For Sebastian

One of my sons is obsessed with frogs. We were upstate today and they were easy to find hiding in the grass. Wonder if it has anything to with the swarms of crickets also found in the grass? Anyway, kinda neat how these guys (Northern Leopard Frogs) blend into the background without actually completely mimicking the background patterns. Who knows, though, maybe the spots are more similar to pebbles in a stream and the actual adaptation is for that environment. Still, it works pretty well in the brown decaying grass/leaves/twigs under the weeds.

Links

Old Regents Exams for Practice (With Answer Keys)

Regents Prep (Oswego City Schools)

SUNY Regents Prep Live (Video Review Sessions)

This post is mainly for people searching the web for resources to prepare for the regents exams. There are also commercial outfits, such as Barrons Regents Prep that charge a fee for their review services, but I don't think they are worth the expense when you have the above referenced free resources. I would recommend a review book in addition, and personally I like the AMSCO version by Rick Hallman. I have found traditional biology textbooks by the national publishers (Holt, Prentice Hall, Glencoe, etc.) to be almost entirely useless for the regents course. Still thinking about how/whether to use them in the coming school year. Some of the diagrams and illustrations are helpful, so I may devise some assignments that involve students in analyzing those diagrams. I'm definitely through with "read the chapter and answer the questions!" (Yeah, shoulda known better...)

SOS* Watch

*Supression of Science

I ranted a few days ago about NASA's Mission statement revision to exclude specific reference to studying planet earth. At the end I posted a link to a related story on censorship at NOAA. Now comes a survey from the Union of Concerned Scientists on discontent at the FDA. I'll quote from the SEED magazine analysis of the report, The FDA Is A Cauldron of Discontent:

The researchers' answers portray a culture of discontent where scientists report not having enough resources to properly evaluate products, having scientific results ignored, being pressured by political appointees to approve drugs and--most criminal, considering the FDA's mission--providing misleading information to the public.

I already know way too many people who are irrationally skeptical of modern medicine, now they are being handed a rational reason.

---Via Bad Astronomy Blog

Along The Hudson.

An algae "pond" formed in a puddle dug by the wheels of a truck that delivers materials to the base of the George Washington Bridge where they are doing who-knows-what in addition to lead paint removal. I would post pictures of the construction site but photography of the bridge is now basically, officially, verboten.Yesterday there were pigeons dunking their heads into the puddle, which would have made an interesting shot if I could have caught them at it. If school were in session I would take a sample to the classroom for a closer look.

I decided to start carrying the camera with me on bike rides and looking for interesting things to shoot. I'll post a photo or two now & then if anything remotely interesting turns up. One of my biggest obstacles in taking decent pictures is overcoming the self-consciousness and the discomfort of imagined or real eyes on me long enough to actually experiment and learn what works and doesn't work. The ears inside my head hear people saying things like, "What the hell's he taking pictures of that for?" "In this light?" "At that angle?" "With that camera?" It's probably my father's voice. Although I don't remember him being particularly mean in that way, he had a certain skepticism toward the value of anything he didn't consider "work." I was rushing a bit today since I didn't get out early enough and had to get back to move the car for those dreaded NYC alternate-side parking regulations.

Friday Random 10

From my mp3 player.

1. Tullycraft - Twee

2. Animal Collective - Grass

3. Green Day - Prosthetic Head

4. The Strokes - Is This It?

5. Deathcab For Cutie - Your Heart Is An Empty Room

6. The Rakes - Retreat

7. Joy Division - Decades

8. Silver Jews - Blue Arrangements

9. Mountain Goats - Idylls Of The King

10. Yo La Tengo - Stockholm Syndrome

No Comment

Male Praying Mantids Prefer Not To Be Victims of Sexual Cannibalism

Consolidation

I've made a modest change to the name of my blog in the interest of consolidating the various projects I've had at one time or another. It's an attempt at re-integration, so to speak, of the various aspects of my life that I had chopped up and placed in different blogs. My original desire was to keep the Regents Living Environment Blog as much a possible strictly professional and I had attempted to maintain a separate blog for more personal items. I never publicized them here and pretty much kept them for myself thinking that one day they would be revealed to my children who would then have a window into understanding why their old man is so looney. The whole idea probably reflects some twisted psychological turmoil I'm trying to suppress. Anyway, out with that idea. I'll henceforth allow myself to post personal stuff and random rants as well as maintaining the professional material related to teaching science as before.

This is hardly a new paradigm. In fact, the original blogger that inspired me to start, Ms. Frizzle, has been doing this all along. Likewise, the incomparable P.Z. Myers doesn't hesitate to throw in pictures of his family in one post and a tutorial on hox genes in the next followed by some comic political relief. I still don't expect to be anywhere near as prolific nor pretend to be anywhere near as interesting as these guys, but I do this as much for my own personal needs as anything else - I'm not looking for recognition or awards here. I do get occasional e-mails from folks who have stumbled upon the blog and who say they enjoy reading it - I do appreciate the feedback and I will continue to try to post useful information for fellow science teachers or the occasional student looking for answers to old regents exams!

