The Living Environment

Study Habits

2010-02-26T08:41:00.004-05:00

I'm conducting a little informal study of students' study habits as they relate to a midterm exam that is coming up in about 3 weeks. The exam is cumulative, spanning all the topics we have covered this year except natural selection.*

My advice to the students is to study a little each day (15 minutes or so), starting now, outside of any class time that I might give them to get prepared. They have packets of notes, old study guides, and most importantly, a set of flashcards that I devised for them.

As part of their daily "do now" assignment, I had them create a study log, so that each day I can now ask them how much time they spent studying the night (or weekend) before and what kind of studying they did - review flashcards, write/organize notes, do homework, etc. I tried to emphasize that the information would not be used for grading purposes, that it will not help them or me to be dishonest, and that honesty would not harm them - except of course that if they don't study they likely will be harmed by not performing well on the test - but that's not about the honesty issue. I further stated, just to be safe, that if keeping the log actually encourages them to study more, then that's a good thing. They don't need to worry that it will mess up my research if they study more now than they normally would have!

Obviously what I will be looking for here is a correlation between study habits and scores on the exam. I will choose questions that are more or less directly modeled on the flashcards, using slightly different diagrams and wordings from old regents exams. This levels the playing field somewhat in terms of what I discussed previously as the "IQ" portion of the regents exam. I will be testing what students have been taught and what they are responsible for studying.

I may get some interesting results. Based on Willingham's idea that the more you know the easier it is to learn more, I suspect a reasonable number of high scores on the exam will show very little study time. Many high performing students pay attention in class, get the concepts from the instruction, and assimilate it rapidly with little need for study time outside of class. I do expect those individual to be outliers and hope that I can show a more general trend where study time correlates to scores. Unfortunately, I also expect to see outliers on the other end of the spectrum, - those students who report a lot of study time and still get low scores. At least that will give me a target audience for some interventions before June comes around.

*I taught natural selection superficially in the beginning of the year and decided to keep it off the midterm - most of the regents questions relating to evolution are embedded with questions about genetics, heredity, or ecology that we haven't covered yet.

Science Test or IQ Test?

2010-02-15T15:43:00.007-05:00

I've been going through old regents exams and pulling out images to make flashcards (which I will post when they are finished). I've got about ~~500~~ 100 images now, but some of them are more or less duplicates that I have to weed out. Going through the multitude of different diagrams and models is getting me a little frustrated about the state of science education and education in general.

One of Willingham's chapters deals with the process of transfer of knowledge. Using knowledge of how Scenario A works can help us figure out how an analogous Scenario B works - if we recognize the two scenarios as analogous, which isn't always so easy. It requires a deep understanding of the underling structures of Scenario A. I'll illustrate the point with the following two images from old regents exams.
This is an energy pyramid.* It shows a producer level (A) followed by primary (B), secondary (C), and tertiary (D) consumers. There are several statements we can make about the pyramid. A might represent plants, which are eaten by B, herbivores, which can be eaten by C, omnivores or carnivores, which can in turn be eaten by D, other carnivores. We can say that D depends on C, which depends on B, which depends on A (which depends on the sun and inorganic substances from the environment, not represented in the diagram). Using basic logic, then, we can say that D and C depend indirectly on A. We could also say that D depends indirectly on the sun and so on.

Finally (for now) we can say that there will always be more energy available at the A level than the B level in a stable ecosystem. More energy at the B level than the C level. More energy at the C level than the D level. The reason for this phenomenon is that organisms do not store all the (food) energy they consume from the level below them. Instead, they use it for their survival needs - staying alive burns energy, so that every step up the pyramid, the energy consumed is lost as heat (when animals use energy, it is transformed into low-grade, useless heat that is lost to the environment).

If your an educated adult reading this and your head is spinning already, imagine what this must do to the the kids. We do spend some time teaching these concepts and using more concrete examples - so we might use grasses at level A, then a grasshopper to represent level B, a frog for level C, and a snake to represent D. Still, for most kids this is a lot of abstraction and they are likely to come away with relatively shallow understanding (they haven't had physics or chemistry and heat is not so easy to grasp), but if they see the energy pyramid on an exam they will at least have some idea what concepts to key into in finding an answer to whatever question might be posed about it.

Now consider the following image used to test understanding of the concept just described in an energy pyramid. What do the squiggly arrows represent? Now, I just set you up for the answer by providing you with the analogous situation, but the kids taking the exam have no such clues. Unless they were directly taught this visual model, they must somehow connect the seaweed as Level A, the small fish as level B, and so on, then remember the point of that pyramid was the loss of energy at each level, so the arrows must represent energy lost to the environment as heat.
That's a lot to expect. I remember grading the exam (June '09) with this question and pulling my hair out at how many kids got it wrong. Some of the kids after the exam told me they thought it was sperm, but sperm wasn't one of the choices! They just weren't able to transfer the knowledge. I have since incorporated this kind of model in my instruction, but really, a lot of the success on the exam depends on kids' basic reasoning skills and not necessarily knowledge of biology. A little knowledge goes a long way if you are capable of abstraction and transfer, not skills that many 9th & 10th graders possess in particular abundance.

Stronger students could have figured out the answer by eliminating the other choices, but slower students are easily overwhelmed by the language and logic necessary to use that strategy effectively. To invoke Willingham's analogy again, imagine if your first driving experience were to involve navigating through midtown Manhattan in fast moving traffic. Although the signs and signals and dangers and other cars are right in front of you, plain to see, you would have a hard time processing it all because so much information is coming at you at once. Some kids look at a regents exam and their eyes glaze over, all the words start to run together and nothing makes sense. Whole pages of easy questions near the end are left blank sometimes, the equivalent of stopping in the middle of the street, getting out of the car, and just walking away.

Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges we face is getting students to a level of deeper understanding so that they can analyze and answer questions about a particular concept that use different visual models or different language than they have been taught directly. This is no small task given the number of concepts we have to cover, the limited time (6 periods per week including lab time), and the deficiencies in both background science knowledge and general high school-level vocabulary & reading skills. There's much work to be done!

*It could also be a pyramid of biomass, which can ultimately be thought of as "energy." but the regents exam almost always presents it as a pyramid of energy.

A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?

2010-02-13T07:23:00.004-05:00

Technology Review: A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?

Apropos the malleability of IQ:

Mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were placed in a stimulus-rich environment, which improved their memory relative to a control group, not surprisingly.

What was rather astounding, however, is that the offspring of these mice, who inherited the genetically engineered memory gene, showed improved memory function even absent the stimulus-rich environment.

The study highlights a growing body of evidence that under certain circumstances, acquired traits can in fact be inherited without changes to the DNA sequence. The exact mechanism of this phenomenon is still not understood.

Wonder if that might explain part of the intergenerational increases in IQ that have been observed around the world?

Via Bioforum, Kim LaCelle

"Progressive" critique of Willingham

2010-01-27T19:27:00.003-05:00

Here's an example of what I referred to as the "perfect world" answer to our educational woes - just completely transform the existing system and all our troubles will magically disappear as children educate themselves effortlessly, with nothing more than a little guidance (when asked for) and a properly rich environment in which to pursue their natural curiosity. Don't bother trying to work within the system, it's fatally flawed and should be completely abandoned. What kind of bubble do these guys live in?

Why don't students like school? well-duhhhh...

Chapter 9: What About My Mind?

2010-01-25T20:30:00.005-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Willingham starts this chapter with some reminders about how thinking works and why thinking is so hard. New material that you want to learn must first be processed in working memory. However, working memory is limited - there are only so many things you can juggle at a once and so too much new information easily overwhelms working memory.

Now think about all the new things a beginning teacher must learn. Every school has its own physical layout that a teacher must become comfortable with, its own set of rules and procedures, and administrative hierarchies. Then there's the classroom itself, procedures and routines for daily activities, managing student behavior, planning lessons, giving students feedback, dealing with disruptions from students, administrators, other teachers, communicating with parents, preparing reports, etc. etc., etc. As you become more and more experienced, these things that once overwhelmed you, at least most of them, become automatic. They no longer require thinking and you can then use the precious resources of your working memory for other, more important things like actually engaging students in a lesson.

The problem, as Willingham describes it, is that most of us approached learning to teach essentially the same way we approached learning to drive. Learning to drive is a difficult process that is analogous to any new experience in that there are so many little things to think about at once and initially they all require conscious thought within the constraints of limited working memory. As you practice driving, many of these activities are learned to a point that they become automatic and no longer require much effort or thought, freeing your mind to do other things like carry on a conversation or listen to talk radio.

Unless you are a professional racer or stunt driver or police officer, however, you probably reached a point in your driving abilities where you felt competent and safe and you have improved little since then. Willingham says it's the same for teaching. We spend the first 5 years or so getting better and better until we have reached a point where we are comfortable enough with how things are going and then our abilities level off. Studies based on gains in student test scores confirm this phenomenon. It is not hard to understand why this is the case. Improvement requires not just experience but practice, which means working on skills and knowledge outside and beyond the day-to-day performance of our normal routines. But as we all know those daily activities already take up an enormous amount of time and energy in themselves, leaving limited time for family, friends, or personal pursuits as it is. You should not be surprised to find, however, that for Willingham there's no getting around this requirement for more work. From a professional perspective, it certainly argues for more training to be incorporated into the school calendar, but again that's a policy area that Willingham does not address directly.

So what does professional development look like in Willingham's model? The essential element for the advancement in any field is expert feedback. Although he acknowledges that there may be many avenues for achieving this feedback, and little hard data to support one approach over another, Willingham does devote a good portion of the chapter to describing one method of working directly with a colleague on a regular basis with a formal and safe set of protocols around mutual observation. I've summarized the process below, but there is more detail in the book if anyone is interested.

Step 1:
Identify a colleague you would feel comfortable working with.

Step 2:
You and your partner each, separately, tape yourselves teaching and view only your own tapes to get used to seeing and hearing yourself on video - it can be a little jarring.

Step 3:
You and your partner together view tapes of OTHER teachers in the classroom (some are available online). This is so you can critique someone else and talk about what would make you uncomfortable if the critique were directed at you - essentially this is a safe place to talk about what kinds of comments would be appropriate/helpful and which would not be helpful or appropriate.

Step 4:
You and your partner take turns viewing, together, tapes of each other. It is important to agree ahead of time on the scope of the discussion and for the observing partner to honor the limits set forth. For example, if the subject wants feedback on his questioning techniques, it would not be appropriate to point out that the kids in the back of the room are off task and disengaged - that discussion should wait for another time.

Step 5:
Identify after each session ONE element of your instruction that you would like to change and focus on changing it. It is important to take this step slowly, and not try to fix everything overnight - you are in this for the long haul, so think in terms of the years that you will spend making improvements.

If all this sounds like too much for now, Willingham offers some immediate, smaller steps you can take, from keeping a diary to starting a discussion group (I think our PD strands can fairly be characterized as study groups) to simply observing teens in their native habitats (like malls) to see how they interact with one another. In the end, however, the crucial element to all of these strategies is a conscious decision to make an effort to improve one's teaching skills by going above and beyond the day-to-day chores of teaching.

Do you teach content or do you teach kids?

2010-01-24T09:48:00.008-05:00

This question came up on Twitter recently and I gave a twitterly response (140 character limit) that "I teach kids content" because I don't think the question, as posed, makes a lot of sense. Certainly in light of reading Willingham's book and pretty much agreeing with him on the issue of teaching content vs. critical thinking, the same idea applies here. Without content there's nothing to "teach" the kids. There has to be a "who" (the kids) as well as a "what" (the content). Otherwise your just standing in front of a group of kids doing nothing or standing in an empty room talking to yourself.

Now, maybe I'm missing the point of the question and stating the obvious. But there is a tendency in education circles to make these over-simplified false-choice kinds of dilemmas, and it becomes a marker for group identity, a way of dividing people into camps of progressive vs. traditional, old vs. new, caring vs. cold, etc.* The question has an implied "right" answer - we are supposed to respond that we teach kids, that is our central goal and purpose.

The original poster of the question was not satisfied with my answer and followed up, "but at the core of it, what is your focus?" That led me to wonder just exactly what problem in education the question is designed to address, leaving aside for a moment the logical absurdity of the choice it proposes. I thought of the following scenario: A teacher is obsessed with "covering the curriculum" and keeps a strict pacing calendar, covers every topic deemed essential to the field, in order, on schedule, and refuses to compromise when the kids are left behind, dazed and confused. This is a bit of an exaggeration and while I have known teachers who express some sympathy for a modified version of this approach, I don't know anyone who is serious about teaching and follows it to this extreme. Even here, though, at the heart of this attitude is a feeling that this is what the kids need to know, so it's still about the kids. Misguided, perhaps, but it's not only about the curriculum. People who feel this way aren't indifferent to the kids, they just have a different conception about what's right for them.

Furthermore, the conflict becomes more acute when we talk about covering the curriculum to help kids prepare for the high-stakes assessments they have to take. In (NY State) high schools, if you don't pass them you don't graduate. If you get a higher score you may qualify for a diploma with honors, which looks good on your college transcripts. Then we also have to worry about the kids going to college and being unprepared for the work that is required of them at the next level. So teaching the content to the best of your ability is every bit about what's good for the kids. The challenge is knowing how to help every child progress in the content as much as possible. It's also about, on a practical level, when to stay on a topic the kids don't understand at the risk of not covering some other topics, and when to just move on. Again, this is a question of what's right for the kids given two equally unpleasant choices.

Am I still missing the point?

*The term "child-centered" education comes to mind. What school isn't "child centered" in the non-specialized sense of the phrase? The term is used as a weapon against schools or teachers who have more traditional approaches to the needs of the child.

Reflections

2010-01-18T11:00:00.004-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

I'm taking a little break here to reflect on some of the overarching themes of the book this weekend before jumping into the next and last chapter, devoted to Willingham's prescription for teachers who want to improve their practices.

Up to this point I have found "Why don't student's like school?" to be on the whole quite teacher friendly, as I see it. You will not find simple answers to complex issues (we're not fools). No magic, artificial, "teacher-proof" curriculum that is doomed to wind up in the dustbin of all the other Great Ideas™ that came before it (we're human beings, not machines). No perfect-world methodology that requires a fundamental transformation of the present-day academic structures in our system (we have to teach in today's world, not some fantasy future). Instead, Willingham offers a pragmatic, realistic approach based in the world of education that we inhabit today. I will summarize below his views on the learning process, the relationships between students and teachers, and the approaches to teaching that seem to work, all in light of why I think these are teacher-friendly positions. Since this is a summary, for more detail you can read the previous individual posts about each point (linked).

A common refrain throughout the book is that learning is hard. It takes effort, and in fact it takes effort that most of us are reluctant to put forth unless there is a good reason to do so. One of our most difficult tasks as teachers is to motivate students to put in that effort. Willingham's answer is simple to state: students will invest time and energy in learning material that is challenging but not frustrating. This requires, among other things, teachers who know the material they teach, who know where students will have difficulty with the material, and who can create appropriate lessons that appeal to students' natural curiosity and desire to solve problems.

So wait, how is that "teacher friendly?" To my mind, it acknowledges the centrality and primacy of teaching in education. That might seem ridiculously obvious, but we have seen wave after wave of reform programs that apparently desire nothing more than to make teachers interchangeable (and cheap) parts of a machine driven by curriculum and/or methodological gimmicks. It also puts to rest a notion that learning can be made easy if we just follow the latest fad - students will miraculously and effortlessly master algebra and have fun doing it if we abandon our outdated methods and get with the new program (or the next one, or the next one, or the next one...). In the end, however, Willingham doesn't see any short cuts to the students themselves engaging in hard work, and I think most teachers would agree.

This does not mean that teachers can be complacent or passive or lazy and just throw work at the students and insist that they do it and blame them when they don't (luckily I don't know many teachers who feel that way to begin with). On the contrary, Willingham asserts that the most important factor in how much students learn is what the teacher does to motivate, engage, and challenge them. Neither curriculum, high-stakes testing, nor a particular method can accomplish that.

Again you might wonder how this is a teacher-friendly principle, when it implies that if students aren't learning it is essentially the teacher's fault, but read on and you will find that Willingham does not believe that struggling students can catch up with where they need to be by simply having better teachers. They need more instructional time targeted at filling in the deficiencies in basic knowledge that are holding them back from learning the grade-level curriculum they are struggling with. That means more time with a teacher and it implies more individual attention and smaller classes for those struggling students.* The good news for teachers is that Willingham's overall philosophy is that hard work pays off, and we will learn in Chapter 9 ways that teachers, struggling or otherwise, can make improvements.

Willingham then offers two criteria for being a good teacher that are not unreasonable or unattainable. Both are flexible enough to allow for a good deal of teacher independence (from rigid mandates about how a teacher must behave, organize a lesson, etc.).** The first is that effective teachers must have a personal connection with their students, but there are as many pathways to finding that connection as there are teachers. Willingham maintains, however, that ultimately your students need to "like" you. They need to know you care about them, they need to trust you, they need to feel safe. None of that will matter, however, if you don't also organize your lessons in a logical way that is appropriate to the subject and the students you teach.

And that brings me to the final overarching theme, how to organize effective lessons. Willingham offers only general principles here, and I'll discuss below why he is vague on the details. The first is the idea of organizing lessons around stories. The human brain seems to have a special affinity for stories. Furthermore, an incredible amount of time in a student's relatively short lifetime has already been spent watching, reading, and listening to stories. The basic structure of a story is therefore already hardwired in the brain and provides a familiar schema or framework to help students make sense of unfamiliar concepts. Stories provide a model for making predictions, inferring causality, and so forth, all of which engage the student in actively thinking about the content embedded within it. You do not have to teach every lesson as a self-contained story, but you should be aware of the story components (character, causality, conflict, complications) and try to incorporate as many as you can into your lessons.

Willingham also cautions against worrying about the "learning styles" of students as there is no evidence that catering to individual styles will result in increased learning. Instead, you should base a particular teaching strategy on the nature of the concept or content objective itself. This makes intuitive sense and simplifies the matter greatly: If you want students to learn what something looks like, use a visual approach. If they need to learn how things sound, then auditory lessons would be called for. If a particular strategy benefits some, it probably benefits all, regardless of their 'learning style."

