhaps "too cool" for my class. And now we have the proof that it, indeed, did nothing for them.

My Experimental Physics Class was a different story however. I only had six students who were enrolled in both the first and second semesters and took both tests, and un-expectedly, four of these students made no gains at all. It was shocking and hubling to find that 2/3 of the student population hadn't apparently "learned" any physics over the year. Shocking. The student with the highest gains jumped 6 points and another moved up 3 points, which averaged out to 1.5 pts/person, but what this tells me is that either I'm not getting through to them, or they're not prepared to take this sort of assessment. Or both. Curious, curious.

Announcing the Vermont Fuel and Food Partnership

2008-06-13T11:51:00.004-04:00

And now for some shameless self-promotion.
Check out Governor Douglas' speech from yesterday - especially the paragraph that starts "Vermonter's care about each other."

Thanks Governor Douglas, let's talk.

State of Vermont
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

Official Remarks of the Governor
Announcing the Vermont Fuel and Food Partnership
Thursday, June 12, 2008

Thank you President Handy for your hospitality-I'm delighted to be at Vermont Technical College to announce an important, wide-ranging, collaborative effort to help Vermont's families address the rising cost of fuel.

Today, we are taking meaningful, additional steps to help Vermont respond to the national recession that has caused our state such marked economic anxiety. Every Vermont family is facing the realities of soaring gas prices, rising food costs and the threat of home heating oil reaching unaffordable levels in the coming winter.

Solving these problems will require an effort that goes beyond government alone.

We're fortunate to live in a state where there is a strong network of community-based organizations and programs to help Vermonters when times get tough. Our partners like the Area Agencies on Aging, Community Action Agencies, Efficiency Vermont, Vermont Fuel Dealers Association, Vermont Economic Development Authority, Vermont Housing Finance Agency, and the Vermont Foodbank, among many others, are very important and very valuable
allies in our efforts to protect the most vulnerable and build a stronger, more innovative economy.

Vermonters care about each other. In communities across our state, organizations and individuals are stepping up to help Vermonters in need, in creative and effective ways. The state Seasonal Fuel Assistance Office is working with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative (VSHI) - led by students at Mt. Abraham and Montpelier High Schools - to help low-income individuals convert from fuel oil to wood pellet furnaces.

The Fuel Assistance Office recently received a call from the Union Bank requesting information for a fuel awareness day they will be holding, to help educate Vermonters about how to prepare for the upcoming fuel season.

And right here at Vermont Technical College-the home of innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy programs-there is a community garden where employee volunteers sow, plant, weed and harvest. Once a week community members are able to purchase fresh organic produce from the garden at very affordable prices. The local food shelf receives regular donations of fresh vegetables from the project as well.

Great things are happening, but not all Vermonters know about these efforts.

We need to bring together all of this creative energy, compassion and information - we need to marshal all of our resources - to ensure that we make the most of every dollar, help reaches those who need it most and, most importantly, that no Vermonter is left in the cold.

To bring everyone together-and to harness all available resources--I have established a cabinet-level task force chaired by Lt. Governor Brian Dubie and Secretary Neale Lunderville. And I have directed them to focus every effort and every resource Vermont can bring to bear to help manage the effects of higher energy costs on Vermont families.

* * *
Like other Americans, every Vermont family and business understands the stark reality of skyrocketing gas prices. With gasoline approaching $4.25 a gallon and diesel near $5.00 a gallon Vermonters are paying dearly at the pump.

The hard fact is there is very little we can do at the state level to effect the international oil markets in the short term. I'm pleased Congress is beginning to consider action that could provide Vermonters with relief from skyrocketing oil and gasoline prices. While I will continue to take every step available to state government to hold down the price of fuel - like continuing to oppose increases in the gas tax - ultimately Vermonters know that federal action is also necessary to address this growing energy crisis.

I applaud our congressional delegation's work to move the debate in the right direction. I also encourage all members of Congress and the Bush administration to make this fundamental economic issue their top priority.

