Professionally Agnostic

I've been mulling over the recent field trip to the American Museum of Natural History, where we watched the IMAX film Galapagos. In class discussions afterward, the conversation turned, of course, to evolution and eventually the religious implications. A small but vocal number of students were quite outspoken in their religious rejection of evolution - God put us here the way we are and how could evolution possibly turn monkeys into humans - the usual objections. I am also fortunate to have some very informed students who may also be religious, but have no trouble being religious and understanding evolution at the same time. They were quick to jump into the discussion and present the scientific point of view as they understand it.

My professional position on religious matters has always been agnostic - I tell students when they ask that I do not discuss my religious beliefs or lack thereof, and they can make any assumptions they wish, but I will neither confirm nor deny any particular belief. The problem is that refusal to discuss religion is always taken as evidence that you are an atheist. I often wonder if I shouldn't just come right out and tell them, but I remain silent as a matter of principle and wish my colleagues would do the same - not just the science teachers, not just the religious ones, or the agnostic ones, or the atheists, but all of them. I have heard many teachers sharing their belief in god with students. They don't proselytize per se, but talk openly of their activities with their church, their religious observances, their faith, etc. On the other hand, I've never heard a teacher discussing his/her atheism with a class. I know that most of my colleagues are silent on the subject most of the time, but wouldn't hesitate to answer if students asked. I think the answer should always be a polite "none of your business."

The only acceptable position for a public school teacher is, in my opinion, professional agnosticism - "there may be a god or gods, there may not be, but as an employee of the state I have no personal position on the matter to discuss with students." This is not a denial of one's god or religion, it is an understanding of our role as public school teachers and our obligation as such to remain neutral on religious matters.

Turkey Brining

In my NYC family, I take turns with the in-laws for the annual holiday festivities. Beginning with Thanksgiving, which I am usually responsible for, my sister-in-law and her family then host the Christmas dinner, we do New Years Day, they do Easter, we do Passover - I think that's it in terms of the regular rotation - there may of course be other special occasions from time-to-time.

For many years I "experimented" with different turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast. I tried different cooking techniques - covered/uncovered, basting/not basting, high heat/low heat. I tried free range turkeys, smaller turkeys, all the while refusing to go the butterball route with the industrial strength water infusion. Still, I was never happy with the finished product, and many years I swore I wouldn't even try turkey again. Then every year tradition would pull at my conscience and I go for the turkey again anyway.

A few years ago, I tried brining a turkey at home. Brining is simply soaking the turkey in a slatwater solution, which I will discuss in a little detail below. The results were OK - the turkey was less dry, but too salty. Not only that, but the the technique is quite cumbersome and messy. So I decided to try the kosher turkey route, since brining is basically part of the koshering process already, it was a ready-made, brined turkey. And it came out pretty good. It's still a little salty, perhaps I will try a little soaking before cooking might to draw out a little of the salt next year. It's mainly an issue when using the drippings to make gravy. That seems to concentrate the salt (makes sense, a lot of evaporation takes place in making gravy anyway) and leads to a salty gravy.

At first thought, brining seems a little counterintuitive. You might think that soaking a turkey in saltwater would cause water to diffuse out of the turkey (from higher concentration in the turkey meat to lower concentration in the saltwater solution) but apparently the process is a bit more complicated, and I'll summarize here, but you might want to click on the links to get more detailed in formation. Basically, it is true that the saltwater is a hypertonic solution, compared to the turkey, which should result in diffusion of water out of the turkey. But, at the same time, salt diffuses into the turkey meat. As a result, the salt starts to break down or denature proteins within the cell, increasing their water holding capacity, as well as their osmolarity (more solutes per unit water) - the relative concentrations of water then favor the diffusion of water into the turkey, and you get a moister piece of meat. This is my synthesis of the explanations offered by the two science-related websites below that discuss brining. Other explanations are offered on various food websites, mostly summarized in this Virtual Weber Bulletin Board article.

Links:

MadSci Network: How does brining a turkey before smoking make it juicier

Cooking for Engineers: Kitchen Notes: Brining

Now if I can just figure out a way to use this application of osmosis in a science lab activity...

Recent Labs

My schedule imposes a sort of lab routine on me that is not always easy to keep up with. Each week students either a) come in very early at 7:45 for a required lab period or b) come back early from lunch, meaning that they only get 20 minutes to get food & eat and get upstairs for their required lab or c) have a double period at the end of the day, as with my highly energetic 8th graders, including an already 10-minutes-longer-than-usual 8th period. In either case, not having a formal lab isn't really an option, as students will begin to resent the lab period and question why it is necessary and start skipping - and who wouldn't at least think about it if no labs were given in the "lab" period? Or in the case of my 8th graders, almost 2 hours together without a lab would be unbearable. So I feel compelled to find a lab for them every week, and on topic.(*See Comment below.)