More importantly, Willingham sees a great need to change student attitudes toward learning. A major stumbling block for many students is a misconception that success comes from "being smart," or "talented," characteristics you are supposedly born with, rather than from working hard, a habit that you can cultivate. A great deal of our efforts should be directed at convincing students that hard work will pay off, and Willingham thinks we can effect this change on a local level through the way we interact with students and praise them for their efforts. This is a relatively easy change in our behavior to make, although the impact on student achievement may of course take longer to notice.

Finally, what all these things have in common is the demand for expert teaching and a willingness to let teachers teach. Willingham seems to be vague on details and reluctant to prescribe any particular approach or method precisely because he understands that teaching is not some mechanical process that can be codified, packaged, and universalized. He emphasizes the social nature of teaching and the importance of the interactions between a human teacher and human students. He places teaching squarely in the center of the education enterprise where it belongs.

Most of the book until now has addressed how learning takes place and the classroom implications of that process. In Chapter 9 Willingham looks at the teacher as learner and what we can to do to become experts in our field.

Next: Chapter 9: What about my mind?

*Wilingham doesn't much address the nitty-gritty policy or political issues in education, such as class size or standardized testing per se. Nonetheless, I think there are some obvious policy implications.

**I think we are fortunate to work with an administration that seems to have an intuitive sense of this principle.

Chapter 8: How Can I Help Slow Learners?

2010-01-10T16:31:00.007-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

First the bulleted summary:

Intelligence is not fixed.
Students who are behind their peers will have to work harder to catch up or risk falling further and further behind.
Never tell students they are "smart" - it could actually make them stupid.

Intelligence is a real phenomenon - experience and controlled studies tell us that some people just learn things more easily than others. But Willingham argues and provides evidence to support the idea that intelligence is in fact malleable. Individual IQ can change over time given proper interventions, and studies around the world have shown increases in national average IQ scores over relatively short periods of time that cannot be explained by any biological (i.e. genetic) changes in the populations. The changes must be the result of environmental influences, such as better health care, nutrition, education, etc.

There have been over the last few years a number of voices in education arguing the opposite - that intelligence is a fixed, inherited trait, determined by a lucky roll of the genetic dice, and not subject to environmental influence. This is of course a very convenient argument for the political right, as the consequence of such a view is that spending money on education and health care to improve the lot of low-performing students would be a waste of taxpayers' money - if it were true. Even more insidious is the way this idea has trickled down to the general population and even into the minds of students themselves. In our culture today, there is a prevailing sense among students that some people are just smart and if you are not smart then there's not much point in striving for academic success.

The point that is missed is that most people who appear smart may or may not have significantly higher IQs, but they do have a lifetime of accumulated knowledge that was acquired through sustained hard work or at least sustained attention to the world around them.* But remember, as discussed in Chapter 1, the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. So as the years go by the gap between the high achievers and low achievers widens to a point where teaching to the middle in a typical classroom leaves a third of the class struggling to keep up and a third of the class breezing through effortlessly. It must seem completely unfair to the low achievers, it reinforces the idea that there are smart kids and not so smart kids, and that the smart kids don't have to do much at all and still get high grades while the rest of us work harder and get low grades for our efforts. How motivating is that? Why bother? Why not just do the bare minimum needed to get a passing grade, because after all, if I work hard and get a 75 or if I don't work hard and get a 65 - does it really matter?

The unavoidable truth is that students who are behind their peers cannot simply do the same work as their peers and ever expect to catch up - it's like starting a race where the other runners have a head start AND they are running at a faster pace - we have to find a way to accelerate the slow learners. And if you've been keeping up with Willingham's other chapters, you may know already that the only way to do that is through extra work, more practice, more focus on filling in the gaps of knowledge that are slowing them down in their current studies. Although Willingham doesn't say this directly, clearly any model of differentiated instruction (the reform du jour in education) that ignores this fundamental fact will be doomed to failure. While better and more targeted instruction would likely be beneficial, it is not enough. If our slower students are to be academically successful and narrow the gap with high achievers, they will need more instructional time, not just better instruction.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter - how do you motivate students to take advantage of this extra time - after all, if you just program kids for more instruction in math or reading, it's unlikely they will thank you for it unless they are prepared to receive it as a gift rather than a punishment. Part of the answer is in changing the internalized beliefs about intelligence. Willingham thinks that the way we praise students frequently reinforces the wrong model and decreases the likelihood that students will work harder. A change in the way students think about intelligence is key.

Willingham puts it this way. Kids think that there are some students who are just smart and some who are not so smart. Smart kids don't have to work hard, everything's easy for them. So working hard is a sign of being dumb. Most kids want to be "smart" - no one wants to be or appear dumb. But since working hard means you're not smart, if you want to look smart you avoid any activity that requires hard work, because then you look dumb. You take easier classes, you do the easiest projects read the easiest books, and when you have no choice in a particular, difficult task, you just don't do it because it's a dumb assignment. "This is stupid" really translates as "I don't understand this but I don't want to look dumb so I'm calling your assignment stupid - see how smart I am?" Still other students have decided that they really aren't smart at all, which leads to resignation and lack of effort because hey, what's the point - I'm just not smart enough to do this.

When we tell students they are smart we simply make the problem worse. It reinforces the idea of intelligence as a fixed attribute of the person rather than a product of hard work that anyone can attain. Further, for low achievers the "praise" can ring hollow, or come off as patronizing. For students who are in fact "smart," as measured by standardized testing, such praise may make them fearful of taking risks or tackling difficult problems lest they be unmasked - a condition sometimes referred to as the "impostor complex" (I don't think I'm smart but I seem to have fooled everyone and now I'm terrified they'll find out that I'm not really smart/talented/competent/etc.). It may be that the smart kid who doesn't do any work would rather fail and be seen as lazy than struggle through a difficult task and risk being revealed as not so smart.

The correct approach, which we've all heard before but often forget or dismiss, is to praise the work or the effort, but do so sincerely. Willingham suggests that we consciously and directly change the culture of our school to one in which the central focus is on work and effort. Students should be taught explicitly that intelligence is a consequence of hard work, and that "failure" in a given task is frequently a necessary step on the way to success. Before I started reading Willingham's book I read a study about IQ that seems relevant here. A survey of Nobel Laureates showed that most of them were not "geniuses" as measured by IQ and many people who are labeled as geniuses fail to live up to the label in terms of achievement - a fact that many observers attribute directly to their being labeled geniuses in the first place.** At a young age, kids have already internalized the idea that to be smart is to have everything come easily to you. When presented with difficulties, even gifted children tend to shut down for fear of not living up the the ideal of smart or gifted that has been foisted upon them. High achievers instead tend to be of average to above average intelligence who know they have to work hard and put in the hours to become leading experts in their fields.

Implications

In summary, we need to change student attitudes about the nature of intelligence and the importance of hard work by directly engaging them in discussions of what is required to succeed academically. One of the most important things we can do in regard to bringing about that mindset is to avoid praising intelligence and instead praise effort. Lastly, we must provide additional time and instruction to students who are behind their peers academically.

Next: Overall reflections on the major themes of the book.

*Students from families with high levels of education and/or parental involvement gain a tremendous amount of knowledge informally and almost without effort through the home environment - dinner conversations, discussions around current events and television shows/movies/plays/etc., homework help, reading at home, visits to museums and other cultural institutions - conditions that are difficult to replicate outside such homes, but programs such as Head Start and others that we can imagine would certainly help.

**I can't find the article now, but here's a similar one on the same theme from New Scientist: How to be a genius.

Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?

2009-12-18T17:50:00.020-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Bottom line message of this chapter: The method you use to teach an individual topic or concept should be dictated by the nature of the concept, not the "learning style" of the student.

If what you want students to learn is a visual concept, say the structure of a cell, then use visuals to teach it. If you want students to learn music, an auditory approach is the way to go. If you want students to learn how to move their bodies in a certain way, then kinesthetic activities are called for.* There is no evidence, however, to support the idea that a visual learner can learn auditory concepts better if they are presented in a visual way (reading musical notes as opposed the hearing them), or that kinesthetic learners will understand mitosis better if they can "dance" the process. This applies equally to any of the other learning styles applied to a concept that doesn't naturally fit the style.

Now for the discussion. None of this is meant to suggest that a student can't be a "visual learner," for example. What that means, though, is that such a person is particularly good at learning visual information, i.e., concepts that have a visual component to them such as colors, shapes, arrangements, physical relationships, etc. It does not mean, and research bears this out according to Willingham, that a visual learner can remember the meanings of vocabulary words better if they are presented with pictures illustrating the vocabulary words or that auditory learners will retain more if the meanings of the words are read aloud or that kinesthetic learners will be better served by acting out the meanings of the words.

The problem is that what is important, what is typically tested, is the meaning of the words, and meaning is something different from auditory, visual, or kinesthetic information. As noted above, the visual learners may well remember exquisite details about the images, but not necessarily be any better able to connect the picture with its corresponding word than a nonvisual learner. Furthermore, remembering details about the visual aspects of a picture is no guarantee that the viewer will have any noticeably enhanced ability to interpret, i.e. find meaning in, that image.

Howard Gardner's model of multiple intelligences fails for the same reasons. It's not that people aren't different in terms of their abilities ("intelligences") in various types of cognition - mathematical, linguistic, interpersonal, musical, etc. However, the idea that we can use their native strengths in one area to help them find success in another, such as using their musical intelligence to help them learn science by singing songs about photosynthesis, is not supported by the data.

Willingham acknowledges that he feels a bit like the Grinch in drawing these conclusions, knowing that the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" paradigms have become accepted wisdom among educators at all levels. People have invested time and energy and perhaps unrealistic hope in the idea that finding a teaching method that suits the individual's learning style or "intelligence" will finally allow everyone to enjoy as much success as they are capable of achieving.

So, having pulled the learning styles rug out from under us, what does Wilingham have to offer in its place? Some ideas are presented below and more will appear in Chapter 8.

Implications for teaching

As noted earlier, let content objectives dictate your teaching strategy. Remember, however, that EVERYONE benefits from looking at or interacting with a concept in a variety of ways, so incorporate visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities as appropriate to the concept (see footnote below).

Change is good. Spending an entire period asking students to stay focused on one cognitive task (listening, e.g.) can be draining. Mixing in visuals to break up the monotony will help to maintain attention. This will again benefit learners of all types. This also should not be news. Everyone knows the 20 minute rule, I hope.

Finally, as the previous implications suggest, don't waste your time or money trying to formally diagnose your students' individual learning styles. There's no proven value to it and you should be incorporating multiple strategies into your teaching anyway. I would add that it may even be counter-productive. I can recall many instances of students using their "learning style" as an excuse for why they can't learn something or pay attention to a discussion: "This isn't working for me, I'm a visual learner..."

Footnote
*It should be noted that many activities and concepts are multi-dimensional and can be approached from many different angles. Learning to sing involves hearing, obviously, but also positioning of the mouth and movement of the lips and tongue and so forth, all of which can be thought of as both kinesthetic, in in terms of learning how to move the muscles the right way, and visual, in that seeing someone else make those movements correctly helps us figure how to do it ourselves. Engaging all students in each of these activities, hearing, moving, and seeing, will benefit everyone, regardless of their perceived learning style.

Next:
Chapter 8: How can I help slow learners?

Chapter 6 Addendum

2009-12-16T21:18:00.011-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

I completely forgot to comment on Willingham's discussion of what it means to be an "expert" teacher!

Although Willingham doesn't spend much time on this (I suspect it will be addressed again in Chapter 9), he does make the following points about expert vs novice teachers, none of which should be surprising, but the second point stands out to me in light of recent discussions on lesson planning and the highly scripted curricula used in some elementary schools.

1. Expert teachers have established routines for beginning class, ending class, calling the class to order, etc. Novice teachers either do not have such routines or have not established them effectively.

2. Novice teachers typically have heavily scripted lesson plans, writing out almost everything they plan to say during a lesson. Experts do not. This suggests that for novice teachers the myriad tasks that have to be performed simultaneously in a typical classroom (and frequently invisible to the casual observer), including routine administrative tasks, handling behaviors before they become disruptions, taking questions, covering content objectives and strategies, all simply overwhelm working memory to the point that actual thinking during the presentation of a lesson is nearly impossible. For expert teachers these minutiae have become automated - they do not require conscious thought, which frees working memory to actually interact with students about content. Additionally, for expert teachers the content itself is more or less automatic - they do not need to refer to a script to discuss or explain a concept.

Willingham asserts that becoming an expert in just about any field requires 10 years of practice.

Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?

Chapter 6: Getting students to think like experts

2009-12-13T11:30:00.005-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?

This is the chapter I alluded to in the introduction where Willingham teased us with the suggestion that we might NOT want to teach our students to "think like real scientists." He makes a good argument here, but it helps first to understand what that means and doesn't mean.

We do want our students to be able to think like experts. As a science teacher, I don't want students to just learn an encyclopedia of science facts - after all, "facts" (as we know them presently) are subject to change or modification. I want students to be open to new ideas, but "skeptical" in the sense of demanding evidence to support those ideas. This requires a deep understanding of how science works, how the physical world works, and what constitutes evidence in support of a claim.

I don't necessarily expect students to go so far as Willingham does in defining an expert as someone one who is capable of generating new knowledge in a given area of study. Of course that would be great if a student wants to enter a scientific or medical field, and I do need to think of the very real possibility that any one of my students might in fact move in that direction - indeed some already have. But ultimately it may not make any difference in terms of how I should teach students at the high school level.

The problem, as Willingham explains, is that thinking like an expert can only come about from years of experience and practice. The kind of thinking an expert engages in is qualitatively different from how novices think. Novices tend to focus first on the surface structure of problems, whereas experts can more readily determine the underlying deep structure of a problem and therefore come to a solution more quickly. In some cases "novices" (that's a relative term) may have extensive knowledge that is equal to or even surpasses experts, but that knowledge is poorly organized and less accessible.

Willingham uses the fictional television doctor House to illustrate the idea, which I will not try to summarize at length here. ( I do recommend watching an episode if you've never seen it). The key idea is that House does not necessarily know more than the medical students and residents around him. Instead he is able to focus in on the important details and ignore the irrelevant symptoms of sometimes bizarre and rare disorders. This expert way of thinking is essentially, as you might hope from a doctor, the scientific method, or more to the point, "hypothesis testing." For House, a set of symptoms suggests a tentative diagnosis, a hypothesis, which in turn leads to further testing to verify the hypothesis. If the test turns out negative, the hypothesis is discarded and a new hypothesis is generated. But the wrong hypothesis is useful because it brings up questions that may never have occurred to anyone before. Thus an initially wide and seemingly contradictory field of possibilities is narrowed and focused until the correct diagnosis is determined.

So why not just look at how experts like House solve problems and then teach students to think that way? Willingham says there is simply no way to become an expert without first being a novice. We can certainly teach the process of hypothesis testing, but the skill of separating fruitful hypotheses from dead ends can only come with experience. That seems self-evident but it speaks to the notion that our curricula are doing a disservice to students by focusing on "knowledge" rather than 'critical thinking" or the movement in science education to have students "doing what scientists do."

Implications for teaching

Students are able to comprehend the knowledge aquired by experts but they are not able to generate knowledge (Willingham's definition of "thinking like scientists"). Our goal should be to expose students to the work of experts in our fields and help them understand both the knowledge itself and the context in which it is developed. Thus, the history (as well as the content) of science is important so that students see science as a process of gradual accumulation of increasingly refined knowledge over time.

Asking students to engage in creative, knowledge generating activities, like writing their own historical narratives or producing authentic scientific investigations can be fun and motivating, but set your expectations accordingly. It will likely be a poor example of the actual work done by experts or it will be a replica of someone else's work. It is no coincidence that almost all of the winners (if not most of the entrants) of the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search work hand-in-hand with a mentor, typically at an institution of higher learning, with access to sophisticated equipment and high-level expertise.

In some cases it might do more harm than good to try to teach students to use expert strategies as novices. An expert tennis player thinks more about strategy than technique. A novice tennis player needs to do the opposite - strategy is useless if you can barely hit the ball over a net consistently.

Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?

Photo Expressions: back to the beginning

2009-12-13T09:37:00.001-05:00

A recent entry from a photography blog that I read fits right in with the expert vs. novice post that I'm working on now. The expert photographer is taking guitar lessons as a novice, which leads to some insights regarding the teacher/pupil dynamic.

I frequently have times, particularly in my lessons, when it feels like the teacher is talking a foreign language. An alien, foreign language, where I don't even know what the words sound like, never mind what they mean.

Read more at...

Photo Expressions: back to the beginning

Chapter 5: Is drilling worth it?

2009-12-06T08:23:00.013-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Or, How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

We all know the old joke, and it turns out to hold true not just for the obvious fields of music, dance, art, and athletics, but also for more cerebral, academic pursuits such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, etc.

As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, drilling is just a harsh, perjorative term for practice and Willingham says there is no way around it, no short-cuts to success. In order to be proficient in any activity one must practice. There are few things in life that can't be lost to some extent when practice wanes or stops all together, but some core elements can be retained practically forever given sufficient, sustained practice over time. As an example from my own experience, I lived in Munich for a while and met a man there once who had married a German woman and was living fully assimilated into German society and culture. He had little contact with English speakers. Although he had grown up speaking English into adulthood, after living in Munich for 7 years his spoken English was sometimes halting, he stumbled over words, and couldn't remember key vocabulary - he would occasionally stop mid-sentence and say, "oh man, what's that word..."

Obviously he was still what we would call "fluent" in English, but clearly he had been affected by the lack of practice speaking his native tongue. Now, compare his situation with mine vis-a-vis speaking German. I only began studying German in college, but I took many semesters and then lived in Munich for a couple of years. I spoke well enough to get around, I read the local newspapers and watched the local news and I could carry on a conversation in German to a certain extent, but I was never fluent. That was over 20 years ago, and I can assure you that if I returned to Germany today I would have trouble completing a full sentence, much less carrying on a conversation.

The key is practice. Tally up the number of hours the American living in Germany spent speaking English and compare it to the number of hours I spent speaking German, and the difference would be obvious. You might argue that the example is invalid because growing up speaking a language in the formative years may account for much of the difference, but Willingham provides evidence from many other fields that show the same pattern. Here's a math example that I found pretty compelling.