The cost of gas and worries about the upcoming heating season are topmost on Vermonters' minds. That's why these issues must be addressed immediately and effectively by officials in Washington D.C.
***
The programs I outline today are practical, near-term and meant to help deal with the realities we face today when it comes to sky-high gas prices.

Today we're launching a new website to give commuters the tools to make more affordable transportation choices. ConnectingCommuters.org<http://connectingcommuters.org/> will provide Vermonters with a range of options to help them identify more affordable transportations options and locate alternatives to single-occupancy commutes.

This site will be a one-stop way to plan trips using bus route maps, to locate convenient park & ride locations across Vermont, offer tips on fuel conservation and identify locations with the lowest gas prices. We're also providing links to an online carpool matching system for Vermonters, so we can all pitch in and use the ties of community to help save gas.

I'm e-mailing state employees, encouraging them to carpool and use other transportation options to help cut down on the number of car trips generated within state government. With 9,000 employees, state workers can have a real effect on energy usage by carpooling, teleconferencing and limiting official travel.

The Park and Ride system lets Vermonters drive to convenient, local points to access mass transit and meet carpools. This summer I've asked VTrans to expedite our 20% expansion of the Park and Ride system. And we will work with the MPO and Regional Planning Commissions to identify capacity in private lots to add additional Park & Ride spots for Vermont commuters.

We're also seeking new ways to help Vermont businesses compete by using technological solutions. Many of Vermont's traditional rural industries rely on diesel trucks. To improve the efficiency of these trucks, I've asked VEDA to explore a low-interest loan program to equip them with Auxiliary Power Units (APUs). These units can help lower costs by giving truckers electrical power without idling and burning $5.00 a gallon diesel fuel.

* * *
As food prices rise along with the cost of fuel, we need to make sure families don't go hungry in Vermont. There are some things state government can do to help, and there are other things that will require neighbor helping neighbor. And some things are just common sense.

We will extensively promote Vermont's "Buy local" initiative through the Agency of Agriculture, as well as the "Grow an Extra Row" gardening program. Over the coming weeks as Vermonters tend to their gardens, we hope they'll plant an extra row of produce to donate to their local food shelf.

Locally grown Vermont produce is among the finest in the world and now it's a more affordable option than ever. Shifting just 10% of Vermont's food consumption to locally grown meat, dairy and produce would not only save Vermonters money but would also pump $130 million dollars into our state's economy.

At my direction, the Agencies of Agriculture and Human Services are expanding the ability of farmers' markets to accept debit and EBT cards. There are presently three farmers' markets with this capacity and we will expand that number to 15 this summer. This will provide
Vermonters-including our food stamp recipients-more convenient access to fresh, affordable, locally grown food.

The federal food stamp program is one of the best was for use to assist the most vulnerable Vermonters. At the present time, only 70% of those eligible for food stamps use the service. To be sure everyone eligible has the opportunity to benefit, I've asked the Agency of Human Services to enhance our outreach efforts to ensure those eligible for food stamps receive them. Lt. Governor Dubie will also work with AHS and the Area Agencies on Aging to ensure no elderly Vermonter goes hungry.

Finally, we'll be working closely with the Vermont Food Bank, local food shelf programs and Meals on Wheels to encourage community-based charitable efforts to support them. These organizations are supported largely by private donations. I hope to encourage those Vermonters who can to join Dorothy and me in making donations to the Vermont Food Bank, and our local food shelf and Meals on Wheels program. Even the smallest donation can make a real difference, and it is in the best Vermont tradition to reach out to help a neighbor in need.

* * *
Today, the sun is shining, another beautiful Vermont summer is upon us, and the last thing we want to think about is another winter heating season-but we must.

We must face the growing reality that fuel prices this winter may be out of reach for many families. Though fuel prices are a product of the international market, Vermonters have in our power the ability to take steps to make homes more weatherized and energy efficient and to use less fuel.

As Governor, I am committed that no Vermonter should spend this winter - or any winter - in the cold.