Black & White Film Processing, Anyone?

Is anyone still shooting black & white film? I know that when I got my digital camera, I stopped shooting film altogether. I like the convenience and price of shooting digital. For the youngsters out there who never had to deal with film at all, it used to cost me $15.00 or more to get processing, prints, and CD burns of my film. That's 36 pictures for $15.00. It's also hard to beat the instant gratification of digital, instantly checking the shot on the little LCD, and if I really want to know how the picture turned out I can upload immediately to my computer and see in large format how the picture looks. With film you send your pictures to a lab and wait a week or two before you see anything. You could go to a local 1-hour lab and get marginal quality prints and (usually) severely scratched negatives, which often show up on the prints themselves.

There are drawbacks to digital as well. Laziness. My digital camera is a "point & shoot" and that's often what I do - point and shoot. With the luxury of almost unlimited pictures at virtually zero cost (I use rechargeable batteries), I take lots of pictures but I don't concentrate as much on getting good shots, just hoping that some of them turn out OK. Then there are the prints, which used to come automatically with film processing, regardless of the quality of the image. Now that I can pick and choose which pictures are good enough to print, I usually decide that NONE of them are worth printing. As a result, I have a lot of framed pictures around the house of my kids, all taken from birth to about 3 years of age, at which point I got the digital camera and stopped making prints, so no framed pictures of the 4-7 year old range.

Which brings me around to the topic of this post. I've grown a bit tired of the digital camera. One of the interesting aspects of film photography is the different qualities of color, contrast, saturation, etc. offered by different films. That's all gone, for the most part, with digital. Then there's black & white. It is certainly possible to remove the color from a color picture and have a B&W picture. My camera even has a setting for B&W so you can take B&W straight from the camera. I haven't been impressed with the results and the quality of the digital prints is pretty low. So I pulled out the old film camera yesterday and dusted it off went out and shot some B&W film. Today I was looking for the website of the lab where I used to send my B&W film, San Miguel Photo Labs, and it looks like hard times for the industry, to say the least. They've gone from a staff of about 9 to a staff of 2 - the owner and a part-time assistant. Some of their machines are obsolete and they can no longer get parts for repair, so they no longer offer proofs. Then there's the warning signs about B&W papers:

Kodak has stopped making B&W papers. Agfa is gone from the face of the earth. Ilford just announced that it will not be selling its own B&W materials in the USA, but rather, has turned that function over to a third party. It is scary times for all of us in the B&W photo world. So I am here to tell you: THE SHIP IS NOT SINKING. We did, however, take those little canvas covers off of the life boats....

How much longer will they be able to stay in business at all? I can process film myself - it's a wonderfully "magical" process that I learned in high school while working on the yearbook staff. I loved the darkroom and even set one up in my old school a few years ago, developed films there and even made some prints from an enlarger we got for a good price back then. I've got materials here at home for developing just the film, but it's a time consuming process and unless you do it on a regular basis it's hard to keep the chemicals fresh, so I don't really want to go there again until I decide to teach the kids how to do it. Who knows if film itself will even be available at a reasonable cost by then?

Ideology Trumps Reality - Again

This is old news but it turned up in an Edutopia newsletter I received today. I skimmed the story last week about a U.S. Dept. of Education (read Bush Administration) study that showed no significant difference in educational performance between comparable private schools and public schools. No surprise there, really. But somehow I missed (darned skimming) the story behind the story. Wow. It's just hard not to fall into a pit of despair at the sorry state of affairs in this country under Bush & Co. Just follow these two headlines:

July 15, 2006

NY Times

Public Schools Perform Near Private Schools In Study

July 18, 2006

NY Times

Republicans Propose Nation-Wide Voucher Program

The first headline actually understates the issue - in all measures except 8th grade reading public schools performed better than comparable private schools. How the Times translated that into "public schools perform near private schools" is beyond me. So much for the liberal NY Times.

The Edutopia Newsletter links to an editorial in the Palm Beach Post:

Bush-Supressed Study Dispels Voucher Myth

The focus of this editorial is the story behind the story, but I will go back and quote from the original Times article to make the point:

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

...

A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, offered no praise for public schools and said he did not expect the findings to influence policy.

And then juxtapose that absence of comment or fanfare from Ms. Spellings with the announcement of the voucher proposal:

With Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joining them in a show of support, Congressional Republicans proposed Tuesday to spend $100 million on vouchers for low-income students in chronically failing public schools around the country to attend private and religious schools.

Another salient point is that the Bush administration sat on this report for almost a year and added commentary to the report in an effort to soften its impact.