Take a group of college graduates and give them a basic algebra test some years after they have completed their schooling. Compare their scores on this test with how long ago they completed their math classes. One obvious, common-sense trend emerges. Scores drop dramatically the further in time they are removed from their last formal math class. This is true if they only took one semester of math or if they took more math up to calculus level.

(See the graph at Google Books here.)

The study went further, though, by looking at students who had taken advanced math courses, calculus and beyond, which required the continued practice of basic algebra skills. Given the same test, the students who took advanced math courses scored as a whole significantly higher on the algebra test. Furthermore, the drop-off in scores was not nearly as steep - 55 years later, students who took advanced math classes did better on the test than students who took only algebra and were tested just 1 month after completing the algebra course! For the group that took courses in math beyond calculus, there was in fact no drop off at all (over time).

Willingham attributes this to the continuing practice required to complete advanced math courses. He anticipates the argument that students who take advanced math classes are simply "smarter" by breaking down the data according to grades achieved in their respective classes (not shown in the simplified graph). According to Willingham, students who got low grades (C's) in calculus still outperformed students who got A's in algebra and then stopped taking math.

Implications for teaching

Practice is essential. But how one practices is also important. There is value in spacing out practice over time, and the conventional wisdom on 'cramming' turns out to hold up pretty well upon closer scrutiny. It is in fact true that studying a few minutes per day is better than studying several hours crammed together the night before a test. I may have to reconsider my homework policies in light of this. Incorporating review into every day of class should also be helpful. I frequently give Do Now assignments that are reviews of earlier topics that students may wish we could just forget about.

Basic skills can be folded into more advanced skills. Think of the algebra example - at the calculus level, algebra skills are embedded. In biology, I spend time at the beginning of the year teaching experimental design directly, after which I incorporate that skill into almost every lab we do. I don't expect all students to understand independent and dependent variables at the same pace - some kids get it now, others will still be asking me which is which in June. They still have 2 more years of science classes to work on it. For this reason alone students should be encouraged to take advanced courses.

One reason practice is so important is to make some mental processes automatic, which frees up working memory to focus on more complex tasks. Working memory seems to be pretty much fixed, and people with greater working memory capacity are generally "smarter" than people with lower working memory capacity. We can cheat the system, however, through practice.* Think of writing as an example. As I type I am also trying to pull together several ideas from different sections of this chapter and present a complex idea as succinctly as possible. To the extent that I am successful at this task, it is largely because the basic elements of writing are more or less automatic - I don't have to think too much about making sure my sentences have a subject and a verb, or what to capitalize, where to put the punctuation, and so on. Yes, I have to proofread and I make plenty of errors, but my main concern is synthesizing the ideas, rather than worrying if my subjects and verbs agree. If I had more experience with mathematics, and statistics specifically, I suspect that this task would be even simpler!

Next: Chapter 6: What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians? (Hint - it has a lot to do with chapter 5...)

*Indeed, studies have shown repeatedly that the vast majority of successful people are the ones who work harder, not necessarily the ones who are "smarter!"

Chapter 4: Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?

2009-11-24T20:12:00.014-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Blogging Note - it's somewhat frowned upon in the blogosphere to erase your mistakes once an item has been posted - frequently the mistake will be caught by readers and commented upon. If you erase the mistake, the comments become confusing or meaningless. Hence the common practice of using strike through text and adding the correction afterward. I do make minor edits for grammar, spelling, or clarity without notification.

I'm going to give chapters 4,5, & 6 relatively short summaries. The information is, I think, pretty well known and reasonably uncontroversial. In chapter 7, on the other hand, the author explodes some myths about "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" that will surely raise some eyebrows. Chapter 8 addresses differentiated instruction head on, and chapter 9 deals with teacher self-reflection and professional development (from a personal standpoint as opposed to an outside mandate).

Willingham sums up chapter 4 as follows:

We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.

In science education this idea has been the cornerstone of virtually every program and class that I've been involved with. The whole constructivist approach is in part built upon (and perhaps takes a little t0o far sometimes) the idea that our traditional way of teaching science is wrong precisely because we typically start out teaching abstract ideas first and then use concrete experiences only later and sporadically to illustrate those abstract ideas.

For example, to take the concept that Willingham uses, Newton's laws of motion are sometimes taught first as a series of abstract statements (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, etc.) or even a more abstract mathematical expression of the ideas (F=ma). Maybe later if the students are lucky they will be given a lab activity to illustrate the idea, and maybe the lab will have the intended effect or not, depending on how well it is set up and how good the equipment is and how seriously the students actually think about the consequences of the lab.

The constructivist approach, and the part of it that is more or less supported by Willingham's research, suggests a better way might be to turn this model on its head and begin a unit of study on Newton's laws with a series of concrete experiences that students can then think about and relate to the abstract concepts of motion described by Newton. Where Willingham might part ways with the strict constructivist approach (not that he discusses it, I'm just inferring here) is in allowing that we can simply use previous concrete experiences, tap into the prior knowledge that students have stored in memory, rather than having to come up with a novel hands-on, concrete experience for every new idea we present. F = ma is an abstract concept that doesn't make intuitive sense until you use a couple of examples; compare hitting a baseball with a bat and hitting a car with a bat - obviously the car will not move much (the a or acceleration in the formula) compared to the baseball because of the different masses of the two objects. Stated that way it is "intuitive" because we all have the concrete experience of trying to move objects of different masses.

The point is that in order for students to be able to understand the abstract laws, they must relate them in some way to concrete experiences. And this is itself a universalized law - ALL abstraction is built upon a foundation of the concrete world and physical experience.

Chapter 4 also deals with the related difficulty of knowledge transfer. Having described a situation above (the baseball and the car example) and hearing the familiar chorus of "ohhhh, I get it," you might think it would be a simple matter to then have the students apply the law to a similar problem, let's say throwing a baseball versus throwing a softball. It is entirely possible, however, that a student with limited experience would not recognize that the key element of the first scenario is the mass of the objects. Instead the student might get hung up on the fact that a ball is a small spherical object whereas the car is a vehicle with wheels, or the use of a bat in the first scenario might make them think that the use of a throwing arm in the second scenario requires a completely different set of rules. In other words, a student with shallow knowledge might not know which elements of the scenario to generalize or transfer.

Implications for teaching

Recognize that for many students a single concrete example will not suffice to allow them to generalize a rule or concept. Provide as many different examples as possible so the student begins to see the pattern and can identify key elements.

Make sure that "understanding" (deep knowledge) is incorporated into every aspect of your teaching, from homework to class activities to assessments. Especially assessments. If your assessments are testing shallow knowledge, that's what students will focus on.

Be realistic. At any particular level of education, there will be limits to how deeply a student will be able to achieve understanding. Sometimes we have to accept that we are simply planting the seed of an idea that ~~students will be able to build upon in the future~~ will grow as students gain more experience and exposure to the concepts (edited, I hate accidental mixed metaphors).

Next: Chapter 5, Is drilling worth it? picks up and expands on the question of how to help students achive deep understanding.

Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 4)

2009-11-08T16:15:00.002-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Rote memorization

The proximal goal of teaching is to get students to think about content, because students will remember what they think about. One way to get students to think about content is to present problems, puzzles, issues, etc. that require solutions. Another is to structure content around stories. Of course the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and both of these strategies activate or take advantage of natural brain processes.

But what to do when you want students to learn things that they cannot think meaningfully about right now but that they need to know anyway in order to progress in a discipline? For example, we might ask students to memorize the multiplication table before they are really able to understand the concept of multiplication. In chemistry students might need to memorize a certain number of chemical elements on the periodic table, or in humanities the names of the 50 states and their capitols, etc. Willingham accepts the notion that these things may be necessary , although they should be needed sparingly and not make up the bulk of your teaching strategies. Nonetheless, in a world where some background factual knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking, we need strategies to help commit certain facts to memory. This is traditionally referred to as rote memorization.

The answer, not surprisingly, is to us mnemonic devices that we are all familiar with. Willingham outlines a few of these techniqies, all of which I already know about except three, which are so ridiculous I won't even bother to summarize them.

The older ones that we all know about are 1) acronyms (ROY G BIV, for the colors of a rainbow), 2) the first letter method (My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts, for the planets), and 3) songs (think of the ABCD song or "Conjunction Junction" from schoolhouse rock)

On to the implications for the classroom, which in this chapter seem merely to summarize ideas that have already been presented.

First, be careful in planning lessons so that students think about what you want them to think about. Beware of the potential for students to become distracted by material that was meant as an aside or as a motivational activity that students then have a difficult time turning away from to think about the real objective of the lesson. Make sure your attention grabbers really require students to think about the core concepts.

Secondly, make assignments so that students can't avoid thinking about meaning. In the example given earlier of having the students actually make biscuits and get distracted by the logistics of measuring and baking, Willingham instead proposes asking students to ponder questions of how runaway slaves could have obtained food, how they would have cooked it, etc.

Overall, these little day-to-day details should be organized in some way around a conflict. A conflict is central to a story, central to the idea of looking for solutions, therefore central to getting students to think about meaning.

Next
Chapter 4: Why is it hard for students to understand abstract ideas?

Intermission

2009-11-04T18:52:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting puzzler - this is not from Willingham's book but it illustrates something he writes about.

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes.
B) No.
C) Cannot be determined.

Click here for the answer.

Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 3)

2009-11-01T09:00:00.010-05:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Storytelling

In the previous section Willingham describes 4 teachers who have their own unique teacher personalities, but all are consistently rated as good teachers and they all have one other thing in common - they organize their lessons around stories.

Willingham is quick to caution he is NOT suggesting that storytelling is the only way to teach content. And if you've been around a while and seen district education specialists prescribing one "true" pedagogical method after another, it's easy to understand why Willingham issues this caveat. Whether it helps or not remains to be seen. He also defines storytelling broadly enough that it may not resemble at all what you think of when you first hear the term "storytelling."

We are surely all aware by now that humans are particularly drawn to stories. Long before written language was developed, verbal stories were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural knowledge over generations. The word "history" in English conveys the sense of a "story," the German word for story and history are one & the same (Geschichte). It is perhaps a testament (no pun intended) to the power of stories that they frequently take on the form of (sometimes harmful) myths and legends that are persistent over generations and impervious to reason and evidence.

Politicians, movie-makers, television producers, journalists, motivational speakers, all take advantage of our innate vulnerability to stories. I dislike television but if I make the mistake of tuning in for a couple of minutes to whatever my wife is watching I can easily be drawn in by the drama and wind up watching entire episodes of Top Chef. In a classic episode of Seinfeld we were let in on the joke that could equally apply to virtually all TV sitcoms, namely that it was all along a show about nothing at all (yes, my bias is showing).

Obviously there's something going on here that we might take advantage of in the classroom. Although Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, it was also a show that took full advantage of the structure of stories, which Willingham breaks into the 4 Cs - causality, conflict, complications, character. The first term, causality, may need some clarification but I trust that the other three are pretty self-explanatory and you will no doubt be able to identify those components in any traditional story you can recall. Causality is equally simple to explain but not necessarily something you may have thought about in the context of a story's structure. It simply means that the events that take place in a story all have a cause. Things don't happen randomly or for no reason.

The causality component of stories seems to fit particularly well with Willingham's major pedagogical goal, getting students to think about content. That's because a good story doesn't tell you all the causal links, instead it requires the listener (or viewer, reader) to infer causal connections. We do this all the time and automatically. Who doesn't feel a little rush of pride that comes from making predictions throughout a movie or book and finding out that our predictions are correct (unless it's too obvious). Even being wrong can be satisfying if the story is well told and we can think how clever the writer was to have outwitted the audience.

So how do we apply this power of stories to engage an audience to classroom teaching? Do we all have to turn every content objective now into a story? The answer is no, although if you could pull it off it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. However, you can take those key elements of a story, the 4 Cs, and structure just about any content objective around them. It's pretty easy to understand how that would work in history or literature classes, and in science the historical development of many ideas can certainly be used extensively as the backbone of our lessons. But even absent a compelling historical narrative, there are many concepts in science that can be arranged around the 4 Cs.

Take photosynthesis, for example. Causality is easy, it's embedded in the "story" of science itself. It's what science is looking for. "What caused living things to evolve the ability to produce glucose" could be answered in a number of different ways. Evolution provides its own story structure that students can apply to any similar question in biology. Conflict? Easy, there's competition, survival of the fittest, limited resources, etc. Long ago in a heterotroph world ("dog-eat-dog" more or less), resources would have become limited and organisms that could get some or all of their nutrition "automatically" (autotrophs) would have prospered. Complications? You have to live near a light source, you have to get rid of this new, toxic, waste product called oxygen, etc. (Wait, oxygen is toxic???) What about characters? The organism itself, or the population of organisms if you want to get technical, can be seen as the characters in the story. I know some scientists/teachers are uncomfortable withanthropomorphizing, but I'm not one of them. Having students imaginethemselves as a plant, or even a carbon atom can make it easier tobring out the "character" in a story-structured lesson. In developing this story of photosynthesis I would want to ask questions and lead a discussion that has students making many of the causal connections for themselves.

Willingham actually uses an example from a math lesson, and while I can see that what he presents is reasonable and contains some of the elements of a story, it seems a bit of a stretch to use it as an model for the 4 Cs he has just presented - I fail to see how the "character" component fits in, personally. Maybe a math teacher can read it over and set me straight. Nonetheless, maybe that's a good thing anyway. Willingham has already explicitly stated that he is not proposing some rigid formula for organizing a lesson, and getting caught up in making sure that your lesson fits to a T some artificial structure misses the real goal, getting students to think about what you are teaching. Sometimes the conflict is between competing ideas, or how to decide whether something is true or not, and doesn't involve "characters" in the traditional sense. And that's OK.

Next Section:
What if there is no meaning? (On rote memorization)

Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 2)

2009-10-24T15:35:00.008-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

What makes a good teacher?

You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:

Do I connect with my students on a personal level? That is, do my students have the sense that I am a nice person?
Is my instruction well-organized from the students' perspective? Am I taking the complex, intricate details of my content and organizing it in such a way that the students feel they can make sense of it?

That's it. If I answered yes to both those questions, honestly, then I am probably an effective teacher. If I answered no to even one of them, then I am not likely an effective teacher, or not as effective as I could be. Notice in both questions the emphasis is on the students' perspective. It doesn't matter how organized I think my instruction is if the students are utterly baffled by it. Similarly, from the students' view "tough love" may come across as all tough and no love, or attempts to be "friends" with students may come across as phony or lead to role confusion and feelings of betrayal when report cards come out. I do think Willingham's treatment of the issue is a little oversimplified and I suspect there's a better word than "nice" that would have been more helpful, but I do agree that the interpersonal relationships between students and teachers (or teachers and administrators, for that matter!) make a world of difference.

On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.

The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.

Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.

In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.

Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?

2009-10-21T16:03:00.005-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Part 1

Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.

In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.

What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.

The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:

The brain lays its bets this way: If you don't think about something very much, then you probably won't want to think about it again, so it need not be stored. If you think about something, then it's likely that you will want to think about it in the same way in the future.

Seems kind of obvious but it does have some implications for teaching and learning that deserve to be explored. You are not doubt familiar with the expression "be careful what you wish for, it just might come true." We can take a little license here and say be careful what you ask your students to think about, because that's what they will remember. Willingham gives an example of a teacher who wants students to learn about the Underground Railroad, and thinks it would be nice have students bake biscuits, a typical food of runaway slaves. Unfortunately this activity diverts students from thinking about the runaway slaves and the lives they lived on the run, as the students will likely think almost exclusively about measuring and mixing ingredients. (Willingham doesn't offer an alternative activity, which would have been nice.)

Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.

Next:
What good teachers have in common.

Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need?

2009-10-17T09:48:00.008-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.

Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.

Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.

Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?

For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.

Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)

More thoughts on knowledge

Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.

Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.

Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.

Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.

Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)

2009-10-11T17:06:00.008-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...

Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.

We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.

Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.

The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.

An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.

It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.

Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)

2009-10-11T17:01:00.006-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?

Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.

Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.

Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).

The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.

Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)

Why Don't Students Like School?

2009-10-07T13:36:00.005-04:00

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Introduction

N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.

I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.

First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.

The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?

The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.

I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...

Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)

Special Delivery

2008-03-22T16:36:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to post these pics for over a week now, but could not find the USB cable for my camera (it's a mini-usb connector). SO I finally gave up and bought a multi-card reader.

At any rate, I walked into my 3rd period class one day and glanced at the cockroach habitat to see right there, out in the open for everyone to watch, the birth of what looks to be about 30-50 baby cockroaches.

And here's a somewhat blurry close-up. You can see the dark spots, which are their eyes, against an otherwise completely white body. You can also see a section of the egg sac, it's a shiny translucent piece, just off center with the babies yet to emerge. They started to darken within an hour and by the following day were completely black all over.

Needless to say, the kids who were fortunate enough to be there were grossed out but fascinated by the whole idea. In three years I've never witnessed the birth process before, so I was pretty psyched myself. Mom seemed pretty exhausted and didn't move much afterward, not surprisingly. In fact she was still in the same spot the following day. But she seems to have recovered just fine and has now re-assimilated with the rest of the colony.

Addendum:

Oh yeah, from what I could tell, since the process was already underway when I first noticed them, it appears that the delivery took a little less than half an hour to complete.

First Real Snow

2008-02-24T18:00:00.003-05:00

On Friday we woke up to what would eventually be about 6 inches of snow - in a relatively snow-less winter, this was something to celebrate. So here are a couple of pics of the kids in Ft. Tryon Park.

My camera is definitely spazzing on me - there's some crazy horizontal streaking in the images, but I haven't had time to check what the problem is.

After watching some other kids, they both just on their own decided to start "snowboarding" (basically standing up on a boogie board, and later borrowing someone's plastic snowboard). It took them about 10 tries to get the hang of it. Ah youth...

I would have pictures but they were terribly badly exposed. I'm thinking of going into debt finally for a digital SLR after years of piddling with this point & shoot toy.

Muscle Fatigue

2008-02-24T16:22:00.002-05:00

The required NY State Living Environment lab called "Making Connections" (no electronic version is available) investigates muscle fatigue as students squeeze a clothespin as quickly as possible for a one-minute period of time. The lab, without mentioning lactic acid per se, goes on the state that muscle fatigue is caused by a buildup of the waste products of cellular activity, lactic acid being the standard suspect (the regents curriculum is notorious for avoiding the use of specific names of things).