Last week I used a cheese making lab that I got from a listserv - I would like to give credit where credit is due, but I can't find the author of the lab. This lab was more or less on topic as we were discussing biochemistry (proteins, carbs, lipids, etc.) and the cheese making lab has to do with denaturing proteins with a mild acid (we used lemon juice). Most of the students refused to taste the cheese (I used food prep materials for the heating and "fresh" lemon juice and paper cups to keep everything clean). I mixed in some sugar and tasted it myself - not unlike cheesecake in some ways. What really grossed them out, for some reason, was when I drank a little of the whey. Of course I mentioned Little Miss Muffet as well:

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey;

Along came a spider, who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away.

This week we created food webs for a lab, based on a set of cards that depict various players in a Chaparral ecosystem. I reduced the cards so that they would fit on 2 sheets of paper, then students cut them out and arrange on poster paper, draw lines connecting them based on information on the cards. Understanding why the arrows point toward the consumer (away from the energy source) is a real challenge for the students.They always want to point toward the one that gets eaten.

On Friday we had a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History to see the Galapagos IMAX film and the Biodiversity exhibit. I didn't prep them as well as I would have liked to. This being my first experience taking a high school group on a field trip, there were a number of issues I didn't anticipate or really have a good grip on - logistical issues, not behavioral. For instance, in high school there are no real "official" classes, so my 2nd & 6th period classes have students who are in different humanities and math classes - in other words, unlike middle school where students form a pretty much cohesive unit that stays together all day, in high school students get individual programs, so the whole field trip experience is in many ways a more disruptive process. The museum was also packed, so completing the "lab" was problematic, just as a matter of being able to view all the necessary exhibits and stand in a position to read the material and gather the necessary information. It was, however, all-in-all a positive experience.

Comment

I may have given a false impression here regarding my feelings about labs (vs. lecture, e.g.), so a little clarification. The difficulty I have is not with the idea of doing lab or hands-on activities, but doing them on commmand according to a set schedule and set time limit regardless of whether we are at a point in the unit where a lab makes sense or not and regardless of the fact that we may have a lab one week that takes several days to complete, and the scheduled lab time falls on a day where some discussion/lecture would be a more pressing need. I would much prefer a schedule where all science classes were 55 minutes long and one meeting per day, allowing me to schedule activities according to the needs of the unit rather than the needs of an artificial and outdated model of lecture and lab periods.

Dumb Smart

I learned a new slang term today, a replacement I suppose for "mad," as in "mad hot ballroom" and all that. The new (probably already outdated) term is "dumb" and I wish I could remember exactly what the expression was, but I was just too taken aback by the realization that I had just heard something for the first time.

Anyway, later that day someone was remarking on some cool feature of the smartboard I was using and I couldn't resist noting that yes, I guess you could say it was "dumb smart." (Groans all around.)

We've finally got most of the computer issues resolved, and I've been using a lot of PowerPoint recently, trudging through the chemistry that the LE curriculum assumes students know (thus no time is budgeted for actually teaching these concepts) but of course the majority of them are clueless. It seems to me that there is a tremendous leap from what students are expected to know in middle school (or at least what they can reasonably be expected to learn) and what they are assumed to know (or need to know) for the LE curriculum. I just don't know how we can get very far with cellular processes, genetics, homeostasis, or cycling of matter without some basic understanding of chemistry. So I've been killing them with the chemistry content these last couple of weeks with lectures, asking them to understand as much as they can and just memorize the rest, because we will return to the concepts over and over in the context of the above mentioned topics. And I left a lot of things that I do think I can teach better in context - like acids & bases, enzyme action, etc. I may be wasting my time and theirs, but I don't know any other options here for teaching covering these largely middle school topics like atoms, elements, compounds, mixtures, solutions, etc. - basic chemistry in just one week!

Which brings me back to the smartboard, the main purpose of which seems to be delivering lectures. Makes sense, I guess. I find it useful for elaborating on a slide, answering questions by drawing a little diagram or picture or adding an aside or throwing in an "enrichment" vocabulary word that I hadn't thought of when making the slides. It's also useful for helping kids learn to take notes, simplify drawings, etc. I'm thinking of incorporating more note-taking skills in these presentations, since kids usually just copy word for word or letter for letter what's on the slide, without processing. I want to try showing a slide just long enough for students to read, then moving on to a blank slide, and then asking volunteers to come up and write how they would summarize the material on the smartboard. Again, I would prefer not to lecture so much, but sometimes you just have to plough through some material to get to something more interesting or just to make it through all the stuff that's in the LE curriculum. I only have 6 periods per week this year - last year I had trouble getting through the material with 8 periods. So I want to make the most of it when I do use it, and get students to take notes both more efficiently and more effectively.