As an isolated event, this sequence might not be so earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things. But this administration shows time and again an utter disregard for reality in formulating and carrying out public policy and we've got 2+ more years to put up with it, if we all live that long. (OK. That's a bit over the top. All this talk about Armageddon, I'm starting to develop a complex.)

It Pays To Complain

In the previous post I complained about the lack of support from HP for a computer I own that needed a new hard drive. Getting the hard drive isn't the problem, but installing the operating system was. HP (& many other manufacturers today for unknown reasons) does not ship recovery CDs with their new systems. Instead, the operating system is located on a special section of the hard drive (a "partition") so you can reload the OS from the hard drive if needed. That's all fine and dandy if your problems are software related and you just want to wipe everything out and start over with a clean slate, but when the hard drive fails, you're screwed. In theory you can order recovery CDs from HP (at about $50.00 with shipping & handling - a scam itself since you already paid once for the OS when you bought the system!) but HP has apparently "run out" of recovery CDs for my system and can't be bothered to burn a few more CDs - how hard can that be? Anyway, That's where I am. A big heavy CPU that will have to be thrown in the garbage because HP can't burn a measly CD that would make it work again and I decided not to throw down $100.00 for a new copy of Windows XP.

I sent a letter of complaint to HP after several failed attempts to get a copy of the recovery. The people at their online tech support were very nice and supportive but they didn't apparently get the memo about recovery CDs, so twice I was informed that the CDs were available, twice I submitted all the relevant info about my computer and personal information, and twice I waited for a phone call to finish the order only to be informed (twice!) that the CDs were not available. I won't even mention the time before these two attempts when I called HP sales directly and was told the CDs were not available. OK, I mentioned it.

I had pretty much given up when a phone call from HP (in response to my e-mail) informed me of a third party vendor who could supply me with the recovery CD and that HP would reimburse me for the cost. Now I just have to cross my fingers that it actually works.

Time for Work

At least I'm not alone in my summertime "procrastination." I've spoken to many an other teacher with similar stories. I have this long list of things to do for next school year and here it is near the end of July and what have I got done?

Well, actually one way I procrastinate is by working hard on tasks that I hadn't consciously planned to work on. The workaholic in me just won't let me have a real day off, so I piddle around doing odd jobs that do need to get done but were never on my list of priorities until I needed a diversion from the things that were on it. For example, it's amazing how much household chores and daily maintenance activities can pile up when you're working 10-12 hours a day during the school year. Several closets were nearly inaccessible with junk and winter clothing and boxes. My office was a wreck. Papers piled up and needed organizing, books that have long since lost any possible relevance littered the shelves and need to be gotten rid of. My computer hard drive was equally in need of organization. I had thousands of digital photographs, for example, that needed to be copied onto CDs before they disappear forever from some hard drive failure or something, and most of those photos exist in duplicate forms scattered across several directories and a couple of hard drives - so that beast needed to be tamed. I also spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to get another computer running (for one of my kids) that had a hard drive failure last year, a computer that is no longer supported by HP. These dastardly computer companies no longer ship recovery CDs with new computers and this one's out of warranty, so the only solution is to buy a new hard drive and purchase a new copy of Windows to load, and I can only imagine the problems I will run into and the hours I will be online with tech support after I spend that money for the materials. It's a real scam that I have to pay again for an operating system that I already paid for. I sent an e-mail to the HP CEO expressing my displeasure.

Of course I've also spent some time "vegging out" for lack of a better term. This past year was emotionally draining, especially the end of the year. I really needed a couple of weeks to just clear my head. Most of that time has been spent exploring some new music and adding to my mp3 collection. For the record I listen mostly to indie "fill-in-the-blank" - indie rock, pop, folk, art-rock, whatever. I've posted a few "Friday Random 10" lists if you're curious. I get a lot of information from Pitchfork. I don't always like what they like, but I can frequently tell from the reviews whether I will like a band or not. Sometimes I just put on Yahoo's LAUNCHcast "radio" and hit the next button until I hear something I like. Then I check out other music by the same group. I also mentioned in a previous post that for the first time in my career teaching I have a few students who's musical tastes overlap with mine, so I've got a lot of recommendations from them that I've just now had the time to listen to. Why is commercial radio in New York City so awful, by the way?

My actual goals for the summer are to get ready for the fall in a couple of ways. I"m looking at what was difficult last year and the year before and coming up with some strategies. Some problems that I thought were attributable to the particular school I was in before turn out to have traveled with me. For example, my students' inability to keep up with their lab reports. That turned into a nightmare again when, despite my constant repeated refrain that students MUST keep their lab reports as a "ticket" to the exam, they still came to me in May acting like they were receiving this information for the first time. And in a way they were - They never really processed what I was telling them. It's like the one or two times I've almost run a stoplight while staring right at it because my mind was pre-occupied. So I have to figure out, for my own sanity, how to deal with this requirement.