That explanation has been pretty much laid to rest recently, and the NY Times article from February 12 (I'm just getting around to catching up on the news feeders) finds another likely explanation in leaky calcium ion channels :

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion.

There's a graphic that I'll post below, but it will probably disappear soon. It isn't really all that helpful:

It also leaves open the question as to why the calcium channels become leaky in the first place. Is it a change in pH, temperature, physical stress on the proteins that make up the channel? That question isn't even raised in the Times article. The obvious issue that is raised is the potential for abuse in competitive athletics of therapies to combat fatigue (the study was initially designed to find ways to combat cardiac muscle fatigue from heart disease). The investigators in this study were able to reduce fatigue in skeletal muscle of mice using drugs called rycals, which stopped the leaky calcium channels, and allowed the mice to continue exercise for 10 - 20% longer than without the drug. There's an interesting speculation at the end of the article about the utility of muscle fatigue:

“Maybe this is a protective mechanism,” he said. “Maybe fatigue is saying that you are getting ready to go into a danger zone. So it is cutting you off. If you could will yourself to run as fast and as long as you could, some people would run until they keeled over and died.”

Just ask Pheidippides.

Road Runner

2008-02-23T11:49:00.003-05:00

I've been a member of the New York Road Runners Club since sometime in 1994. I always enjoyed participating in their "races," not as a competetive runner (I'm exceedingly slow by race standards as I'll document below) but just as a way of pushing myself a bit and mainly for fun. Today I ran in the Snowflake 4 miler, and although we just got a load of snow yesterday, no precipitation was falling today during the race. It was my first race since 2003, back when I was dreaming of running in the NYC marathon but didn't quite make it there. I'm working toward that goal again now. I need 9 races this year to get automatic entry for the 2009 marathon. That part is easy. The hard part is then getting my mileage up to a point where I am physically ready for the marathon.

One nice benefit of the club is that they keep all your race history on file and available online. So I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past. Of course the drawback is that I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past! What a difference 14 years makes. Back before the kids were born (pre-1998) I was consistently running sub 8-min miles, for 3 & 4 mile races.

Today I really thought I was moving fast and pushing myself, when much to my disappointment I looked at my watch at the one mile mark and saw - 10 minutes. Wow. Of course the first part of the course is always slow going as the crowded starting field gradually thins out, so I finally finished the race at 36 minutes - a 9 minute pace overall, but boy was I huffing and puffing over that final mile. If the mile markers were accurate and we take away the first mile, the final three were at approximately 8:40 pace, which isn't that far off the old marks. Pretty much in line with the 2002/2003 marks I was turning in as I was dreaming of the marathon. Of course I was about 10 lbs heavier then, so I'm a little concerned about the apparent effects of aging on my body. I will definitely be looking for improvement over the next few months as I get back into my training.

Fantastic Voyage into Creationism

2008-02-17T19:14:00.005-05:00

I thought I would show some excerpts from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage to my biology classes. Although some of the biology is just plain wrong, I'm not sure how much of it is due to a more primitive state of the science in the 1960's and how much is just Hollywood getting rid of any little factual details that might interfere with a good story. I'll ignore the absurd physics elements, but here's a good starting point for considering just the silliness of shrinking things. For a biology example, there's the red blood cells (corpuscles) changing from blue to red as they pick up oxygen in the lungs. I thought the blue blood myth was pretty well known already in the 60s? The special effects here are all lava-lampish, so there's that little detail as well.

A second problem is the antibodies. We just studied the immune system in my classes, so the kids would probably pick up on that error - antibodies don't just spontaneously appear to attack a new pathogen. There's a substantial lag time between exposure and the production of antibodies. On top of that, the antibodies are seen almost as mindful agents seeking out the intruder - which simply isn't the case. Lastly, the wetsuits worn by the scientists are all the same material, so how is it that the antibodies only attack Raquel Welch and not the others? Of course it's a great excuse to have four men clawing at her breasts to remove the antibodies before she suffocates.

Then there's the problem of the cytoskeleton. At the size they have been reduced to, antibodies are clearly visible, about the size of a hand. At such a scale, the cytoskeleton, not to mention other blood proteins, would be a bit of an obstacle. As it is, the cells are portrayed as a thin, fragile, almost gelatinous film with little more than water inside. So many other little details that don't work from a scientific point of view, it might be fun to watch it just to let the kids point them out in class.

On a positive note, there is an interesting trip through the heart, the lungs, the inner ear, a look at lymph vessels, and the depiction of blood vessels as a tunnel of cells, which is pretty cool.

As the title of the post implies, however, there's the other more sinister aspect of the film, the classic cold-war anti-communist propaganda element. Part of it is overt - the Soviets and Americans are in a race to master the whole miniaturization technology for military purposes (see silliness article again). The patient in the movie has the information on how to overcome the time limit (60 minutes, to the second apparently) and he's coming to the US with the secret. Of course he is then the target of an assassination attempt by Soviet operatives that leaves him with a brain injury, leading to the "fantastic voyage" to save him with a laser surgical procedure to remove a blood clot.

More understated (for it's time), is how the villain is depicted and contrasted with the good doctor who will do the actual operation. Our villain, obvious from the beginning with his bald head and British accent, is the paragon of the rational scientist. He has little time for waxing poetic about the human body and offers instead Darwinian explanations (the horror!) for the wonders of the human body. The good doctor has other ideas, and the other hero of the movie, sent along for security purposes and suspecting a saboteur on the mission, forms a bond with the doctor as they quote together passages from literature extolling the virtues of the almighty creator and his creation. Although his sympathies are suspect in the beginning of the movie, we know when he starts spouting this crap (the human mind is finite, incapable of comprehending the infinite), that he can't be a commie. He's on our side. It's the atheist who is easily corrupted without an absolute moral compass to guide him. Appropriate, then, that he is in fact the ship's navigator. The ship goes off course almost from the beginning and his plans for proceeding are at several critical junctures overridden by the rest of the crew. Communist atheism was also part of the revulsion Americans felt toward the Soviet Union and much of the rabid anti-communism from the right grew out of this fact. Then it's a short walk from Darwin to Stalin among the religious right and their intellectual co-dependents.

So I'll try to find a way to skip all the garbage and show some of the interesting bits.

Dancing Like Rabbits

2008-02-16T07:37:00.006-05:00

I guess you know you are truly* old when you start worrying about how the kids today are dancing. Every generation it seems has its dance moves that the old folks deem way out of line with proper decorum and public decency. I know the whole "Elvis the Pelvis" prudery from the 50's - but honestly, the only way it could get any raunchier than today would be if the kids just strip and have actual sex out on the dance floor. So I REALLY worry about the next generation that has to one-up these guys!

Oh, yeah, I should mention I chaperoned the high school Valentine's Day dance last night. And in case you haven't seen it, just imagine dirty dancing without the dancing. The tension I felt as chaperone was difficult to handle. I basically decided that as long as they weren't groping one another with their hands and as long as everyone involved was a willing participant, I wasn't going to make up a rule on the spot that this kind of dancing would be unacceptable. That didn't make me any less uncomfortable watching it. In the future I suppose we need to get together and decide on some ground (or should I say "grind") rules for what is and is not tolerable among consenting high school students at a school function.

Masters Project

2008-02-13T16:14:00.003-05:00

I'm determined to find a doable project this time, even if it isn't the most exciting. What I have proposed for now is to look at student understanding of DNA structure and replication using either, 1)Hands-on, 3D models or, 2) computer simulations. I haven't got any feedback yet from the instructor or my classmates, but I can't think of any reason it shouldn't be an acceptable study. I still need to do a literature search to see what's already been done and look for some cognitive science rationale for my hypothesis: both methods are important, a combination of the two will be more effective than either one alone.

From there it's a matter of finding the appropriate instructional materials and designing the assessments. I will have to decide whether to use my own home-made materials (Pasta DNA models) or purchase a commercially produced kit, such as this one. I'm leaning toward the commercial kit if only because the pasta lab gets a little tedious and is a bit removed from the standard visual models of what DNA looks like. Then, finding computer simulations that are comparably comprehensive and cover the same concepts will require some digging. All students will get the same introductory lessons from me before manipulating the materials/software. Wish me luck.

Mealworm Madness

2008-02-03T17:35:00.000-05:00

Just finished up the mealworm lab with one class, and will probably scrap it for this year for my other classes. We were not able to get much in the way of useful data. I believe the major problem was the materials - a lot of little things went wrong that I need to correct. First, the cylindrical tubes made of a slippery (for mealworms) plastic caused the mealworms to bunch up together at the entrance, then spin their "wheels" as they tried to walk from one place to another. So each end of the tube, which contained the experimental conditions (such as light/dark, dry/moist, etc.) was just too difficult for the mealworms to get to, much less change their minds and head for the opposite side. They tended to go in whichever direction they were initially oriented in - understandably.

So back to the drawing board in terms of designing the experimental spaces - I will need to go back to a more boxy format with cardboard, which will also make it easier for the students to handle the mealworms. I will post the updated lab sheets when I get that done, meanwhile I've attached a note for teachers warning of the issues.

Addendum

I neglected to mention the insane amount of time I spent finding and modifying the tubes for this activity. Note to self - try on a small scale before investing in a whole class set of custom made materials!!!

A Note

2008-02-02T16:54:00.000-05:00

This is probably the longest stretch I've gone without posting. It's been a challenging year in terms of finding the time - or perhaps more to the point, the focus and energy -- needed to keep up with work and then set aside time to reflect on it. In all honesty I've been a little down lately, feeling a bit lost and lethargic, spending too much time procrastinating and worrying, getting by from day-to-day. I try not to let it show, and can usually turn up the energy for class and have reasonably interesting lessons and discussions with students, but during the non-teaching intervals, I'm really using time inefficiently. I may even have to start practicing some of the time- and stress-management strategies I teach to my health classes. As it is, I'm finishing up my master's project this semester and may have no choice, since I will really be in trouble if I don't get back into the swing of it. Blogging is actually a decent indicator of how things are going - If I can keep up the postings, then it's usually because things are going well and I have positive things to write about. If things are going badly, I don't want to sit here and whine about it so I just stop posting. Let's see how it goes the next couple of weeks as the new semester really kicks in. Up next, a post about the mealworm lab I wrote up this summer that needs some work!

How do you know?

2007-10-20T15:31:00.000-04:00

This year I've got a lot of students who are vocally resistant to science - evolution in particular, but science in general is suspect in the minds of a lot more students than I've witnessed before. A frequent challenge is "how do they know that?" and a frequent answer (provided by the student asking the question in the first place) is, "they don't, they're just guessing." That's a literal quote, mind you.

So, after deciding last year to retire the activity, this year I am again dusting off the "Black Box" lab to address the idea that science is about just guessing what's going on in the world, or because we can't "see" the structure of an atom, or the solar system, or macroevolution, we shouldn't have much confidence in the models presented by scientists. Where this thinking ultimately leads is to a rationalization for rejecting science in favor more comfortable or "convenient" explanations, such as creationism.

I can't say a lot about the activity, since the element of mystery is crucial, and I wouldn't want a student to stumble upon this blog and spoil it. I'm attaching the lab sheets that I revised last week, without teacher's guide - if you want a copy, send me an e-mail and I'll get it to you.

Black Box Lab - Student Edition

Global Warming & Risk Management

2007-10-13T16:22:00.000-04:00

How It All Ends - Watch more free videos

- Watch more free videos

Stress = Silence

2007-09-23T14:48:00.000-04:00

I suppose that there are people for whom blogging would be a form of stress release and therefore blog even more when stressed. I'm of the opposite variety - when the demands of work become overwhelming, the blog falls way down on my priorities list.

So it has been a couple of weeks. I have a lot of stored materials ready to go when the time comes, but there are also gaps to be filled, and that's what I've been doing lately. Already the workload of 120 students - setting up computer gradebook, arranging seating assignments, checking on materials, collecting contact information, sending out progress reports to parents, posting assignments on the website, collecting labs and homeworks and journals - I'm drowning!

But much of this work is "front-loading" and will get easier. I look closely at labs and homeworks in the beginning, but after this I will do honor policy ("raise your hand if you don't have homework") plus spot check ("the following 5 randomly chosen students please turn in your homework for grading"). Ditto with the labs. Then the only thing I need to concentrate on is projects & journals.

I decided on a different lab this year for natural selection. I pretty much took Kim Foglia's lab and copied into my standard format, changed some of the text to reflect my own way of presenting the topic to reduce confusion, cut out some of the more detailed analytical questions (too confusing for my students) and voila. Here it is:

Natural Selection Game

First Day 2007

2007-09-03T07:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a first day activity based on Dan Collea's suggestion on the Bioforum Listserv and modified for my own circumstances and comfort levels. It brings biology to "life" from Day 1 by introducing an interesting creature - my hissing cockroaches - for students to observe. At the end of the period on I will distribute my course packet for students to read as homework.

I'm calling it a lab, a "getting to know you" activity where I gather info about them, they gather info about the cockroaches and later they also gather info about me and the course. The lab folds in a discussion of the scientific method - observe, formulate hypotheses, test hypotheses - It may evolve into more elaborate investigations, but for now I'm keeping it rather simple, with a limited initial duration but open-ended possibilities for further explorations. The last section asks students to imagine the cockroaches can talk - what kinds of questions would you ask? Some of these questions may then lead to follow up investigations. I will revise as it unfolds.

Getting to Know You.

Updated Course Packet

2007-08-26T08:37:00.000-04:00

Not much has changed. I streamlined the course overview, re-arranged a couple of items, included details of our new lab policy and changed the dates to reflect the 2008 Regents exam administration.

I changed the grading policy a bit as well. I lumped together tests, quizzes, projects, and classwork because I found that in a given marking period, I assign radically different amounts of each of the categories - sometimes there are just a lot of tests and not many projects, for example, which gives an undue weight to a single project if I gave each category its own percentage. As a group, they are now 70% of the grade, which is what they would add up to if I separated them out. That allows me to keep the 20% for labs and 10% for homework. Both of those components are fairly consistent.

Course Packet 2007-8

Are You Tone Deaf?

2007-08-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

No, I mean literally. This was a fun online music test. Took about 15 minutes. I can't stand to hear myself sing, so maybe that in itself is a sign that I'm not actually tone deaf - I KNOW I can't sing.

The test involves listening to a series of paired musical snippets. Each pair is either identical or slightly different, and you have to identify which are the same and which are not.

Check the results of the study for a nice histogram. Potential tool for a long term study for a student project as well. It would be nice to get a better breakdown of the results - false positives vs false negatives, for example. You may be able to contact the study authors and get more details. I suspect I would do better on a second trial, but I won't explain why - it might influence your results.

Article

Predator-Prey & Population Dynamics

2007-08-22T20:02:00.000-04:00

Here's a predator-prey simulation game that I got from Queen's University (Canada) Science Teacher Resources page and modified.

Simulations are always tricky, and depend on students following some rather complex and precise rules, having the patience and focus to go through multiple generations of a process, keeping meticulous records along the way, engaging in the spirit of the exercise rather than looking for loopholes to get it over with, and being willing to start over when they realize they've made a big mistake - that's a lot of conditions for a group of 9th/10th grade kids to adhere to.

To make matters worse, there are two simulations that follow similar patterns, but are just different enough that I can't combine them, so the kids have to endure two tedious simulations during the year. One is this predator-prey game, the other is the natural selection game, which of course involves a predator-prey relationship, but examines changes in the frequency of a particular characteristic - visual acuity or camouflage - in the two populations. I'll write about that one later. Here's my version of the predator-prey simulation. I bought some "poker chips" to use for the rabbits, because the paper was just such a mess.

Predator-Prey Population Dynamics Lab

Fossil Tracks Lab

2007-08-21T11:09:00.000-04:00

I revised this lab from last year and added the image to the document for teachers to use. The source of the image and basic idea for the lab are from some now forgotten edition of the BSCS series. It is a set of hypothetical fossilized footprints that can tell a story. The set of prints is divided into 3 sections, and revealed sequentially as students hypothesize about the limited information they are given. As new information is "uncovered" students are given a chance to revise their hypotheses. I use this as a basic introduction to the scientific method (hypothesis testing, logic, etc.) I've added a little section on basic logic - valid, sound arguments - which may or may not go over so well with my 9th grade level students.

Fossil Tracks Lab

Back From Vacation

2007-08-21T11:04:00.000-04:00

A few vanity photos from my "torturous" bike ride from Port Jervis to Jeffersonville, NY. Lots of hills, about 50 miles. I've done 50 miles in the city without much pain, but it's a pretty flat circuit around the island of Manhattan, so the hills really killed me...

Starting in Port Jervis - already annoyed at the long train ride that turned into a bus ride because a bridge was shut down. A very hot day with blazing sunshine, but not a hint of sunburn using 70 SPF sunscreen.

Along the Delaware River...

...and about half-way there at a little roadside "market" (general store really) in Barryville.

Finally a few miles outside Jeffersonville, exhausted.

Forcing a Vacation

2007-08-03T08:31:00.000-04:00

I admit it. I'm a workaholic. I've got quite a bit done this summer in preparation for September, and I still feel like I need to do a lot more. Teaching and all the preparation that goes into it consume me. I neglect things that need to be done around the house. Other than for exercise I hardly leave my apartment, and instead sit at the computer planning, writing, reading, and so on. I don't spend enough time with my kids. I don't go out. All work and no play and all that.

I know the only way I will stop working is to put myself in a place where I can't work. So I'm going out of town this week to a place where I won't have access to a computer. I've even asked my wife not to bring her computer. I'm not taking books or any other kind of work-related materials. It will be a bit of work de-tox. I just hope I can handle the withdrawal don't find myself wandering into some cheap, sleazy internet cafe in the town where we're going.

Sadly, my real motivation here is to come back refreshed so that I can get more work done before school starts. It's like the heroin addict putting himself through withdrawal in order to experience a better high afterward. I really do have work to get done. But more on that after the vacation.

Final Post on Flashcards (For Now)

2007-07-31T11:53:00.000-04:00

Wow, that was a grueling experience. I just finished last night with the last of the 400+ vocabulary terms from the core curriculum. It was a tedious process, a struggle to come up with definitions that were sufficiently clear and understandable without being inaccurate. I suspect I failed on a number of items, and on a number of counts the core itself imposes a certain level of inaccuracy by the way a term is used in that document, which guided my definitions. In other cases the core omits words that seem absolutely essential for defining other words, and in those cases I felt it necessary to go ahead and use the term in question (example: chlorophyll is in the core but not "pigment.")