Vermont has the most generous Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) in the country, and we benefit from a robust weatherization program. In total, Vermont state government is presently investing over $32 million in fuel assistance and weatherization programs. We also enjoy the generous support of our private and non-profit community partners like Efficient Vermont and the Community Action Agencies who contribute millions more to the effort.

But spending isn't the only answer. Our goal must be to reduce demand for fuel-and demand for these assistance programs-by making homes more fuel efficient. Simple, low-cost tasks, like getting a furnace cleaned and serviced, saves on average 18% in fuel costs over the winter season. It's hard to argue with the cost-effectiveness of these services.

We will encourage Vermonters to tap the extensive resources the state offers to make their homes more energy efficient, to weatherize them against the elements, and to assist families who are struggling to pay heating bills. There are public and private programs across Vermont to serve a variety of heating needs, and we will work tirelessly to integrate their efforts with those of the state and to direct Vermonters to the most effective programs for their needs.

We will establish a Winter Heating Helpline and a Vermont Winter Heating Assistance Website which will serve as one-stop clearinghouses for all energy assistance programs. To provide Vermonters with additional access to the information and resources they need to address fuel costs, we will also organize and conduct 8 regional energy workshops over the summer and we will engage the Town Energy Committees in our effort as well. Vermont 2-1-1 will also serve as our partner to direct Vermonters to our helpline for additional services.

Through these one-stop clearing houses of information, Vermonters will be able to tap expert advice, obtain services for weatherization, energy efficiency programs and fuel conversion. These resources will also help qualified families apply for LIHEAP.

Expanding access to existing services is only one part of the solution. We understand that increased demand will require increased resources to help Vermonters make smart weatherization and efficiency choices.

Today, I am pleased to announce that we are on track to release an additional $1 million into the traditional weatherization program that serves individuals and families at or below 60% of the median income. This money will help community action agencies provide weatherization services to the most vulnerable.

Of course, there are many Vermonters that don't qualify for existing weatherization programs, but still have a demonstrable need for the services. To serve these individuals and families, I am taking steps to infuse additional resources that will help expand the reach of existing programs.

I am asking the Agency of Commerce to release $2 million in Community Development Block Grant funds to community-based weatherization and energy efficiency programs.

I am also proposing the creation of a State Weatherization Revolving Loan Fund that will provide no or low-interest loans to middle income Vermonters for weatherization and efficiency upgrades. With a $9 million state investment over four years, we can help two to four thousand homeowners with up to $20 million in needed energy improvements. All of these weatherization and efficiency improvements have a quick payback-with all of the savings going back into the pocket of the homeowners. This is especially true as fuel prices continue to rise.

As market demand for efficiency and weatherization expands through our efforts, we must also grow the number of qualified and trained contractors capable of providing these services.

The Vermont Department of Labor will help develop workforce training programs to quickly expand the number of qualified and trained contractors in the fields of energy auditing, weatherization and alternative energy system installation.

These professions will assist Vermonters with retrofitting existing homes for energy savings and building new energy efficient homes. Working with the Community Action Agencies and Efficiency Vermont, Vermont Technical College and other partners we will accelerate these essential training programs.

***
These are difficult times for working families, but Vermont has faced these kinds of challenges before, and is a national example of how deep community roots and a strong commitment to seeking new solutions can resolve even the most difficult challenges. I know that the strength and determination of Vermonters will lead us past these difficult times and leave us with a state that is stronger and more energy independent than ever before.

What I've laid out today is the start of a very strong program to address the rising cost of fuel. All of these ideas, and those that will develop as the task force continues its work with our partners, can be accomplished by working together.

Physics Final: Egypt to Greece in 18s?

2008-06-11T09:42:00.006-04:00

Yesterday was the awards assembly (which went 2 hrs over by the way) and school picnic, which makes today the first day of exams.

