Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
A couple days ago I had students present their physics lab reports to the class. They did a good job, but I think I need to emphasize the importance of including graphs in their results. It’s much harder to look for trends and patterns in the data without charts, especially when presenting to an audience. … Continue reading “The Power of Graphs”
If you pull apart the nucleus of an atom, you’ll find that the mass of its parts is greater than the mass of the original nucleus. That extra mass is where nuclear energy comes from; it’s called the binding energy. How so? Take a helium atom for example. Its nucleus typically has two protons and … Continue reading “Energy in the Nucleus of the Atom”
In fact scientists have found that variety boosts both attention and retention. –Patti Neighmond on NPR’s Morning Edition (2011): Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely Morning Edition has an excellent piece that points out that there is little or no actual experimental data supporting the idea that teaching should be … Continue reading “Learning from Multiple Perspectives Works Better”
Energy cannot be either created or destroyed, just changed from one form to another. That is one of the fundamental insights into the way the universe works. In physics it’s referred to as the Law of Conservation of Energy, and is the basic starting point for solving a lot of physical problems. One great example … Continue reading “Global Temperature Model: An Application of Conservation of Energy”
Elegant in its simplicity but profound in its application, the Pythagorean Theorem is one of the fundamentals of geometry. Mathematician Alexander Bogomolny has dedicated a page to cataloging 93 ways of proving the theorem (he also has, on a separate page, six wrong proofs). Some of the proofs are simple and elegant. Others are quite … Continue reading “93 Ways to Prove Pythagoras’ Theorem”
Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, or maybe it’s genetic a predisposition, but adolescent boys to seem to have more of a predilection for war games than their female peers. The games they like tend to be first-person-shooters, like Call of Duty, and, given the trends toward improved video game graphics and remote, kinetic military action, real … Continue reading “Cyberwar”
Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?” Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.” But then she thought about it, … Continue reading “Molly Backes on How to Be a Writer”
Our bread-baking enterprise was quite popular last year. In the afternoons, just as the loaves were about to come out of the ovens, we’d get the occasional visitor poking their head into our room for “aromatherapy”. Students also liked the freshly baked bread. Some favored the crust while others liked the insides; which worked out … Continue reading “Bread Baking”