I still need to go through and proofread some of the entries - I did a spell check but I've also discovered grammatical errors that don't show up in spell check, I've simplified a few definitions, provided examples for a few more, etc. This kind of editing will probably go on for a long time, but I'm at a point where I'm willing to distribute the cards to my students. I'm hoping to get some input from other teachers in the fall.

I plan to keep the google spreadsheet up and available to all, and of course I have the flashcards posted here as well in the sidebar. I may decide for my own classroom purposes to cut back on some of the terms for which I feel students need only a passive knowledge, and focus on those terms that they need to know more intimately. At the same time, I am likely to find other terms in the NY State required labs that need to be added, along with some terms that occasionally show up on the exam, even though they are not in the core.

Problems

--The image cards are still a problem that I discussed earlier, namely the difficulty in getting good results with a variety of images exhibiting a range of contrasts outside the copiers abilities to render properly. It's a big problem that will take a while to fix.

--I priced card stock at staples recently, then looked online, and it's simply too expensive for me to use. So students will have to make their own card stock versions or accept them on regular paper.

Finally, having done all this work, I considering how I might use it as part of my masters project looking at how students learn (science). But that's another post...

Shop Lowes

2007-07-29T11:48:00.001-04:00

Or you local independent hardware store. Just keep on driving past that Home Depot, feel good knowing that your money isn't supporting the O'Really factor.

Awesome Science Blog

2007-07-25T09:47:00.000-04:00

My science-obsessed son (8 yrs old) just started his own science blog. Go check it out and leave a nice comment - he'll be thrilled!

Snag

2007-07-25T09:20:00.000-04:00

I tried photocopying flashcards at school copiers yesterday. The quality of the image cards is unacceptable. Even after experimenting with the output variables at different settings, some of the images are too dark, some are completely washed out. So, I don't know what the solution will be at this point. Some image styles are better than others - line drawings work pretty well, as long as there isn't much text. Flashcard exchange only allows jpeg format images, which doesn't render text sharply - GIF format is much better for that. Photos are a mixed bag, depending on the contrast in the original image. So that means taking more time to find appropriate image types, or in some cases just not including images. I could also make all the image sheets on a printer and then run through a copier for the text - not unreasonable using a laser printer. I really think the image cards are essential, even more so than the straight definitions, so I will keep working on them, but they will take even more time than anticipated. I may also think about making the image cards bigger, which would take care of some problems (text legibility) but not others (widely varying contrast between images makes copying difficult regardless of size).

The second snag is less of a problem. As I feared, the borders on double sided cards do not line up properly on the copier. Even though the office copier has options for adjusting the "offset," which would probably allow me to make it work, it seems a simpler solution to just get rid of the borders on one side of the cards, which I will do sometime today.

The Naturalist

2007-07-24T06:27:00.000-04:00

One son is really into nature, the great outdoors, frogs, bugs, the works. The other one prefers the physical sciences, particularly physics/chemistry. I don't have any good pictures of the other one in some sort of physics-y context, but I'll work on it. In the interest of equal time, I'm posting a random picture of him anyway. We're making a lava lamp this weekend or early next week, so I should have something better then...

Last night they both expressed interest (unprompted) in starting a website - I did suggest a blog would be the way to go for simplicity and ease of use. I'll link when they get them running. Only one wants to start a science blog, the other, the naturalist, wants to start an "Animorphs" blog. He's actually much more into the arts than science, although Animporphs is in the science-fiction genre.

UPDATE

Awesome Science Blog

He would be thrilled see a comment! (I moderate comments, just in case).

Obsessive

2007-07-22T22:51:00.000-04:00

I could not be satisfied until I got to a logical stopping point with the flashcards. Just finished the image card set for the first three units now posted in sidebar. It's the frickin weekend in summer and I couldn't let it go until Monday - I had to get it done. I need (mental) help! Well, it's over for now.

UPDATE (7/23/07)
It's never over. Just one problem with google spreadsheets is that there's no spell check. So I have to save as excel, then do spell check and make corrections. So that was the real last task and I think I'm finished up through Unit 3. I will make some copies on the school copier tomorrow to make sure it all aligns properly. If not, I will need to make a few more adjustments.

Half-Way There

2007-07-20T16:13:00.000-04:00

I've finished half the flashcard definitions (first 3 units), which covers at least half the school year. I'll leave the rest for later. The only thing I have remaining to do in the next week or so is finish the image cards for the first 3 units. A reminder that the spreadsheet is here - criticisms or suggestions welcome. You can download as excel file if you want (file-export-.xls).

I've printed the flashcards to pdf. Students will be able to access them and study online through Flashcard Exchange, but they cannot print from flashcard exchange, so I've uploaded the pdf files to this blog and my e-chalk class page for those kids who inevitably loose the copies I give them.

I've added a flashcard section to the sidebar, beneath My Lab List, rather than putting the links into this post.

Balloon Blow Up Lab

2007-07-18T23:06:00.000-04:00

I use this lab as an introduction to the basic chemistry portion of the living environment curriculum. It is a pretty elementary experiment that many children have done in one form or another (Volcanoes!) but they may not have measured the results and considered the chemical reactions taking place or used a graph to estimate the equivalence point (the mass of baking soda at which the number (moles) of both reactants would be equal and hence used up). I calculated their molar masses and figured out that with 50 mL vinegar, that point should be somewhere between 5 and 10 grams of baking soda, unless I made an error somewhere. Please let me know if you find a mistake.

I also added the bromthymol blue piece to the lab, which I haven't done before. It’s optional if you don’t have any. It is added in the initial test (1 gram) only, just because I like to introduce indicators as early as possible to use as an example later on when I get the inevitable, “how do scientists know…?” It illustrates one example of the ingenuity that goes into seeing things that can’t be seen.

I've done this lab for a long time, back to my middle school days, but in writing it up this summer I took some of the introductory text from K-12 Outreach: NSF & Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents and Processes (CERSP)

Here's my version. I'm getting a little fatigued from all the summer work. I am busily working on flashcards, curriculum mapping, etc., and writing these labs is mentally draining - this may be the last one for a while.

Chemical Reactions: Balloon Blow Up

Flashcard Update

2007-07-16T18:18:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to my flashcard home page. You can view and study but not download or print unless you have an account ($19.95). There's even an rss feed for anyone who wants to subscribe and get updated as I add and refine cards. I'm about 1/4 of the way through the 400+ terms and have created some image cards. I decided to separate out the image cards - it's a long story but it's essentially a logistical issue - I can maintain the spreadsheet at google docs with vocabulary, and import the terms and definitions wholesale to keep up with revisions, but that doesn't work so well if image cards are mixed in with text-only cards.

So here are the updated files. Eventually I will post these in the sidebar:

UPDATE (7/20/07)

Cards now listed in sidebar

And just for illustation, here are the (incomplete) image cards (view at "100%" or they look crummy):

Vocabulary Flashcard Image Questions

Vocabulary Flashcard Image Answers

Flashcards

2007-07-14T19:05:00.000-04:00

I've tried in the past to have students make their own flashcards, but it's been a frustrating experience. First, getting all the index cards together is an ordeal in itself. Second, students ability to write a meaningful, relevant definition of a term is rather limited - they tend to look in a dictionary and copy the first definition they come to without regard to the fact that, for example, "bias" has a slightly more nuanced definition in the hard sciences than the social sciences. Third, their handwriting makes it difficult for them to use the cards effectively. They are sloppy, fill up the card by writing too large or make lots of mistakes and splatter the card with wite-out or scribbled out sentences - it's a mess.

So one of my long-term goals is to make a set of flashcards with NY State regents relevant definitions that I can print and copy onto card stock and let students cut out and use for studying terminology. I may even use color-coded papers for the different units. I'm also trying to enlist the help of my fellow biology teachers through the bioforum listserv.

I've posted the spreadsheet containing all the vocabulary terms found in the New York State Core curriculum on google documents (you need a free google account to view it). This allows me to invite others to "collaborate." In this context, that means contributing definitions or proofreading or editing existing definitions or suggesting images to use, etc. - kind of like a wiki. We already do a lot of sharing of work created individually through the listserv, but not much real collaboration. I'm really more concerned with the idea of collaboration in general than the flashcards in particular.

On my own I have defined all the terms in Unit 1: Science and The Living Environment. The definitions are from my own head, the images were downloaded from the Creative Commons website. Once the terms are defined, I copy them to Flashcard Exchange, where I paid a $19.95 one time fee for an account that allows me to print the flashcards to pdf. I also add the images at Flashcard Exchange, since they can't be embedded in the spreadsheet, and even if they were that wouldn't translate to the flashcard template very well.

I am sharing those pdf's here, even though they may change again if anyone goes in and edits my definitions and finds errors, or better descriptions, etc. I probably will not finish another unit this summer unless I get some help - it's a tremendous amout of time to write out definitions alone, and finding and downloading images takes an additional, sizeable chunk of time. I also need to investigate a little more how easily I can copy the pdf's on my school's riso machines, which I will do later in the summer - If that's a hassle, I may look for alternatives.

Here's how it works. For making a single copy from a printer, print the questions file. Then turn you paper over, re-insert into printer and print answer file on the back of the the question sheets. They align absolutely perfectly on my printer - your mileage may vary. If you have trouble, let me know and I will make a copy where the question side has no lines. For making multiple copies on a copier, I always make single sided documents and then copy back-to-back from the copier. Just make sure they align properly before ruining a large batch.

UPDATE (7/20/07)

See sidebar for links to flashcards.

Cooling off to ThinkFree

2007-07-06T13:36:00.000-04:00

I don't know if it's because they are still in beta or it's summer or what.

First, my initial enthusiasm was based on their compatibility with MSWord. I tried google docs and I also tried Zoho - neither one preserves the formatting that was in my original word document, but ThinkFree does that - beautifully. And then you start to edit it and the formatting spazzes on you. For example, I tried to change the bullets in a single paragraph, but it went in and converted all my numbered lists to bullets. And my numbered lists are a little complex so no way do I want to go in and re-format them in a clunky online word-processing program. I approached it in a couple of different ways, but every time I changed a bullet the whole document was afffected.

Second, I've had some difficulties getting the collaboration settings in order - I really wanted to use ThinkFree in a "wiki" sort of way, and allow others to edit the lab online and see how it evolved. Not sure anyone would be interested in this type of work, but it shouldn't be that much effort to set it up and see if there are takers. But the collaboration settings are not intuitive and not user friendly. Very few options and not easy to navigate to the place where those settings are. Along the same lines, the "send invitation" function was not working for me last night as I was trying to figure out what an invited user would experience using my wife as a guinea pig.

Third, the whole process is still too slow. I have broadband and there's a huge loading time (relatively speaking) for the JAVA application that lets you edit the file. Of course, this might be a minor detail if everything else worked like a charm once you invested that time in waiting for it. Unfortunately, I've spent far more time trying to figure it out than just about anybody I might hope to bring into the process, and I'm still frustrated by the quirks and bugs.

Lastly, and this may have to do with my computer rather than ThinkFree, but on my home computer I was unable to save edited changes. The program just hangs. Tried several different times. Oddly, it works on the computer at school, so there may be some security settings or something getting in the way on my computer, but there are no warnings or troubleshooting guidelines for this possibility. I didn't have any trouble on the same computer with google docs.

With any luck, these are beta problems that will be ironed out, but I'm not optimistic at the moment. I will keep checking in on them and see what happens by summer's end.

Acid Rain Lab

2007-07-05T20:50:00.000-04:00

The acid rain lab is adapted from fellow NY State LE teacher Frank DuRoss. As I've mentioned repeatedly in the past, I like the idea of having a standardized lab format, and so I took one of Frank's labs and molded it around my lab template, changing a bit here and there along the way but preserving much of Frank's introductory text and the basic set up. I asked Frank's permission to post the lab and he graciously agreed.

As I mentioned here, I'm switching my labs to an online office suite, so in order to get the full featured lab with correct formatting, you have to click the "Power Edit" button and then allow a painless installation of the JAVA application that makes it all possible. It's a one-time deal. Please let me know how you like it, it's a new concept for me and I'm doing it on a trial basis.

Acid Rain Lab

ThinkAgain

Here's the traditional:

Acid Rain Lab (MSWord)

Paradigm Shift - ThinkFree

2007-07-05T20:36:00.000-04:00

OK. I've decided to make the leap to an online office suite from ThinkFree. It allows me to upload my labs and other materials that I post on the blog AND it allows me to edit them online without having to go back and re-upload the files as I do now whenever I edit a document.

The only downside is that anyone wanting to use one of my documents will have to take an extra step to allow the JAVA software to be installed on their computers. Otherwise some of the formatting gets lost as the basic mode displays documents in html only, but you want them for printing to be displayed in full editing mode, as if you opened up an MSWord doc for example. You can also upload spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. I'm moving slowly on this, and have so far uploaded only one lab, described in this post: Acid Rain Lab.

Plant Respiration

2007-07-05T08:55:00.000-04:00

Another lab that I have not yet tried, it comes from The American Biology Teacher (Lisa Weise, The American Biology Teacher, Volume 68 No. 5, May 2006) I've written an introduction and added my usual lab formatting, keeping the basic experimental design from the original article. It looks like a very clever way to measure relative CO2 production in radish seedlings in a modified pipette.

Plant Respiration Lab

A cotton swab soaked in an NaOH solution is loaded into the bulb of several pipettes, followed by several seedlings. The tips of the pipettes are then placed (using a home-made, cardboard holder) in a petri dish containing water. As CO2 is produced by the seedlings, it reacts with the NaOH to form baking soda, essentially removing the gaseous CO2, causing a decrease in the pressure inside the pipette. Voila, water rises in the pipette proportional to the amount of CO2 produced. Remember that the initial production of CO2 simply replaces a molecule of O2 with a molecule of CO2 so the pressure differential only comes about when the CO2 is removed.

In a related story, I'm trying to get my school to invest in Vernier's new LabQuest probeware. If that happens, I may or may not use this particular set-up. In some ways it is better for bringing in the chemistry, but on the other hand chemistry is such a big mystery to 8-10th graders, it may actually distract from the lesson. I could always do both...

Mello Jello in a Test Tube

2007-07-04T13:55:00.000-04:00

I had been doing the mello jello lab in a petri dish as called for in the original published lab, but found it rather difficult in terms of materials management and set up. I re-worked it after "can't-remember-who's" lab using similar principles but set in test tubes instead of petri dishes. Much of the introductory material is lifted directly from the original lab. I've given full credit, so hopefully they won't come after me!

Mello Jello in a Test Tube

Haloscan

2007-07-04T13:42:00.000-04:00

I noticed the "comments" links were missing so I tried to go to Haloscan to see what the problem is and lo, Haloscan is the problem - their website is inaccessible. Others have reported similar problems. Will keep trying...

Protein Synthesis Lab

2007-07-03T20:57:00.001-04:00

I've put this lab together over a the last couple of years. It annoys the kids a bit -transcribing DNA into mRNA and then translating into amino acid sequences can be a little tedious. I tried to make it a little interesting with some silly word game analogies, but still.

I have also been adding some regents exam questions at the end of each lab but I haven't got around to it yet on this one. I will automatically update the link when I get to it. Keep in mind in NY state past regents exams have used both the circular codon table I use in this lab as well as the more typical square table, so kids need familiarity with the other one as well.

Protein Synthesis Lab

Diffusion Lab

2007-07-03T19:03:00.000-04:00

I did this lab last year without lab sheets and had students record observations in their journals. I've put the lab sheets together. As usual, I may add to it next year - for example, I'd like to add a section on calculating the rate of diffusion, but I haven't had the time or energy to put it in yet. I may also play around with putting some starch into the mix and using starch indicator instead of food coloring. Still, the basic set-up will be the same.

I've seen other labs out there that use gelatin cubes placed in food coloring or other substances and incorporate surface area:volume ratios. For now I'm keeping it simple. I use a petri dish with gelatin and add food coloring to a well in the center, then measure the distance it diffuses over a 5 day period.

An added bonus, if you wait long enough, is the growth of mold on the surface, which is a whole other science lesson in itself on extra-cellular digestion and enzymes. I generally do this lab after the detergent enzymes with jello lab, so I try to get students to make the connection before I have to point it out to them. Anyway, here it is.

Diffusion Through Gelatin

Summer Planning

2007-07-03T14:50:00.000-04:00

As you can probably tell (the two of you who "subscribe" to my blog anyway), the period of time from end of May to beginning of July is a stressed out frenzy of regents prep, graduation prep (12th and 8th grade), prom, final grades, marking regents exam, cleaning up the room, etc. This flurry of activity is followed by the sudden emptiness I feel at the end of each year. It always takes me a few days to adjust to change in pace.

I haven't wasted any time though, getting to work on planning for next year. The older I get the shorter the summers are. I want to have everything in place this September and finally get my master's project finished sometime this academic year - the deadline is fast approaching for me to complete all the requirements for my permanent license. I am thinking of completely changing my topic, but I'll have more time to worry about it later in the summer.

So, rather than load everything into a single posting, I'll be adding a few little tidbits over the next few days - I've got new labs to upload and describe, results from this year's regents exam, some ranting about New Yorkers (especially the pedestrians!) and and more.

i haz ben publishd

2007-05-27T08:23:00.000-04:00

Sorry, I stumbled across this silly little web phenomenon, LOLCATS, last night and couldn't help myself.

"Published" is a short response to Michael Kinsley's review of Christopher Hitchens'book God is Not Great. I thought Kinsley botched the idea of Occam's razor. On closer inspection, he glossed over it more than botched it, discussing it in a way that, while perhaps more sophisticated, requires a lot more space to explain than he gave it. I presented what I think is a shorter and simpler version.

Not a big deal and I was frankly surprised they printed it at all. The only other letter I ever sent to a newspaper was also published a few years ago. It was a response to a Newsday article lambasting a day of science professional development put together by my then boss, the science coordinator in District 6. It was a hatchet job that had less to do with the particulars of the PD and everything to do with objection to the very IDEA that teachers should have PD days. I'm still angry about that and won't touch a Newsday paper.