This year for my exam I had students either choose a 3 minute movie clip, and analyze the physics in it (using a minimum of four equations), or choose four physics concepts/equations to relate to philosophy, relationships, society, emotions, spirituality, etc. and write a paper about it. So far the philosophy papers I've read are remarkable: deep, captivating, demonstrating a rich understanding of physics.

The movie clips were entertaining. Most of them were of the same nature, probably because of the example I gave: calculating the height of Kazadum by timing Gandalf's fall with the Bolrog (accounting for terminal velocity, etc.) - thus most of the clips were falling clips.

This year we had three separate scenes that were chosen by the two different students:
1) Luke Skywalker's hand being cut off and him falling down the shoot
2) Elizabeth falling off the cliff after she can't breathe from Pirates of the Carribean
3) The sperm whale and a pot of petunias materializing and plummeting to the planet Magrithea from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Four people chose different scenes for the Matrix series.

But the project that won for "coolest clip and analyzation" goes to Aladin's "A Whole New World" scene where Aladin and Jasmine go from Egypt to Greece on the magic carpet in a span of 18 seconds. The student calculated the average velocity, the drag, the force of friction, and then the coefficient of friction between them and the carpet, and determined that the carpet had a coefficient of friction millions of times higher than velcro. hA! What fun!

In other news I won the Sustainability Award this year from the Earth Group, which was very exciting. I get a plaque for my wall, and a gift certificate to Kismet (an expensive local/organic restaurant) and two tickets for a free cone at a local creamery. Thanks guys!

Energy Town Meeting Day in Montpelier

2008-06-05T20:18:00.005-04:00

This morning I saw the upcoming environmental engineer, Andrew Laing, on the bus to Montpelier, and it reminded me that I haven't blogged in a little bit, so here we are:

Recently there was an article in the Bridge about me, my teaching, and the working I'm doing with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. So that was very encouraging. Since then I've had lots of people come up to me saying, "You've got me convinced. I've got a couple acres of land we could grow grasses on!" Ha! Most excellent.

And as long as we're talking VSHI, the last Thursday in Montpelier was the Energy Town Meeting Day with Ken Jones and the Montpelier Energy Team. We were hoping to start a pellet-purchasing coop that night (ideally 100-150 homes participating). Unfortunately, we only had six families sign up. I mean, it's a start, but more work needs to be done.

Some of my students presented their work to the community, which was ... a little comical since many of the students thought they were sharing new information, when really the audience was abnormally well-educated. This was most poigniant when a student who had built a wind turbine had a diagram of the insides of an industrial turbine in his PowerPoint presentation. Someone from the crowd asked, "I normally see fins on these turbines to make sure they face into the wind, but there's not fin on this one, how does it turn?" The student didn't know, he had merely tapped the picture to make the point that his was much simpler, but to everyone's surprise a guy in the back corner piped up, "Well, I happen to be a windmill designer, and you can see there on the back, there's a little anemometer and a sensor there, which sends information to a computer inside the turbine, which tells it how to turn." hA! Wow. This was not your typical audience.

Anyway - back to VSHI - the VSHI kids ran a session called "How can we move in the direction of locally produced pellets", which was sorely under-attended. Or at least it felt that way at first, there were only 3 people in attendance, but they were the right three people: Jeff Beyer, the Tree Warden and head of the Parks and Rec Department, and Rick Barstow an East Montpelier farmer who recently bought a small pelletizer so that he can pelletize grass from his farm. Jeff was saying, "We have hundreds of yards of woody biomass that's just getting buried right now because we don't have anything to do with it, but it's got to be worth something. We've got to use it!" And Rick was saying that he'd like to go into production very soon - by the fall he hopes. And ideally, the right blend of materials in a pellet would be mostly grass and a little bit of wood for lignan, which acts as a binder. Getting these two guys together was just fabulous. There was a lot of potential there.

Thus far VSHI has been mainly focused on Bristol and Addison County, and I think I need to start dreaming about the Montpelier community and its potential heating future.

Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative in Bristol

2008-05-25T11:38:00.004-04:00

Last Tuesday morning we had one of the most exciting events in the short history of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. As one of our student members put it, it was "one of the most important things we've done."

