Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Apparently, 8% of human genes have been spliced in by viruses.
The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. – University of Texas at Arlington (2010)
A beautiful intersection of art, science and abstract thinking. An assemblage of photos compressed into a circular graph by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.
[googleMap name=”Old Turbine” description=”Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Dam” width=”490″ height=”490″ mapzoom=”14″ mousewheel=”false”]35.072711, -88.250578[/googleMap]
The hydroelectric dam at Pickwick Landing on the Tennessee River is an almost ideal place to observe electricity generation and transmission. It was a serendipitous discovery though. After our failure to arrange a tour of a dam in Arkansas on the last immersion, we did not even try with this one.
The dam is right next to Pickwick Landing State Park where we camp when visiting the Shiloh National Battlefield. We’d arrived early at the park on the day before our visit to Shiloh, and having seen the dam and its locks on Google Maps’ satellite image (click the satellite button on the map above), I thought it might be useful if we drove over.
Coming around the northern side of the dam we spotted, right next to a parking lot, an old turbine from the dam that had been set up for display. It is amazing how big these things are, but what was really neat is the fact that if you listened, you could hear the whine of the modern turbines coming from the generators deep inside the dam.
Standing over the old turbine was an enormous high-voltage wire tower, sparse metal frame and truncated arms like a benevolent grandparent leaning over a plump, but scared child. The line of towers are connected to the generation station in the dam by power substation just across the street from the old turbine. The substation’s large transformer drums were obvious even from across the road.
Crossing southward over the dam, there is a road that runs westward along the edge of the river that allows a good view of the downriver side of the locks. We were lucky enough to see a barge passing through, although with the traffic on the river the locks are probably always busy.
When we got back to the park the students draw a diagrams of the dam. They don’t do nearly enough diagrams given the importance of drawing in connecting the body and the mind (something I plan on rectifying in the next cycle) so this was a good experience for them. It was also a reminder to always keep their writer’s notebooks with them because then they could have drawn their diagram while they were at the dam looking at the thing.
The BBC has an excellent video demonstration by Maggie Aderin-Pocock of how to demonstrate how additional carbon dioxide in the air results in global warming. She uses baking soda and vinegar to create the CO2 and lamps for light (putting the bottles in the sun would work just as well). You’d also probably want to use regular thermometers in the bottles if you don’t have ones that connect to your computer.
Along the edge of Pickwick Lake are outcrops of sedimentary rock being slowly broken apart by the action of the waves on the reservoir. We stopped for lunch at Shelter #6 in Pickwick Landing State Park (see map) before finding our cabins for this immersion. Located at the eastern edge of a triangular ridge of land girded by drowned river valleys on two sides the shelter is almost surrounded by water. On a beautiful, clear day at the beginning of spring, with temperatures verging on t-shirt weather, tiny flowers blooming in the grass and tree leaves just sprouting, it was an almost perfect time and place to take a break after a long drive.
Yet despite the fact that we were eating later that we normally do, half the class walked right past the shelter and down the rough slope to the lake’s edge. There they found fossils. Beautiful crinoids were weathering out of thin (4cm thick) alternating layers of sandstone and limestone, their long fossilized necks resisting while the limestone around them slowly dissolved away. They also found bivalves partially exposed on the face of the broken cliff and in the small pile of tallus. There were even a few thin sandstone wedges sitting on the rocks at the edge of the water that looked like fossilized burrow molds. It was quite fascinating.
Neither the word “science” nor the phrase “natural world” was used, and they brought the questions to me, which I always consider better than me asking them. Next year when we study Earth History perhaps the subject will be considered boring when we see it in the classroom, but today, out there on the rocks at the edge of the water, they got a great primer.
This stop, planed solely as a lunch break was so successful that I now wonder if I should plan the immersion trips to introduce the topics we cover in class rather than using them to integrate what we’ve already seen. Let the outdoor experience be the “spark the imagination” part of the lesson. I’m not sure, but it’s something to think about.
[googleMap name=”Picnic Shelter #6, Pickwick Landing State Park” description=”The picnic shelter is located at the point due west of this marker.” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”15″ mousewheel=”false”]35.055555, -88.232[/googleMap]
NOVA’s program The Elegant Universe has an excellent website where the entire three hour video is available for free (with a full screen option). They have also broken the video up into segments and have a great teachers’ page which summarizes what’s in each segment.
Created in 2003, when string theory was making it’s big splash in the popular consciousness, The Elegant Universe starts with Newton’s observations of gravity, shows Einstein’s separate explanations of why gravity works and the nature of the sub-atomic world, and finally delves into string theory which tries to reconcile Einstein’s two theories into a unified whole.
We don’t usually get past Newton in middle school, but this PBS program introduces such a wider and weirder view of the universe that it can help strike the imagination. It also presents complex concepts in an intelligible way.
The government’s Energy Star program to label products that are more energy efficient was in the news recently (and there are a lot of different products that have the label). The New York Times ran a story on how auditors, when asked by congress, submitted 20 fake and often ridiculous products to be approved for the stickers many environmentally aware people look for when they buy appliances like refrigerators (an AP report is also available).
GAO obtained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock. – (GAO, 2010)
The Energy Star investigation was done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is often tasked with checking up on the other branches of the government. The GAO website is a great information source because they post very readable summaries of their reports, and a highlights page that answers the question, “Why GAO Did This Study” and “What GAO Found”.
This study highlights the lesson that while we want to be environmentally aware, we must always remain skeptical of claims pushed by manufacturers, even if they are supported by government certification. It also highlights an excellent application of the concept of checks and balances. One branch of government (congress) checks up on others (EPA and DOE who run the Energy Star program are part of the executive branch) and the others are forced to improve.
A discussion of statistical significance is probably a bit above middle school level, but I’m posting a note here because it is a reminder about the importance of statistics. In fact, students will hear about confidence intervals when they hear about the margin of error of polls in the news and the “significant” benefits of new drugs. Indeed, if you think about it, the development of formal thinking skills during adolescence should make it easier for students to see the world from a more probabilistic perspective, noticing the shades of grey that surround issues, rather that the more black and white, deterministic, point of view young idealists tend to have. At any rate, statistics are important in life but, according to a Science Magazine article, many scientists are not using them correctly.
One key error is in understanding the term “statistically significant”. When Ronald A. Fisher came up with the concept he arbitrarily chose 95% as the cutoff to test if an experiment worked. The arbitrariness is one part of the problem, 95% still means there is one chance in twenty that the experiment failed and with all the scientists conducting experiments, that’s a lot of unrecognized failed experiments.
But the big problem is the fact that people conflate statistical significance and actual significance. Just because there is a statistically significant correlation between eating apples and acne, does not mean that it’s actually important. It could be that this result predicts that one person in ten million will get acne from eating apples, but is that enough reason to stop eating apples?
It is a fascinating article that deals with a number of other erroneous uses of statistics, but I’ve just spent more time on this post than I’d planned (it was supposed to be a short note). So I’d be willing to bet that there is a statistically significant correlation between my interest in an issue and the length of the post (and no correlation with the amount of time I intended to spend on the post).