Dennis Miller Has Left the Reality-Based Community

2007-05-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

I'm sure this is old news, but I don't keep up with Miller's career so this just came up on my radar as I was channel surfing last night and stumbled on his O'Really Factor segment. In this case, talking about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, he categorically and absolutely refuses to accept that there were not WMD's in Iraq - he does not care what anybody says - not the CIA, not the UN, not even if Bush himself, the ultimate reality denier, comes out and admits they were wrong, Dennis Miller will stick by his arm chair intelligence instincts and continue to maintain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were secretly ferried over the border to Syria before the invasion. I searched for the transcript or a YouTube video, but it's not up yet. I'll add links if they become available soon.

There's a blog devoted to this kind of denialist thinking. It's worth reading, especially the early posts that discuss the impenetrable bubble that denialists build around their convictions. Miller's is pretty obvious. He has posited a non-falsifiable explanation that will withstand any evidence to the contrary. He has transferred the problem of the absent evidence to another locale to which our intelligence has little access, and further, to a remote time that allows for the dispersal or destruction of the evidence in such a way as to make his conclusion immune to scrutiny even if we did invade Syria and rummage through their stuff.

So why should I care what Dennis Miller says on Fox "News" and what has this to do with science? I don't really care what he says, but I'm always concerned about the mind set that dismisses evidence in order to maintain a hard, unwavering, ideological stance. What's so difficult about drawing tentative conclusions based on the evidence and allowing for the possibility that your conclusions may need to be revised if new evidence surfaces to challenge those conclusions? It just seems so natural, so logical to me, yet an entire industry of pundits and a catastrophic republican administration have been built on the opposite way of thinking. There is some serious emotional weakness masking this macho approach. I can't help tying this in with religion - does religion answers our need, as a species, for that absolute certainty, or do we crave absolute certainty because of our religious upbringing?

I suspect it is the former and we're just stuck with a sizable segment of the population that can't get past it - but of course, I'm willing to change my opinion if evidence surfaces to suggest otherwise. I'm also willing to operate on a daily basis as if I can effect a change in people, if only those few individuals I interact with on a daily basis, my students.

Tacky People are Back

2007-05-20T12:29:00.001-04:00

And they've got an early start this year. So far only one pile was seen today in the picture above, just under the 135th Street overpass to the Riverbank State Park. I ran over these but fortunately none of them stuck. Guess I need to start carrying a little broom.

Shrek the Turd

2007-05-19T20:03:00.001-04:00

Oh my god, that was the worst. I don't have a lot to say about it, you almost get the sense that the writers/producers put this out with the title (Shrek the Third as opposed to simply "Shrek 3") as their own inside joke about how bad it would be.

Wait for someone else to buy the DVD and then borrow it if you really just have to see how bad it is. A few laughs here and there, but poorly written, plodding, and one of the lamest endings imaginable. My kids seemed bored at times and haven't talked much about it as they do when they really like a movie.

And what was with all the couples in the theater on a Saturday afternoon - no kids - watching the second sequel to a children's cartoon? Aren't there any adult films playing today? Get a life. (Yeah, I'm feeling a bit like an ogre myself today...)

Letter to Editor

2007-05-19T11:07:00.000-04:00

I wrote a short, I mean really short, little letter to the editor at the NY Times regarding Michael Kinsley's review of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Probably the kind of nit-picky little "correction" that would drive the author crazy, but I get that way sometimes.

I'm rather surprised that they e-mailed to say it will be published in the May 27th edition of the Book Review Section! I'll not reproduce it here, but I will come back and link to it when it's published next weekend.

As a public school science teacher I try not to have an opinion on religious matters and refuse to answer students' questions about my religious beliefs or lack thereof. I do occasionally hear grumblings among some students when we discuss topics that are at odds with one religious concept or another. As for religious explanations of natural phenomena, I stand firmly with the evidence and I don't mind making that point with students - if your religion says, for example, that the earth is less than 10,000 yrs old, that claim is demonstrably false. I don't push this idea on students, but as I have warned them, in my science classroom claims of fact, regardless of their source, will be subjected to scientific scrutiny. So if a student wants to argue against science by bringing in religious doctrine, I will engage, at least to a point. It doesn't happen often and I think most students are willing to close their ears when we discuss things they don't want to hear or compartmentalize their brains to learn the science, even if they reject it emotionally.

I would prefer that they do neither, but I don't know how to bring about a change in their mindset, other than discussing the science as matter-of-factly as possible and encouraging them to think generally in a logical manner.

Metro Bicycles on 96th Street

2007-05-13T11:33:00.000-04:00

I won't be dealing with these guys anymore. I bought my bike there a couple of years ago. I've been in a couple of times for tune ups and adjustments and such. Today I went in with an urgent problem, one that occurred while I was riding, and they were not helpful. I was willing to leave the bike there and pick up Monday or whatever - they wouldn't take the bike, complaining that their basement was literally full of bikes that were sitting around forever waiting for owners to pick them up. Hey, that's not my problem, that's bad management on your part.

I had what I assume was a simple problem to fix - a couple of spokes on the real wheel popped and needed replacing. The wheel was wobbly to the point that I had to disconnect the rear brakes just to push the thing. I was the first customer in the store with a repair request and it was not busy. They would not fix it on the spot and said it would be noon before they could get to it. Again, I was flexible - more than willing to pick it up tomorrow or the next day. I just couldn't wait around till noon - that's 2.5 hours on top of the hour I had already sat around doing nothing waiting for the store to open.

So instead I cut my ride short and headed home, slowly, probably doing permanent damage to the wheel along the way. I guess given their location they'll do just fine without my business.

Republican Social Darwinism

2007-05-05T06:48:00.000-04:00

A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin

They can't seem to get anything right on the right. There are the anti-science crowd who reject evolution in favor of creationism/ID:

For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it.

I like (not) the language, "accepting Darwin," which of course parallels the Christian notion of "accepting Jesus." The Times really knows how to alienate its readers. I realize they are presenting the arguments from the perspective of the conservatives who think this way, but how about some quotation marks or something. Furthermore, using Darwin's name as a stand in for the theory of evolution, as the article does throughout, is already an editorial statement. The theory of evolution has advanced quite a bit since Darwin's initial formulation - for example, although the theory of natural selection remains intact, Darwin missed other mechanisms, such as genetic drift, and the entire science of heredity/genetics, etc.

I also suspect a good percentage of these "anti-Darwinists" are insincere in their rejection of evolution, and the wording in the above quote hints at it. They simply fear the consequences of the theory. There have been numerous articles in various publications to the effect that many conservative thinkers actually have no trouble with the soundness and validity of evolutionary biology, but maintain a distrust of knowledge in the hands of the masses. Religion is a tool of the powerful to keep the meek meek.

And then there are the modern-day social Darwinist who think the theory of natural selection supports their conservative ideology:

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

The rest of the article is the back and forth among the different conservative camps, the usual (anti Darwin): "Darwin led to Nazism AND communism" and (PRO!-Darwin): "Darwinism supports male dominated societies." Great, I can already see the liberal backlash against evolution when conservatives start openly "framing" it in that way.

I do like the final word from John Derbyshire at the National Review:

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”

Wow, a conservative who's willing to go wherever the evidence leads - pretty refreshing statement in light of today's ideology-driven policy making.

Take Your Kids to Work Day

2007-04-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

I'm SOOO far behind. This is from Thursday. Quite a hectic day.

Everyone had a great time - my students loved the distraction, my kids got to be the center of attention for a day, and I get to worry about covering all the final pieces of biology before the exam!

The Story Behind the Photo-op

2007-04-15T08:40:00.000-04:00

NYC Parents has a story on the recent photo-op in which the mayor and chancellor Klein lined up a group of "independent supporters" who had signed a letter of support for the mayor's latest wave of "reforms." Several of the news organizations did mention that almost all of those supporters had formal or informal connections, in many cases financial ties, with the school system and were hardly independent, disinterested parties in a position to withhold support of the man who essentially pays the bills.

The NYC Parents piece digs up the e-mail that was sent to these organizations asking for their signatures of support. They also find internal e-mails between some of the organizations discussing the possible consequences of NOT signing - i.e., they felt more than a little pressure to sign, even if they in fact do not support the mayor or at least prefer to remain outside the political ring (who do they think they are, educators?)

I've re-produced the e-mail posted at NYC Parents below:

Dear principals and mentors,

We received this letter on Tuesday asking for [our group] to sign on. So far, we were told by one intermediary (who is NOT signing) that there was an earlier version which explicitly criticized politicians and the teachers union and that after pushback, it was revised to this version.

We are asking for your input….(phone or non-doe email is best)…

What cost and/or benefit to your school (and our network of schools) do you foresee if we do or do NOT sign this letter?

We are also reaching out to other intermediaries to gauge their response.

Thanks.

And then I can't resist this quote from the DOE e-mail:

Our students and their families, indeed all New Yorkers, deserve the kind of schools and the kind of school system that our Mayor and our Chancellor are creating.

Interesting phraseology. They might have said we deserve better schools, or even the best schools in the nation. But no, we deserve the system the mayor is creating. Maybe one day they'll tell us what exactly we did to "deserve" it.

City-wide Science Curriculum

2007-04-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

The city has announced its core science curriculum for grades K-8. It's a spiral format with a little bit of every area of science each year. Schools are given the option of a textbook-based approach or a kit-based approach. The vendors have been chosen - for middle school grades, Delta's FOSS, and LabAids' SALI are the kit options while Glenco is the textbook option. There are also other semi-approved programs for which schools can request a waiver (someone should write a book about "waivers" and their role in NYC DOE policies) and it's also possible to use some combination of books and kits.

For accelerated 8th graders taking regents LE, the only option is Holt New York Biology: The Living Environment. I requested an examination copy, didn't get a good read on it at the showcase. It is considerably slimmer than the national version of the book, I suspect they simply chopped out some chapters and I will be EXTREMELY surprised if they actually re-wrote any of the chapters that were left in.

Otherwise high school are left untouched, and will perhaps remain so. The state exams petty much dictate the curriculum, and short of approving textbooks, I can't see the city doing much more in that area.

Pasta DNA - Revised

2007-04-07T23:24:00.000-04:00

I dug up the original source of this lab at the Discovery Channel's DiscoverySchool website:

Building a Model DNA

I've incorporated the basic idea into my own lab and I am planning to substitute paper clips for the pipe cleaners - after several years doing it with pipe cleaners I simply cannot bring myself to cut out all those little pieces again and then hear students complaining about how they don't hold together and so on...I'll update if there's a problem with the paper clips.

I've written about this lab before and other than the new lab sheets and paper clips, nothing new to add.

Pasta DNA Lab

UPDATE

I just completed this lab with my students and I need to make some revisions. I will try to get the lab sheets updated this weekend, but just in case I don't, be flexible when doing this lab. It's "mad tedious" after the first part, and I modified it on the fly. I have too much repetitious drawing and I need to add a text piece about how real DNA replicates, so students have a better basis for comparison. I'll also add more specific materials requirements, such as the number of pieces needed, etc. On the plus side, the paper clips worked just fine.

New or Newly (re)Discovered Music

2007-04-07T11:08:00.000-04:00

Delgados – Accused of Stealing

These guys have been around for over a decade and I’ve heard of them before, but just now getting around to listening. Some nice stuff.

Arcade Fire – No Cars Go

Bright spot on an otherwise dark, slightly disappointing (how could it not be) second album.

Cloud Cult – Rockwell

When you listen to this song and think of the lead singer-songwriter losing his two-year old son, it’s almost too painful. And it’s not even about that.

Asobi Seksu – Sooner

This group has grown on me a bit. A little too pretty sometimes, just enough bite to save it.

M. Ward – To Go Home

There’s this dude who plays guitar in the 59th street subway station. He seems more to be playing the part of a musician – animated, dramatic strumming, low toned but passionate vocalizations – not sure he’s even singing actual words, but very into it. This song reminds me of him.

Sigmatropic – Haiku Ten

A short little piece (I guess “Haiku” gives that away) with Cat Power on vocals. (“I am raising now a dead butterfly with no make-up”).

Superchunk – Cool

When I heard this last week on a compilation album I thought, “Hey, somebody’s covering that song by…wait a minute, that’s the original.” And so it goes with some old songs I heard back in the early 90s in Chapel Hill that formed a sort of background noise to all the academic stress. My wife was actually in an art class with Laura Ballance (bassist).

Spoon – Decora

From the same compilation (Old Enough 2 Know Better: 15 Years of Merge Records). Spoon covering Yo La Tengo

And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead – Mistakes & Regrets

From 1999. Still catching up. Another selection from the Merge Records compilation mentioned above.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Weeping Song.

Thus completes my Chapel Hill nostalgia. Can’t stomach a lot of the Nick Cave material, but for some reason this song always appealed to me.

DNA Extraction

2007-04-05T16:26:00.000-04:00

This is NOT my favorite topic to teach in Living Environment. Its importance cannot be overstated, and yet at the level of my students, 8th, 9th, some 10th graders, it's all still so abstract and hard to get your head around. It's our last major topic before the more straight-forward ecology unit (and revisiting evolution) to round out the year.

I still begin more or less with this "demystification" lab. The only purpose is really to see a big glump of DNA that came from the students themselves, and to understand the concept of a "protocol." I've re-written worksheets to follow my standard lab format and changed a few details around after consulting several other sources of information on the purpose of the various steps of the protocol. I don't do a lot with this lab. Some websites offer suggestions on how to manipulate/test some of the variables in the protocol, but I don't have the time or space for that. I'm not 100% sure of some of the measurements - I always gave rough descriptions in the past, and converted in my head to exact measurements - I'll have to double check them back at school next week and make adjustments if necessary.

After this, it's Pasta DNA models (structure & replication - under construction) followed by some kind of protein synthesis modelling, which I will work on and post as time permits.

Cheek Cell DNA Extraction Lab

Epidemiology Lab Activity

2007-03-24T11:36:00.000-04:00

Even though grades are due Monday, I'll try to get in a couple of posts this weekend to make up for the recent absence. It's been real busy at home and work these days.

First up, a new lab, which is one of the tasks that have consumed me recently. I've gone through three different editions as I piloted it with my three different LE classes and I still want to make modifications if I can get some help - maybe next year.

This is the classic contagious disease lab, and I've made it specific to HIV until someone complains about it. In the lab, students simulate exchanging bodily fluids (also simulated, of course) and track the spread of HIV in a "sexually active" community. Of course the kids then joke about whom they've "had sex with" which makes me a little nervous about how other adults will react to the simulation, but I believe in confronting the reality on the ground - over 60% of high schoolers have had sexual intercourse by the time they are seniors. If I can influence them to practice abstinence or safer sex by demonstrating how STIs can spread, then I will take the chance of a parent complaining - better to ask forgiveness than permission in the bizarro world of public education.

Epidemiology Lab

You can change a bit of the introductory text and make it a generic contagious disease lab.

The part I need help with is a method for determining the original infected individual and verifying the conclusion. My students did a great job of figuring out the first part on their own, using their own logic and methods. The difficulty is then verifying their hypotheses by being able to trace all infected individuals back to the index case. At this point you have to take into account the sequence of infection among many individuals who have had multiple partners - it's a lot of detail to try to keep in one's head, and I don't yet have a spreadsheet or flowchart model for organizing it - but I'm working on it.

UPDATE

I've modified the class data table, making separate columns for each partner. Once you have decided who the index case is, you then use the index case as your starting point and draw lines of "descent" from the index case to each infected individual. If I have time I'll post a sample later next week.

UPDATE II (4/5/07)

I DID hear from a few parents about this lab at parent/teacher conferences last week - all positive. Of course that's a pretty small and probably biased sample - the kids who are comfortable going home and telling their parents about the lab are the ones whose parents would most likely be supportive of their children being exposed to this kind of information in this manner. Still, it's encouraging when parents express unsolicited support for what you're doing in the classroom.

Class size doesn't matter

2007-03-09T18:13:00.000-05:00

That's why the big dogs send their kids to public schools along with the rest of us right?

From NYC Public School Parents:

Hmm. Joel Klein's stepdaughter went to Miss Porter’s, a boarding school in Connecticut: average class size of 11.

Bloomberg sent his daughters to Spence; middle and high school classes average 13-14 students.

Just more comforting facts to soothe my worry as I struggle to interact meaningfully with my science labs of 32 high school students, mostly sitting on top of each other in a room originally designed for elementary school. No big deal. Class size doesn't matter. At least I know we are all suffering together - rich, poor, powerful, meek - one nation, undivided and all that. Keep up the good work, Mayor, and please, continue to lead by example, stand on principles, put your money where your mouth is. Show the UFT that you walk the walk and have the courage of your convictions. Don't listen to those loony parents with their delusional ideas - you and I know that class size doesn't matter (wink wink).

Looking for a Little Anonymity

2007-03-08T19:39:00.000-05:00

My students are starting to find my blog (among other things) thanks to google and my long-standing policy to use my real name. This has started making me a little uncomfortable, so I'm going to make it little harder for them from now on.

I've erased some of the identifying information in my profile and my posts are now attributed to "mister g." Although a few of my student actually call me that, I doubt they would think to use it in a search, and if they do they'll have to wade through 177,000 results to find me.

I don't want to make a big deal of it and I'm not planning to suddenly become a raving lunatic, railing against the board of ed or my school or my students, but I do want to feel a little freer to express opinions that I don't necessarily want my students to stumble upon - things that I generally don't say in school in my role as teacher because I don't think they are appropriate, but I may want to express on a blog targeted at adult fellow educators. It'll be interesting to see if the anonymity actually affects what and how I write.

New York City Parents' Blog

2007-03-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

After several years of more or less officially shutting parents out of the education decision making process, Bloomberg & Co. face a potential uprising. In anticipation the administration is trying to mend fences and bring parents in - it may be too late, the damage done. A new blog dedicated to NY City parents and advocates has been launched. Check it out.

New York City Public School Parents

Lactose Intolerance

2007-02-26T19:53:00.000-05:00

Head on over to Carl Zimmer's Loom to read up on the latest research investigating the origins of lactase persistence, the (relatively rare on a global scale) alternative to lactose intolerance, which is actually the norm perhaps for most of human history and most of the world outside of Northern/Central Europe and its colonies, and a few isolated regions of Africa.

The central question is whether herding peoples of these different regions developed lactase persistence when milk became a reliable source of nutrition, or whether pre-existing lactase persistence (for whatever reason it might have become common in a small, isolated population) led people who had this mutation to become herders.