Basically we gathered all the players in the Bristol biomass heating community to discuss a potential LIHEAP pilot program in that area. There were people from LIHEAP, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, ACORN, Norwich University, Pellet Vendors, Farmers, the Extension Service, the Bristol Selectboard, and two Addison County Legislators, among others.

It was (needless to say) very productive. We discussed the basic idea, and then broke up into sub-groups to address different aspects of the pilot project: the Human Side, the Burning Technology/Production & Farming side, aaaaaand Funding.

These committees will continue to meet, and hopefully make further headway. I was on the Human Side, which I'm particularly interested in as I would like to be certified to do Home Energy Audits in the future.

This will be followed by a meeting this Thursday in Montpelier about the heating situation in that area. We'll discuss a bulk purchase of pellets (or pellet purchasing co-op), and how we can make this transition. More on that to follow.

Two Books on Theology and Ecology

2008-05-25T10:58:00.009-04:00

The Ecophysicsteacher has been in radio silence for the last month, but maybe that's just an indicator of my free time lately. So here on this Memorial Day weekend I find myself with time to read, write, and reflect on the last month's events.

Let's start with today and some books.

I recent read Serve God Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth, which is basically a good introduction to the idea of Christian Ecological Stewardship. As someone who has been deep into this issue for a long time, I didn't necessarily find it challenging or novel, but for someone who is a non-scientist or a new Christian, this would be a great place to start. However, I must admit I was affected by the book. As a result of reading this book, I now wash my dishes by hand whenever I can (as it uses *far* less energy than a dishwasher), and I avoid red artificially colored foods. J. Matthew Sleeth, who is a doctor by trade, claims that most artificial red dyes are incredibly toxic to humans. No more cherry Kool-Aid for me!

I'm right smack in the middle of For the Beauty of the Earth by Steven Bouma-Prediger, which I just had to put down because it was so thought-provoking. I found the beginning compelling as he pushed the idea "We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience." And so we must start with ecological literacy. We must know our place. After some meandering trips through different ecological habitats and statistics about the state of Earth, we were back to discussing theology. This is where I had to put the book down because it caused such a reaction in me. Basically the thrust of chapter 3 is that Christians are largely to blame for the destruction we currently see, and he cites four main reasons tied back to our flawed theology.

1. Misinterpretation of Genesis 1:28, aka "the dominance clause".
2. Neo-gnostic dualism, e.g. "only the soul matters - not the body", transfered to "only the Spirit and saving souls matter, not the creation"
3. Misled End-Times Theology, such as "It will just get trashed anyway."
4. (An extension of #1) If we apply the Christian-born sense of mastery over nature to Science, Christians are largely to blame for the ecologically-conscienceless results Science and Technology have produced.

I find these ideas all too true. I have thought these things. I have seen other people in churches express these misunderstandings, and having put all these complaints against Christianity in one spot fills me with a sense of repentance. Which is one of the reasons I am writing this: You are my confessional. Previously I had thought that all people need to repent of their ecological mis-behavior, but now it seems clear to me that Christians (more than other folk) need to examine their ideas.

If environmental reconciliation is to occur within the church we will need to directly address these misconceptions.

Roads vs. Paths, or Who Conforms to Whom?

2008-04-29T20:04:00.004-04:00

Ever since I heard the Dredg song Pyramid, I've loved the line "We live like penguins in the desert/why can we live like tribes?" It made me think of summer time office buildings that are over air conditioned such that it makes one wish for a sweater.

I went to a conference this last weekend on Christianity & the Arts in Middlebury and I went to a session led by Matt Dickerson, a computer science professor and Tolkien scholar (author of Following Gandalf, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: the Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy). So I was pretty excited about that session, and I seem to have emerged with something I'm still chewing on.

