Author: Lensyl Urbano

The Eggs have Arrived

After waiting an eternity (about two weeks) the Middle School business’ eggs have arrived.

Eight eggs in their packing.
Eight eggs in their packing.

We set up the incubator downstairs in the pre-school/Kindergarden classroom so Mrs. D’s kids will have the chance of monitoring them. The little kids will be responsible for turning the eggs, while the middle schoolers have set up a data logger and a couple temperature probes to keep track of the temperature in the incubator.

The incubator was provided by Ms. Mertz. It’s put together out of plywood with a 75 W incandescent light bulb as the heat source. Unfortunately there is a significant thermal gradient and although we salvaged a couple of computer fans for the purpose we did not get around to installing them –and more importantly testing them– in the incubator before the eggs arrived.

We’ll see how it goes.

Radiolab: The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

RadioLab has an excellent podcast featuring Jay Melosh, a geophysicist who specializes in impact craters, and who advocates the hypothesis that the entire extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary (the K-T boundary) took place over a period of two hours. The asteroid impact vaporized the crust of the Earth where it hit (near the Yucatan peninsula) and blasted this rock gas into space. There it cooled down to create little glass particles that reentered the atmosphere. On reentry the glass burned up, but there was so much of it that it raised the temperature of the atmosphere by several hundred degrees Celsius. Anything near the surface (mostly the dinosaurs) was cooked, but anything living just beneath the surface could have survived.

How Much Homework?

As noted previously, the Finns have no homework, while the South Koreans have a lot. Yet these two countries’ educational systems are ranked 1 and 2 in the world. Misty Adoniou summarizes some of the research into the effectiveness of homework.

A key point: there are two types of homework, neither of which may be awfully useful:

  • Extra-practice: Which sometimes does not help a lot because often parents don’t have the expertise to give help when needed.
  • Creative extensions: Which students don’t necessarily need or enjoy because they’d prefer to come up with their interesting projects — if they did not have all the homework (or other distractions).

The type of homework I assign differs by subject. For science, I’ll often ask students to do reading assignments and make vocabulary cards before we cover a topic in class. It’s to give them a little preparation and, theoretically, allows us to do more higher-level, application type projects in class–this is the same as the idea behind flipped classrooms. For math, the objective is for students to get extra practice. Much of algebra and calculus relies on pattern recognition–when you can use integration by substitution for example–so some students benefit from extra practice after class.

ᔥ The Dish