I'll tease you with the data being collected and then you'll have to read the rest of the story at the Loom. Scientists are testing human remains thousands of years in age from different parts of Europe, some dating as far back as 8,000 years. This is roughly within the range of dates given for the time that evidence exists of herding behavior in Europe. So make your own hypothesis here - would you expect to find the gene for lactase persistence in these specimens or not? Now go find the answer.

As If..

2007-02-25T11:37:00.000-05:00

The problem with these self-tests is that what you want to do and what you actually have an aptitude for are often 2 or more different things...

Your Dominant Intelligence is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

You are great at finding patterns and relationships between things.
Always curious about how things work, you love to set up experiments.
You need for the world to make sense - and are good at making sense of it.
You have a head for numbers and math ... and you can solve almost any logic puzzle.

You would make a great scientist, engineer, computer programmer, researcher, accountant, or mathematician.
What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

A lot of wishful thinking on my part along with some forced either/or questions that can't possibly capture nuance and the complex nature of our personalities. Just for fun, don't take it too seriously. And avoid the other "tests" on the page that ask for your cell phone number.

via Evolving Thoughts

Third Lab

2007-02-22T22:01:00.000-05:00

I just lost a long post on this lab that I was composing when IE froze up. I thought I had copied it to paste (as I usually do, just in case, when a post reaches a certain length) but apparently I messed that up to and I just don't have the patience to recreate the damned thing. So without much comment, here's a third lab. Just as a caveat, as with the others, it is somewhat untested and will undergo revisions but I'm fairly confident with 3/4th of it - not sure mealworms are capable of being trained as this lab attempts, but it'll be interesting trying.

Mealworm Behavior Lab

Go Me...

2007-02-22T09:33:00.000-05:00

Feeling a little whimsical today.

Fathers of non-identical twins have better sperm

Of course I'm only about 90% sure my twins are fraternal and the study suffers from small sample size, but hey, I'll take any self-esteem boost I can get!

Edutopia Gets it Wrong

2007-02-19T07:34:00.000-05:00

A recent article in Edutopia tackles the nature of science question. The author, Christopher Thomas Scott, attempts to distinguish between facts, theories, and laws, but bungles it in a way that just adds to creationists' confusion about evolution's place in biology:

We don't yet talk about the law of evolution, because the theory is still being refined and polished.

No, no, no! For comparison, here's the National Academy of Science's definition of terms that should inform all such discussions about the nature of science (emphasis mine):

Glossary of Terms Used in Teaching About the Nature of Science
Fact: In science, an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed.
Law: A descriptive generalization about how some aspect of the natural world behaves under stated circumstances.
Hypothesis: A testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations.
Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

As I repeatedly stress with my students, theories do not grow up to become laws. Think about it, Newton's Laws did not become laws after decades of testing and refinement, they sprang from his mind as laws because they are descriptive in nature - they do not explain WHY or HOW bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, e.g., simply that they do under prescribed circumstances (no external forces working against their motion). Another important aspect of laws is that they tend to be stated mathematically. Since we are describing nature, we can usually quantify these observations - for all the words we use to teach Newton's laws, at least in the lower grades, it all boils down to f=ma.

On the other hand, as the NAS definition of theory suggests, there are many laws that are Incorporated into the theory of evolution - for example, Darwin himself referred to the major components of his theory of natural selection as laws: reproduction & growth, variability, overproduction of offspring, struggle for survival, etc. (Source)

Part of the confusion arises, perhaps, from the fact that both theories and laws (and hypotheses for that matter) are inductive propositions. They both look at a limited, imperfect, set of data and infer order and predictability on a larger scale. From this derives the caveat that all scientific knowledge, both theories and laws (and to a lesser degree "facts" themselves), are "tentative" and subject to refinement or dismissal.

A final point about terminology - "scientists" aren't particularly hung up on these sometimes hair-splitting debates, they are too busy DOING science, while the ID crowd, conversely, spend all their time (and money) trying to confuse people with words and doing no science whatsoever to support their so-called "theory."

UPDATE

This article in the same issue by the same author is a lot more satisfying.

Two New Labs

2007-02-18T21:02:00.000-05:00

I've started a list in the sidebar for labs that I've either created or adapted from other sources. I will slowly add to the list as I format them to a standardized layout, which takes some time. I have a number of labs that I created/adapted over the years on an ad hoc basis, usually in a hurry and devoid of an overall plan. I do think that students benefit, if we are going to do narrowly focused, traditional labs, from a standard design.

I also believe, in defense of traditional labs, that they have a place even in an inquiry classroom when done well - not that I worry anymore about what labels are applied to my teaching style - it is what it is, to borrow a cliche, and I've developed and continue to develop strategies that I feel are most helpful to my students in achieving three goals; 1. Understanding the nature of science, 2. Understanding the importance of biology to their everyday lives and their sense of place in the world, and 3. Passing the regents exam. Depending on the topic and the time of year, one of those goals may take priority over others, although they often overlap.

I'm starting the list with 2 labs that I just created to go along with the Hot Tub Mystery that we are working on. For the record, I consider the case study approach to be a good example of guided inquiry, and these labs are designed specifically to address issues that come up in trying to solve the mystery.

A final note about these labs. They are designed for lower level (8th, 9th, 10th grade) students who would be considered in a college course, "non-science majors." No slight is intended - my school simply attracts students with strong arts & humanities leanings and only a small minority are even considering the sciences as a possible career avenue, although many are clearly up to the task if they change their minds one day. Additionally, although the physical facilities at my school are fabulous, they are new and science materials to actually use in the labs are a bit skimpy. So I look for labs that are simple, require minimal specialized equipment, and can be done in a limited amount of time.

These labs have not been "peer reviewed." If you use them and find mistakes or better ways of doing some aspect of a lab, please let me know.

Cardiac Output Lab

Arteriolar Radius and Blood Pressure Lab

UPDATE 3/3/07

I finished the cardiac output lab with my classes and made a couple of adjustments. There's a certain "duh" factor to the relationship if you can visualize the process or comprehend the mathematical formula, but that's just it with kids, especially in this age group. They still need concrete experiences with these concepts and this activity is as close as I can get to a reasonable model using everyday, inexpensive, and simple materials.

I've incorporated a virtual metronome to keep the tempo and the beat for this activity - you could just have a student in the group keep the tempo with a 4 count, but I think the metronome makes the lab a little more fun and consistent as well. I like this one, GiveMe Tac! because it lets you adjust tempo, beat, sound effect. There are others that you don't have to download, like this one: Metronome Online.

Updated Cardiac Output Lab

Stiff

2007-02-12T19:26:00.000-05:00

At the end of chapter 3, "Life after Death," Mary Roach writes"
Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
That is in essence a partial apologia for writing a book about death and the after-death in case you were wondering why anyone would want to write such a book. Metaphysical reasons aside, the author also considers the ethical implications and dilemmas in donating one's cadaver to scientific research, a self-less act if ever there were one.

Just to lay it out for you, there are three or so basic options for what do do with yourself after you die: 1. You can donate your body to science and have it subjected to various unpleasant experiences that you don't want to know about before you die and your family won't want to know about after the fact. 2) So you might prefer a traditional, embalmed, open-casket funeral and burial - until you read about the process and the ultimate futility of it - eventually, "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out," and...well, you know the rest of the song, or: 3) Cremation, and of course Roach includes a rather detailed description of the sequence of events that occur in a body subjected to extreme temperatures necessary to turn a sac of water into a pile of ashes.

Still, all in all, I think I prefer the cremation route. I may be OK with donating organs to save other people, but I don't want my body lying around being poked, prodded, dissected, getting a face lift, or otherwise experimented on.

Dipping My Feet Into The Case Study Waters

2007-02-10T08:31:00.000-05:00

The Hot Tub Mystery

SUNY Buffalo has developed a library of case studies for use in science teaching. Many are geared toward college biology classes, but some can be adapted or are already more or less appropriate for regent -level biology.

I've wanted to play around with case studies for a while but haven't had the time or mental energy to invest. So a couple of weeks ago I found one that doesn't seem to require a lot of planning and is pretty straight forward and relevant to the human body/homeostasis unit we are working on. The really nice thing about it is how it brings together the workings of the circulatory, nervous, endocrine, and excretory systems to understand the cause of death in a couple who are found dead in a hot tub.

The task for students as outlined in the case study is to take on the role of the detective who investigated the case and write a final report on the cause of death. In my high school classes I'm sticking with that task, but I'll give them some options for presenting the report in the form of powerpoint, a poster, etc. I won't have a lot of class time to spend on that part of the study. My 8th graders, who have a good deal more class time than the high schoolers due to the fact that they attend school during regents weeks and so on, will have a bit more freedom to produce something more creative - one group is already working on a film that will re-enact the accident.

The case study website provides a lot of information, at times too much information, about how to incorporate case studies into your teaching. The worksheets have questions attached and are available in PDF or easy printing. The basic flow of my approach is as follows:

1. We've already learned about the circulatory system through "traditional" means, and have discussed homeostasis throughout the year.

2. I introduced the case, which is broken down into 3 segments. I started with part one, where students are given some very basic background information and the facts of the case as reported by two detectives and a maid who discovered the bodies.

3. Students research some questions that are fairly easy to grasp, such as the effects of alcohol on the body, what the drug lasix is used for, how the body responds to high temperatures, etc.

4. I teach through traditional means the nervous system, highlighting along the way the parts that are particularly relevant to the case study.

5. Students get part 2 of the case study and learn more information about the case that underlines the importance of understanding how the nervous system regulates homeostasis and how the hot tub, alcohol, and lasix combine to disrupt that regulation. The subject of kidney function and hormones comes up.

6. Teach endocrine and excretory systems.

7. Students compose final reports.

Along the way students are given opportunities to work in small groups sharing information and discussing the details of the case. We are not told if the autopsy indicates drowning as the cause of death, so there may be disagreements over whether they died and then slipped under the water or whether they lost consciousness and drowned. Then the question of why this would happen to both, seemingly at the same time.

Oh, "PS" or whatever - There are teacher notes available for the case studies but you have to be registered and recognized as a legitimate teacher - a fairly painless procedure if your name appears on your school website as a member of the faculty. It does take a day or two for the elves to process your application.

Hot Paperback

2007-01-30T20:34:00.000-05:00

The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

Boy, if you aren't squeamish or hypochondriacal and you haven't read it yet, this is must read material. I'm only about half-way through and there are some unsolved mysteries just unfolding now, but it is, as the cover says, a terrifying true story of the world's most fearsome (in terms of kill rate and the violent deaths they produce) pathogens - the filoviruses (named for their thread-like structure as seen left), which include Ebola (90% fatality rate within a couple of weeks after exposure) and Marburg ("only" about a 25% rate - quite lethal already compared with other pathogens).

I'll spare you the gruesome details of how these viruses kill. It is so disturbing that I don't plan to recommend it to my students without some parental notification in the future - I could easily see kids having nightmares or turning into total germophobes. Of course I read the thing sitting on a NY City subway car surrounded by the hacking, wheezing and sneezing masses. It's an interesting context in which to read a book that could easily induce acute anxiety attacks in more than a few people that I know.

It's not all about blood and guts. Preston is a great story teller with a gift for getting inside people's heads. The parallel stories that go from African or Asian rainforests to suburban DC and back again give you a real sense of how small the world has become - and how dangerous that smallness may prove to be. Did I mention that this is a true story?

Image Source

Recipe for "success"

2007-01-29T18:00:00.000-05:00

At least some level of success, as in a passing grade for the marking period at the very least.

I always assumed there was a correlation between completed work and grades but now I have a little data to back it up, thanks to the magic of electronic gradebooks and excel. I noticed it almost by accident as I was sorting grades the other day. Let's get the graphic out of the way:

Sorry it's a bit fuzzy, I'm not sure what is the best method for converting an excel chart into a jpeg for posting on the internet - if I figure it out I'll come back & fix it.(See Update)

Missing assignments are on the X axis, grades on the Y. The general trend is pretty obvious and allows me to make a few generalizations. Trendline shows a clear negative correlation between missing work and grades - As missing assignments increase, grades decrease.*

1. Although it is not an official policy of mine, it seems virtually, mathematically impossible to fail my class if you do all the work. Based on this observation, I'm now willing to make it official policy - I guarantee you will receive a passing grade if you DO all your work. Of course this does not include work copied from a friend just to hand something in or habitually late work (as in a week after the marking period ends!).

2. More work = higher grades. Of the relatively small number of students who have zero missing work, the grades range from 84-101 (I give extra credit occasionally). One missing assignment and the range goes to 72-98. And so on. It's not a perfectly smooth trend, as some assignments carry more weight than others. Some reasonably diligent students still get low test scores and some less-than-diligent students do really well on tests and quizzes. Still the trend is clear.

3. Finally, it's never been my policy to fail a student just because X number of assignments is missing. But as I think more and more about what success means in the real world (It's not what you know but what you do), I'm planning on revising that policy. I don't know exactly what X will be, yet, but I will impose a minimum amount of work requirement from now. Failure to complete that minimum will result in a failing grade regardless of how the numbers compute.

*Yes, I'm aware that there's a certain "duh" factor here. Every assignment not turned in counts against your grade so of course there would be a correlation. But as obvious as it is, I can only conclude that this realization simply hasn't dawned on many of the students who turn in no work and then come to me full of desperate hope that they will somehow still receive a passing grade. So I'm actually using this data in class to have students look at, think about, and discuss what it takes to succeed.

UPDATE

It looks like GIF is the way to go with charts. Click on the small picture above to see larger (clearer) version. I copied the chart from excel and pasted into photoshop (elements), saved as GIF.

How to pass the regents exam

2007-01-25T06:17:00.000-05:00

As we pass the mid-point of the year and start thinking more seriously about passing the regents exam in June, a few thoughts on what it takes to do well in biology. I always get a flurry of hits on the blog around regents time, and I suspect they are from desperate students looking for some magical solution to their last minute concern with passing the exam. Alas, I have no such elixir. Hopefully a few will read this well enough in advance and take it to heart.

These suggestions assume that you are an average student or better who can read at, near, or above grade level.

Pay attention in class. This is the number one most important thing you can do. If you can't do anything else, like homework, or projects, or studying, then do this. Listen to the class discussions & the lectures. Watch the demonstrations, animations, slide shows. Ask questions. Take notes. Add your own insights or comments to the teacher's notes.

Why? Biology is a huge subject. Your textbook gives far more detail than you can possibly take in. Class lectures and discussions serve to narrow down the content to the most important concepts and terms. Your teacher will also try to clarify concepts that are usually confusing and put things into a context that the book doesn't always do well. I also try to personalize the content so students will develop an understanding of how the biology relates to them. You will only get this kind of guidance in class, and without it you are likely to be overwhelmed and confused.
Labs. We do labs for a variety of reasons, but the most important is probably the understanding of the scientific process itself. This is a fairly substantial part of the regents exam, and few people can grasp the scientific method by simply reading about it - it is a skill that must be practiced and that's what labs are really about. Yes, some of them also teach you important content -related understandings, but that is usually secondary and not terribly efficient. You can spend a lot of time in lab and only learn a very limited amount of "content." Labs are really a subcategory of "paying attention in class." If you go through the motions of filling out the lab report without actually focusing on it, you're wasting your time.
Textbook Homeworks. Homework can make class discussion more meaningful and class discussions can make homework more meaningful. Either way, doing your homework will help you get the most out of the course. Or homework can just be a laborious waste of time. It all depends on HOW you do it. Do you skim the chapter looking for the shortest answer to the questions so you can hand something in and pretend you "did your work?" Or do you read the chapter, study the diagrams, and answer the questions in your own words?
Projects. The textbook usually does a good job of teaching very narrowly focused content objectives. The regents course emphasizes big ideas and major understandings. The purpose of projects is usually to bridge the gap and bring together the disparate ideas presented in the textbook. Your teacher probably does this in class, at least I do. I always try to make connections between what we learned last month and what we are learning now. But at some point you the student must jump in and piece that puzzle together for yourself. I try to design projects that require you to make those connections.
Regents Review. If you've done everything else, then this part will actually be a little fun. You will see that many regents exam questions are like riddles, and solving them will make you feel good about yourself. You will take delight in realizing how ridiculous some of the multiple choice answers are and how easy it is to rule out 2 or 3 of them with little effort. It's like watching Jeopardy and realizing that the questions often contain dead give-away clues for anyone who has a little knowledge of the subject.

Well, I hope that helps. This is just my personal take on things, your teacher's list might be different.

Addendum

I just realized I didn't mention the word "study." When I think of studying I think of "cramming" for the exam. It's not very effective and not usually necessary if you've done everything else. There are some things you should know, and if that means "studying" then you will have to include that. I prefer the term "review." Examples of things you should review are the formulas for photosynthesis & respirations, the cell organelles and their functions, the human body systems and how they function, DNA structure/replication/protein synthesis, etc. I still think that the amount of studying or review necessary will be minimal if you do the right thing throughout the year. And your regents review will give you plenty of opportunity to do most of this, well, "review."

Here We Go Again

2007-01-24T06:15:00.000-05:00

This is my last post on this issue, it's clearly not going away.

From Today's New York Times article on magical thinking:

If the tendency to think magically were no more than self-defeating superstition, then over the pitiless history of human evolution it should have all but disappeared in intellectually mature adults.

How exactly does magical thinking lead to disadvantages in terms of survival or reporductive success? Evolution doesn't lead to a loss of habits just because they are silly or irrational.

The article does go on to describe how magical thinking can actually be an advantage in certain situations (it reduces stress and gives some poeple the motivation or confidence to do things that they might otherwise not do - but that can cut both ways when it leads to risky or foolish behavior), but it still leaves the impression that if something is not necessary it should disappear from a population.

Update

OK, I just realized the writer provided some wiggle room with the phrase "self-defeating," which I overlooked, since there's zero explanation of how wishful thinking might be self-defeating. Not one example. I can think of a few, but these excesses would in fact likely be weeded out by natural selection, assuming that magical thinking is not an either/or trait but exists along a continuum. On the most obvious level, magical thinking that leads to totally ridiculous acts of "bravery" or daredevil stunts would likely lead more often to death or injury.

