It was a day like any other day (except for the fact that it was Monday, but seemed like a Thursday since tomorrow is Tuesday, but is really Friday). I made it through 1st and 2nd block easily, but then 3rd block rolled around. Not that I have anything against 3rd block. Really. I don’t. But it started off with a very nasty habit many of the students in that block have: being polite. Yes, they are polite to a fault. I’ll try to explain.
Students are tardy if the they enter the classroom after the tardy bell rings. Makes sense, right? At Putnam City, all of the doors are kept locked when shut, therefore, students cannot enter the classroom late, unless someone opens the door for them. And therein lies the problem with their politeness. I’ll continue to explain. I usually stand at the door and close it just as the tardy bell rings. I then proceed to get students going on the bellwork or whatever other task I have for them to start class. This means I am not at the door and cannot see who comes in late to class. There is a sign on my door, which says “For entry, knock politely” which students read “To sneak in, knock quietly”. This is what usually happens. Students knock quietly and my students, being the polite human beings they are, open the door and return to their seat. Usually before I can see who is coming in tardy.
So there you have it, my students are annoyingly polite! This put me in a other than pleasant mood since it happened once, I addressed it, and then it happened twice more! We then proceeded to submit papers to turnitin.com, which you don’t even want to hear about. Really. I’m not going to talk about it.
That was the “bad” part of my day. Not very bad, right? I didn’t think so either. I love my job. And therein lies the good part of my day. I went up to the teacher workroom to check my mail box and was greeted by a fluorescent pink sheet of paper there in the box. What was this pink paper? Glad you asked. It was the final ballot of the “teacher of the year” voting for our school. You might ask why that is significant. My colleagues have voted me through the first two rounds which means I’m on the final ballot “against” two other teachers. Knowing these two people, there’s no way I have a chance to be voted teacher of the year for Putnam City High School, but that’s okay. The other two teachers are the type of teachers who make an impact on students and they are both very deserving and after all, that’s what its all about anyway. Impacting students lives. I am just honored to be nominated. Thanks faculty, I appreciate your confidence.
Tonight in class, our professor was talking about correlations between matched/paired vs. non-matched/non-paired and he chose not to give a definition as to what those are. I won’t speculate on the reasoning behind his choice; I’ll just say he chose to define them by giving examples.
I only bring this up because I did the same thing today in class and therein lies my question. Is this a valid way to teach students the definition of a term/word? Because I can tell you I didn’t really get a good grasp on the meaning of these two contrasting educational research terms.
I wonder if my students felt the same way about the terms I was working with in class this morning? We were talking about constructive and destructive interference. I defined those two terms for them, but I chose not to define in-phase and out-of-phase. This refers to two signals which either correspond directly (in-phase) or are offset from each other (out-of-phase). Signals can be anywhere from zero to 359 degrees out of phase with one another. I guess my one saving grace is that I did a demo using two phase-shifted speakers which completely cancel the sound from the other speaker. Its my favorite demo of the year, by the way.
I will be revisiting phase shift with students tomorrow. Even if there is a chance students feel half as vague about phase as I do about about matched pairs, I need to re-teach the concept. At the bare minimum, I’ll be asking if anyone has any questions at all about phase and I will certainly think twice before teaching “definition by example” next time.
Wired.com posted a great video with Dr. Megavolt. Dr. Richards, as his alter-ego is known, lives a normal life as a particle physicist working on the AMANDA telescope, which interacts with neutrinos instead of visible light. In the video, Dr. Megavolt performs a some cool demos with his metal suit and Tesla Coil, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla’s shows, way back in the day. It’s a spectacular show and I believe I need to find out when he plans to come to the Science Museum of Oklahoma. I’m sure this type of demo leave a lasting impression on the viewer, especially when you consider that Tesla did his demos without a metal suit. No wonder people thought he was crazy and we now realize he was a genius. Probably mentally ill in some capacity, as well.
Check out the video and then go get out your Tesla Coil and light up some light bulbs or something! I can’t wait to get mine out in class. The students never forget it.
This was the question posed to me this week when we were discussion particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider in our classroom by an exceptionally bright student. She followed it up with “This just seems like an enormous waste of money.” I surely see her point. When you have friends at school who come from homes were there’s not enough to eat or when they can’t (or won’t) keep the electric bill paid.
I imagine its also due (at least in part) to the idea students have that “everything that can be known, is”. As a student in high school, a person who has a constant inflow of information everyday, its easy to think the world is pretty well all figured out. I would say this is not the case, nor will it ever be. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop questioning. In fact, even if we, as scientists, think the world is all figured out, it would be a huge mistake to stop asking questions. According to Humphrey Davy: “Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.” It is worth mentioning that Davy was the mentor of Michael Faraday, who produced the theory that electrical force and the magnetic force are the same thing. This was the first Unified Theory of Physics, which laid the groundwork for all other unification theories in Physics. So in essence, we can thank Davy for everything we know about Physics, for without his encouragement of Faraday, we might not understand physics much better than we did back in the 1800’s.
I think Albert Einstein said it best: “The important thing is not to stop questioning”. That is the point! That is why we do research. All of the technology we gain from particle physics research is just a bonus. The reason to do the research is for the knowledge gained.
Thanks for reading.
Today we had a special speaker in our Pre-AP Physics class, Dr. Flera Rizatdinova (who is originally from Moscow and has a very strong Russian accent, which makes the talk much more interesting) from the Oklahoma State University Dept. of Physics. She is a scientist working on the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider. She shared some of the writing she has been doing for the DOE (which I mistakenly confused with the Dept. of Ed. initially) towards the end of her presentation. She was writing for them about the “benefits of particle physics research” which is a subject that arises frequently in my class. I hear something like “Mr. Bowie, isn’t this just an enormous waste of money?”
Dr. Rizatdinova talked extensively about what the questions the LHC is trying to answer (see previous post). This was the deepest part of the presentation and was probably a little above level of my students (but if I don’t set the bar high, they won’t achieve as much, right?). At the end, she took some questions which was really good for the students. I’m glad they have some opportunities to interact with college professors/scientists.
There wasn’t really any ground-breaking material in her talk. I have been keeping up with the goings-on of the LHC recently and did some research over the summer with Dr. Rizatdinova, so much of this was a review for me. I’m not sure how the students will react to it, I’ll try to get some feedback tomorrow. I was simply excited about having a real, live scientist in my classroom and wanted to share the experience!