We read an essay by Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace, which touched on the difference between a road and a path. Matt said that a road was like conquest of the Earth. A road is the fast place from here to there, never mind what's in between: plow through the hills, uproot the trees. Nature is in the way, and so we plow over it. Whereas a path is a submission to nature. If the hill curves around, so does the path. If there is a cliff, we go around it. It is working within the environment we've got. In short, a road transforms nature to meet my needs, and with a path it is I who conform.

And today it occurred to me that that is really the same idea behind the Dredg lyric - we shape the earth to meet our needs so that it is a pleasant 70 degrees no matter where we are rather than sweating a bit in the summer.

One quote from the session has stuck with me from C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man:
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men".

I think I might present my students with some philosophy of science type questions and ask them to write a reflection on them. I love physics. :)

Renewable Energy Presentations are Beginning!

2008-04-29T19:45:00.004-04:00

Today was the first day of renewable energy project presentations. Apparently my intern has been talking about my class in her science methods course, so the teacher approached me yesterday wondering if she could bring her class to see my presentations, so of course I agreed. So we had a troop of college kids in my somewhat small 7th period class today.

The presentations went really well. The kids had great calculations, conclusions, and for the most part were very into the work they had done.

Afterwards the college kids said the presentations had been "college level work, like I'd expect to see this in one of my classes", which I plan to pass along to these students. We talked about how to modify this to a lower level physics course. We talked about how I had the lower level students create their own rubric for their presentations.

The teacher wondered if I had published about any of this work, and I said I had (so I showed them the Science Teacher article), but even so the teacher later asked me if I'd be willing to work with her on writing another article about my work. Ha! How exciting.

Anyway, I'm just glad to have a bit of closure (just two more classes to go - but they won't be ready for at least another week or so, and frankly I don't have that kind of patience). :P

Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started My National Board Application

2008-04-22T21:03:00.004-04:00

Some of my colleagues at the Knowles Science Teachers meeting wanted to know what it was like to go through the National Board Portfolio process. So I told them and it from that conversation it seems to me that I ought to write a list entitled Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started My National Board Application.

I wish I'd

read all the response questions before I even planned the lessons
joined a National Board Support class/group
studied harder for the test (harder? this one might be moot, since hindsight is always 20/20, there's no guarantees that I would've studied the right thing - and far be it from me to let slip what's on it)
I think it probably would've been a really good idea to the Take-One option, so to get my feet wet, feel the whole thing out and then go for the rest of it.

Maybe this list will get longer, but that's it for now. (I'm sure I'll refer back to this post when Knowles asks me to present about my NBPTS experience at their summer meeting in July).

Concept Attainment Game

2008-04-22T10:00:00.003-04:00

This past weekend was the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation's Spring Meeting for the '04 cohort (which I'm a part of) in San Diego, CA. Amy Germundson from Virginia (who's working with Carole Ann Tomlinson, a "Differentiated Instruction" genius) worked with our cohort to help us critique a differentiated instruction lesson from our own classrooms: totally helpful. One of the techniques I learned was called Concept Attainment. So here's how you play:

I give Positive Examples and Negative Examples of a principle or pattern and you hypothesize about what the principle/rule is.

Hey, let's try it:

Positive Examples
mud
jersey cows
chocolate

Negative Examples
ripe watermelon
the sun
fresh snow

If you guessed "Things that are brown", then you win!

Do you get how it works? Ok, let's try a harder one:

Positive Examples
Biomass
Wind power
Hydro (dam) power

Negative Examples
Geothermal
Nuclear Fission
Hydro (tidal) power

i'll post the answer in the comments section ;)

Lungless Frogs and Remembering to Breathe

2008-04-21T15:30:00.004-04:00

Just for kicks (since we're on April break right now), let's talk about some weird discoveries in science, specifically a lungless frog discovered in Indonesia. Apparently it "breathes" through its skin, which is extraordinarily rare among tetrapods.

Why was I thinking about this? Cause I just finished watching Rob Bell's NOOMA video called Breathe, which is neither environmental, nor education, nor physics related, but nonetheless yummy.

Don't forget to breathe this week :)