In a related item, I'm working on having lab binders prepared for students in the beginning of the year. I can't stand the constant runs to the copy machine to get worksheets done on an almost daily basis. The issue will be storage space and student access to them. I don't have the kind of students that I can depend on to carry their binders around, so I'll have to store them. I don't think it will be that much of a problem. I've got a good space for them, then it's simply a matter of establishing routines to ensure a smooth delivery and return.

I will be streamlining labs and breaking up the bigger ones to accommodate the lab schedule in my school. Many of my labs have a tendency to soak up time like a sponge, and that leads to incompletes and lack of closure and "when can I finish it" and so on. I have what I consider to be a bare minimum number of periods per week for the LE curriculum - in fact, it's a real stretch and a rush to get through the material that I want to get through, so I have to minimize inefficiency. I also have an incredibly diverse (academically) group of students in every class. I'm looking into a tiered approach to as a way of differentiating instruction, which I'll address in a separate post after I've worked out the details.

I think I'll end with that, as this is getting a bit long. I'm starting to feel the energy again and need to get to work!

He Started It!

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t

NY Times

I think all teachers and parents know about this little quirk of human behavior and psychology. An argument ensues in your classroom and if you take the time to try to mediate the conflict and figure out how to resolve it, you can easily get caught up in an endless regression into who did what first to whom that sometimes goes back several periods, days, even years as student A recounts how student B teased him in first grade.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as the violence in Lebanon/Israel escalates, and even made a passing reference to it in conversation yesterday when asked about my feelings on the situation. Lo & behold the NY Times has an article citing research on the "he started it" phenomenon and applies it to - you guessed it, the conflict in the Middle East. The term "even-numberedness" refers to the idea that it's OK to strike back (physically or verbally) at someone who has harmed you.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

It gets worse. Another feature of conflict is the magnitute of the response to a perceived "punch." Retribution in kind is generally perceived as "fair," but an excessive response to a perceived wrong ("an eye for an eye-lash" as the Times puts it) is generally not. So researchers set up an experiment to see well we can gauge the fairness of our own actions.

In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

You can probably guess the results. The pressure escalated as each mis(under)estimated the force he/she was applying to the other. With each round of retribution the pressure increased even though each participant believed that he/she was giving back in kind.

I think this article might be a good point for discussion in my classes this year.

NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

Wow. Is there any limit to this administration's naked ambition?

OK. I did just see "An Inconvenient Truth" but come on, after the recent uproar over a politically appointed NASA officer trying to censor NASA scientists from speaking publicly about global warming data, they simply delete any reference to our terrestrial home from the mission statement? OMG.

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

...so that we might establish a new home after we've destroyed this one?

Realated storys:

Censorship Is Alleged at NOAA

Just Added (7-29-06)

The FDA Is A Cauldron of Discontent

A recent survey of FDA scientists:

The researchers' answers portray a culture of discontent where scientists report not having enough resources to properly evaluate products, having scientific results ignored, being pressured by political appointees to approve drugs and--most criminal, considering the FDA's mission--providing misleading information to the public.

You can research the whole study at:

Union of Concerned Scientists

Back To The Blog Again

And to kick things off, this story from the New York Times, which I'll link to, but it won't be available for long before they take it down and charge for it.

Bronx Sixth Graders Master Mysteries of the Biology Regents

I'll quote:

Although the biology Regents is usually taken in ninth grade, teachers at this school felt that their students needed a challenge, so they essentially started teaching ninth-grade biology and added test preparation.

Ten of the 23 students who took the exam (known formally as the Living Environment test) passed with marks between 65 and 80 on a 100-point scale. Of the 51,000 students who took the exam citywide in the 2003-4 school year, 58 percent passed.

Ten out of 23 students passed a 9th grade exam in 6th grade. The article says they completed 20 hours of labs, apparently mostly on Saturday extra sessions. Sounds impressive? Well, actually 20 hours is the bare minimum required to qualify for the exam. What did they do in the other periods? What happens to the 13 who didn't pass the exam? If they couldn't score 65 on a generously scaled (i.e., curved) exam then what exactly did they learn? How much confusion was sown, how many kids came away feeling that science is just too hard for them?

I don't mean to sound so negative, and I'm sorta happy for the kids who passed the exam. I'm sure they feel a good deal of pride. I do wonder about kids feeling pride in achieving a 65 on an exam and thinking that this is an "accomplishment." I graded a fair number of exams and a 65 on the exam, while passing, shows an incredible LACK of understanding of the mysteries of biology. I had a number of students pass with scores in the 65-75 range and I just had to shake my head at how little they knew. What really bothers me is that this approach to teaching is more about the school than the kids. There are so many other ways to make a science program rigorous and at the same time age-appropriate.