Phineas Gage

2007-01-23T08:27:00.000-05:00

I'm almost finished with this short (86 pages) book about the life of a man who had a 3 foot iron tamping rod rammed through his skull in a freak accident that changed his life and taught us some things about how the brain works.

If I were to pick a single book to have everyone in my science classes read, it would be this one. Short enough to get through in a brief amount of time, interesting, engaging, detailed information presented in small chunks, and the main story, which is quite compelling, can be followed even if some of the details are a little too advanced for most students. A great accompaniment to a nervous system unit.

Phineas's accident left him "physically" unharmed - he could still function physically as well as he did before the accident. He remained strong, fit, lost no coordination or physical abilities that could be detected. His memory was intact, as well as his mathematical reasoning ability and attention span. However, Phineas was no longer his old self. The iron rod tore through his frontal lobe destroying an area of the brain that is today associated with "sociability" - the capacity to interact with others by reading and responding appropriately to their verbal and nonverbal cues as well as the overall social context in which these interactions take place. Here's a quote:

Humans have always argued about what makes us human. Is it our ability to walk on two feet? To hold tools in our hands? To speak and hear language? To worship a supreme being? The case of Phineas Gage suggests that we are human because our frontal lobes are set up so that we can get along with other humans. we are "hard-wired" to be sociable. When we lose that ability, we end up like Phineas.

I'm not sure the answer actually follows - there are plenty of social animals who are "hard-wired" to get along with other members of their own species. The question itself is probably moot. There is no single quality we possess that other animals do not. It becomes a matter of degree and the unique combination of characteristics we exhibit. The book raises a number of interesting questions that bridge science, philosophy, and psychology. Just the kind of ideas I like to discuss with my students.

Image Source (Wikipedia)

Book Recommendations

2007-01-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

I took the advice of the english teacher in my school and made up a list of 6 books that students could purchase at a discount from Barnes & Noble. I ordered extra copies that students could borrow. Here's the list:

The Case of the Monkeys That Fell from the Trees: And Other Mysteries in Tropical Nature

172 pages, a collection of mysteries in Nature. Young adult audience.

Susan E. Quinlan, Susan E. Quinlan (Illustrator)

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 1563979020

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793

192 pages, written for young adult readers.

Jim Murphy

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 0395776082

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story about Brain Science

86 pages, young adult audience.

John Fleischman

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 0618494782

Great Mythconceptions: The Science Behind the Myths

224 pages, large type and illustrations. Young adult audience.

Karl Kruszelnicki, Adam Yazxhi (Illustrator)

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 0740753649

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

304 pages, adult themes – not for the faint of heart.

Mary Roach

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 0393324826

Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

418 pages, a real suspense-filled true story of a nearly disastrous biological accident at a government laboratory.

Richard Preston

Format: Mass Market Paperback

ISBN: 0385479565

And here's the
Order Form that I used.

An occasional quote

2007-01-13T12:42:00.000-05:00

As I'm reading I keep coming across interesting passages that I would like to share. Here's the first.

In the future, humans may well be able to engineer themselves, be it by better drugs or better genes, to live as long as they please, but the cost may be twenty year olds with all the vigour, appetites and charm of the middle aged.

Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants

This is based on the idea that there is in inseparable linkage between the vim & vigour of youth and life span. As life span increases, youthful vitality will be diminished. This hypothesis is born out by experiments with fruit flies that have been bred for longer life. They produced fewer offspring, and lived a much slower, almost sloth-like existence.

Nature abounds with other examples of a connection. In a species of marsupial mice in Australia, the life of an adult male is a playboy's fantasy, or so it might appear, culminating in a 2 week period of repeated 12 hour frenzies of copulation. But then the mouse dies at the end of that single breeding season, "spent" in every sense of the word.

Conversely, the British Royal family's geneological history (with meticulous records dating over many centuries) shows a correlation between the lifespan of its members and their fecundity - Those who died shortly after menopause had on average 2.4 children. Those who lived a substantially longer life (past 90) averaged 1.8 but nearly half of the nonagenarians had no children at all.

Not exactly a slam dunk case, but interesting to think about as I approach middle age territory and watch the wrinkles grow.

Well I thought it would be fun...

2007-01-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

...to have the kids personalize the digestive system a little by photoshopping their own faces onto a diagram of the digestive system.

So I lined up the assignment and told everyone to get their head shots ready and brought in the laptops to the classroom...

...only to find the laptops don't have photoshop loaded. So much for planning ahead and checking the software availability FIRST!

Anyway, a couple of students also expressed some reservations about putting their pictures on a body like this, so I gave them the option of picking a celeb to attach...*

Who knew bush was in such good physical condition (or Mr. Gatton for that matter!).

*I also thought better of it and found a different diagram of the digestive system and manipulated it a little to make the "private parts" a little more private.

Image Source

Lamarckianism

2007-01-10T20:22:00.000-05:00

I like to use the example of the blind cave fish to test whether my students still harbor Lamarckian notions about evolution or if they have really caught on to the idea of natural selection. It's a good example because the Lamarckian explanation is so tempting. It just seems so logical that the cave fish lost their eyes because in total darkness they just don't need them anymore.

I bring this topic up again after mentioning it last week regarding wisdom teeth. Then yesterday reading an excellent book called simply Mutants, about all the things that can go wrong in a developing human embryo, I stumbled across this line (italics mine):

...But delightful as it may be to look at, red hair is not good for anything at all (i.e., has no adaptive survival value in any environment in which humans live ). MC1R (for simplicity's sake, the gene that causes dark hair when it functions "properly," red hair when it doesn't) may simply be a gene that is decaying because it is no longer needed, rather as eyes decay in blind cave-fish.

Now, I'm reasonably certain that the author is a hundred times more knowledgeable about biology, genetics and evolution, than I am, and yet either through carelessness or brutal editing, has issued a Lamarckian explanation for an evolutionary phenomenon. It's an otherwise fabulous book.

I started doubting myself, maybe I don't know as much as I thought I did. Maybe decay is the answer and I just haven't thought it through thoroughly enough to see how it works. But alas, serendipitously, I found PZ Myers' article in Seed Magazine on the very topic of HOW THE CAVEFISH LOST ITS EYES.

The Mexican blind cavefish raises the challenging evolutionary question: Does disuse lead to degeneration or disappearance of a feature? Here, an answer Darwin would have loved.

I certainly can't do the article justice by summarizing, so I'll leave you to go and read it for yourself. It's relatively short and sweet. I'll give you a hint about the ending - it's not Lamarck.

That Wasn't So Bad

2007-01-08T19:47:00.000-05:00

I really expected to be in the oral surgeon's office for a couple of hours of excruciating discomfort. All those horror stories about wisdom tooth extraction. Turned out that it was over in a matter of minutes.

The worst pain is of course the injections of Novocaine, 4 to be exact. The doctor said I seemed to handle the harder ones better than the easy ones. Maybe I just got used to it. Anyway, I sat there a few minutes expecting the whole side of my face to go numb like the last time I had tooth work done, but he explained that upper teeth are easier to numb and wouldn't be so bad. The most noticeable effect was a loss of feeling in the roof of the mouth - otherwise the cheek, eye, ear, lips, felt pretty normal (ALL those areas were numb when I had lower tooth work done). All-in-all a much more pleasant experience than having a crown which required two separate numbing experiences!

What was a little freaky was the sound of the cracking tooth being extracted. Even with the heads-up that I would hear it and not to worry about it, it's a little disconcerting.

I also have learned that I do not savour the taste of blood. That oddly salty, almost sweet, raw steak quality is decidedly unpleasant. I would not make a good vampire. And a gaping hole in your mouth tends to take a while to stop bleeding, so every 30 minutes or so I change the gauze that I' m supposed to bite down on to apply pressure. SO I'm off now to change the dressing and get ready for bed. SO far not too much pain or discomfort. But I am taking pain killers prophylactically as advised.

Wisdom Teeth

2007-01-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

I have a long history of tooth problems, dating back to early childhood. I grew up in the rural south with unfluorinated water and super sweet iced tea and soda and candy and a general lack of awareness concerning good oral hygiene. And I didn't inherit the best genes either - my father had a complete set of false teeth in his 30s and mom has had her share of tooth problems over the years. Needless to say, all my experiences with dentists have been of the painful variety, which in turn led me to avoid the dentists as much as possible which in turn again ensured that when I did visit it would be an unpleasant experience.

So about a year & a half ago I was compelled to visit the dentist to get a crown. He informed me at the time that I had a wisdom tooth that would need to come out soon. He expressed surprise that it had not already caused me trouble or pain, and said he would leave it for the time being - the tooth would let me know when it was time to go. This week the tooth started talking to me. It's scheduled to come out on the 8th. Meantime I have to take antibiotics and I have a prescription for pain killers to get me through. I am trying to avoid the pain killers as much as possible - it's just barely tolerable on ibuprofen, we'll see if it gets worse.

Of course this got me thinking about the whole concept of wisdom teeth and why we have them when they cause so much trouble - a rather "unintelligent" design flaw to say the least - and the irony of then calling them "wisdom" teeth is inescapable. Nothing wise about a set of teeth that your mouth doesn't have room for.

The obvious (not necessarily correct, just intuitively obvious) explanation is that in our evolutionary history the modern human mouth (the jaw, really) decreased in size but the number of teeth remained the same as our larger-jowled ancestors. Scientists debate why this event occured: Was it a change in diet and eating habits or the necessary by-product of an increase in brain size? In other words, did the change in diet and subsequent decrease in jaw size allow the development of a larger brain or did the development of the larger brain drive the decrease in size of the jaw? I don't see why these two alternatives are mutually exclusive and I can see how both forces could have been at work simultaneously. Although it's not obvious why a larger jaw for a third set of molars would in itself be disadvantageous for eating softer or cooked foods.

Whatever the ultimate driving force, it seems the wisdom tooth problem is a pretty nice argument for evolution and illustrates the way evolution works- and perhaps more importantly how it DOESN'T work. It produces characteristics that are not perfect, just "good enough" to allow for survival. Who knows, perhaps given more time and a more primitive technological world, the wisdom tooth would not be such a problem - either we would have settled for a larger jaw or the wisdom-toothless trait would have become the norm. As it is, the wisdom tooth is not a fatal (normally) condition and even then it usually causes trouble relatively late in life - thus there's really no evolutionary mechanism for eliminating it.

In cursory research of this topic, I stumbled across this article from the Columbia News Service. Columbia as in Columbia University. It's an article by a journalism student, so I'm more than willing to cut a little slack here, but I still expected to find a pretty accurate and intelligent story. Unfortunately the author completely botched the concept of evolution generally & natural selection in particular. Here's a quote:

Scientists agree the human race is advancing -- if very, very slowly -- along the evolutionary track by shedding unnecessary parts like the wisdom tooth, though there's debate about what is causing it to disappear.

I'll just mention without going into the details that the whole concept of evolution representing some sort of "advance" in any metaphysical or cosmic sense is pretty much a dead topic and a little jarring to see people still discussing it in those terms.

What strikes me more is the Lamarckian explanation for the way in which the wisdom tooth is supposedly disappearing, the idea that we are shedding wisdom teeth simply because we don't need them. I read the whole article looking for a clarification of this simplistic explanation, but there is none. It reminds me of those stories I heard when I was younger about how we are losing our little toes because we don't use them any more. I also looked elsewhere for data that support the idea that we, as a species or even a population in the US, are losing the wisdom teeth at all. I browsed a couple of studies from PubMed that looked at wisdom teeth in a sampling of students. Both put the number at around 10% showing no wisdom teeth (congenitally missing) but neither refer to any change in this percentage over time. So I'm not even sure the general statement is supported by the evidence and I can't think of any plausible explanation for how it would occur. In general, here's what would have to happen.

Assumption: Congenitally missing wisdom teeth is an inherited condition - it is not a result of pre-natal or post-natal nutrition or the texture of the food eaten in early childhood or adolescence. If this trait is becoming more prevalent, then one of the following conditions would have to be met (there may be others, but these are the obvious possibilities.)

1. People who inherit congenitally missing wisdom teeth have an advantage over people who are born with wisdom teeth. By advantage, I mean ONLY that they are able to survive longer and produce more offspring. In the modern world this seems a rather unlikely scenario. I could be wrong, but an article that asserts an increase in the number of people who do not have wisdom teeth (as a result of evolution) needs to address this issue - do a significant number of people die as a result of having wisdom teeth compared with those who do not? Do the wisdom-toothless live longer and thereby produce more offspring? Are they more attractive and therefore find mates more successfully? Again, none of these possible explanations seem plausible.

2. The second possibility is that congenitally missing wisdom teeth is bundled with some other trait that is advantageous - a stronger jaw line, which seems to be a particularly attractive male feature (if less so for females), for example. Again this seems rather implausible, and in fact the opposite would seem more intuitively correct - a stronger jaw line would be more likely to have room for the extra set of molars.

3. Genetic drift - by pure chance a slightly larger number of offspring are produced with the missing wisdom teeth, and over time we have drifted toward a decrease in the incidence of wisdom teeth in our population. Like tossing a coin and getting 7 heads and 3 tails out of ten, this possibility is more likely in small isolated populations (If a subset of a population is getting 7/10 heads, by chance, another subset is just as likely to get 7/10 tails - when they commingle the outcome is back to the expected 5/10 each). I'm not sure this is a plausible answer given the large population size we are dealing with and the constant influx of immigrants from around the world into the gene pool.

I have absolutely no data to support or refute any of these possibilities. I also realize there may be more complicated factors at work. I'm just wondering where the author got her data and arrived at her conclusions. I'm always interested in how people imagine evolution occurs, and Lamarckian "disuse" seems to be a particularly common conception.

PS- Alexbarnett gets the award for most catchy title relating to this topic: An Inconvenient Tooth

Books Update

2006-12-31T09:38:00.000-05:00

Trip to the Museum of Natural History on Friday revealed indeed an extensive selection of children's science books. Unfortunately, again, quite dissatisfying. Shelf after shelf of "core dumping" titles on dinosaurs, plants, mammals, frogs, snakes, human body, technology, etc. I want stories! I don't mean fictional stories, I mean stories in the sense of the books produced by best science writers for adults - Carl Zimmer's books tell stories about how scientists work and along the way reveal a great deal of information about the products of science in addition to the process. They have a central focus - usually a mystery or a problem to be solved - around which all the details coalesce. One would think that the story format would be all the more appealing to children, raised on a diet of fiction most of their lives, and yet they are the rarest of science books. In the stores there is often a "Young Adult" section for upper-middle school to high school aged students, and there's a rather large selection of titles - all fiction.

It's also my hunch that many of the non-fiction titles that may be more interesting are geared almost exclusively toward libraries. Few are available in paperback and fewer still are available in bookstores - what do I know, maybe they just don't sell. So I'll be talking to our librarian about getting some new material into the school library. In addition to the NSTA recommendations I mentioned earlier, I also stumbled on the Young Adult Library Association's recommendations. They have a quite extensive list including a list for college bound older students. All lists are broken down by category (fiction/nonfiction or science, history, etc.) and many are annotated.

core dump
n.

A recapitulation of knowledge (compare bits, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one knows about a topic (syn. brain dump), esp. in a lecture or answer to an exam question. “Short, concise answers are better than core dumps” (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia).

Originally: A copy of the data stored in the core memory of a computer, usually used for debugging purposes.

Answers.com

This Is "Fit To Print?"

2006-12-30T08:50:00.000-05:00

I started writing this earlier today but had to leave before finishing it.

Ghosts in the machine. What is this rot? Scientists discovered (more or less accidentally) a part of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, induces phantom visions. The obvious logical conclusion to be drawn is that all those reports of people seeing ghosts and other supernatural apparitions are nothing more than the result of chemical/electrical disturbances in the brain. In other words, illusions. Most reasonable, rational people long ago accepted that these phenomena are merely tricks of the brain, but here comes a study - hard evidence really -that demonstrates the possibility of inducing exactly the kind of visions people sometimes report as paranormal. Case closed.

Unless, of course, your life's work is based on peddling this supernatural nonsense. Don't get me wrong. I don't really have a problem with kids believing in Santa or superman or space aliens or otherwise engaging in fantasies of ghosts or demons or the Avatar. But when these beliefs persist into adulthood in a literal way, you've got to wonder about the sanity of the people holding onto them.

Deborah Blum won a Pulitzer prize for “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death.” I haven't read it, but I assume it's a pretty objective account of a turn of the century thinker who holds onto some romantic notions of spirituality and tries to bring science to bear on his beliefs. Sounds not much different from the "Creation Science" movement a few decades ago or the intelligent design fraud that is waning today. But apparently the author isn't just interested in this stuff for historical reasons but actually holds onto this desperate need for some form of supernatural world out there beyond the limited imaginations of the stale scientists who dismiss it. Nineteenth century indeed. Her conclusion says it all:

I suspect that we’ll dwell forever in the haunted landscape of our beliefs. To many people it’s a world more interesting — bigger, stranger, more mysterious — than the one offered by science. Why choose instead to be creatures of chemical impulse and electrical twitch? We would rather gamble on even a tiny, electrical spark of a chance that we are something more.

I suspect that my 8 year old twins have a similar rationalization somewhere deep in the recesses of their brains regarding Santa Claus. On one level, they must know that it just doesn't make sense and I can see the beginnings of doubt and realization on their faces and in the questions they ask. On the other hand, to disbelieve outright is to lose something warm & comforting and to risk not getting presents anymore. But eventually they will have to face the facts and appreciate the reality behind the fantasy - that Santa, in his purest form, is a mythical figure who represents something real but abstract, the spirit of giving and of generosity and good will and yes, even love. That is part of the "something more" that we are and it's enough for me, cynical "scientist" that I am.

I Started a Blog...

2006-12-29T22:09:00.000-05:00

...which nobody read.

Sprites 2006 album Modern Gameplay

AKA Friday Random 10 + 1

I was about to post my random 10 for today when this song started playing on my Yahoo radio station. Seriously, not making this up. Must be a message from the BlogGods.

But since I don't pay much attention to the gods anyway, here goes.

Artist - Title

Yo La Tengo - Sugarcube
Phoenix - North
Dismemberment Plan - Time Bomb
Franklin Bruno - Bulk Removal Truck
Cat Power - Say
Muse - Starlight
Placebo - Running Up That Hill
Joesf K - Endless Soul
Patty Griffin - One Big Love
Bloc Party - Plans