Category Archives: Teaching and learning

Kids and drugs: difficulty with definitions.

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I’ve become aware that discussions, both heated and measured, are raging in other parts of the blogosphere about the collisions between drug law, educational initiatives, and governmental agencies responsible for looking out for the welfare of children (e.g., see here, here, and here.) At the moment, looking at hundreds of papers to grade, a soccer game to coach, and a bunch of other tasks that will be significantly harder to complete (but that must be completed within the next few days), I am not jumping into that fray.

However, it did put me in mind of some of the ways our parenting has interacted with the elementary school’s programing, including Red Ribbon Week, an anti-drug educational initiative that generally falls shortly before Halloween (and, coincidentally, that often coincides with National Chemistry Week. Four years ago, when both Free-Ride offspring were in the lower grades, celebrating Red Ribbon Week mostly amounted to wearing sunglasses or crazy socks or whatever that day’s Red Ribbon “theme” called for. But there was also a wee bit of discussion in the classroom about drugs. As originally reported in this post, the Free-Ride parents decided to see what the sprogs had learned:

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National Chemistry Week repost: elements.

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Still swamped, but National Chemistry Week must go on. Here’s a post from the archives about one of the basic concepts of chemistry, what defines an element.

As far as chemists are concerned, the world is made up of atoms and various assemblies and modifications thereof. Those atoms and modifications of atoms are, in turn, made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons have a +1 charge and a mass of 1.0073 amu [1]. Neutrons have zero charge and a mass of 1.0087 amu. And electrons have a -1 charge and a mass of 5.49 x 10-4 amu. Various combinations of these three will give you atoms, radicals, and ions [2]. Protons and neutrons hang out together in the nucleus of your atom (or radical or ion), while electrons can be thought of as zipping around the nucleus [3].

An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. The element oxygen has 8 protons in the nuclei of its atoms. Any atom (or radical or ion) that has exactly 8 protons is an oxygen atom, and all oxygen atoms (or radicals or ions) have exactly 8 protons. It doesn’t matter how many electrons there are zipping around the nucleus; that determines the net charge. It doesn’t matter how many neutrons there are in the nucleus; that determines the atomic mass (and which isotope of oxygen you have). The number of protons in the nucleus is all that counts when you’re determining the element you’re dealing with.

Lots of compounds (like water) are made up of more than one element (here, hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms in a ratio of 2:1). Elements, however, have molecules that are made up of a single kind of atom — elemental hydrogen is H2, while elemental oxygen comes in two forms, O2 and O3 (ozone). Most textbooks will define an element as a substance that can’t be broken down into simpler substances. (This means that chemists must view protons, neutrons, and electrons not as substances, but as the building blocks from which substances are made.)
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[1] The abbreviations “amu” stands for atomic mass unit. 1 amu = 1.66056 x 10 -27 kg.

[2] Ions are nuclei (or multinuclear assemblies) where the total number of protons does not equal the total number of electrons — meaning they have a net-positive or net-negative charge. For example, Cl– has one more electron zipping around the Cl nucleus than there are protons in that nucleus.

A radical is a nucleus (or a multinuclear assembly) with an unpaired electron that’s “looking for action” (i.e., is generally highly reactive). For example Cl. has the same number of protons and electrons (i.e., a neutral charge), but one of its 17 electrons is not paired, and thus the radical is “looking” for an opportunity to react with something else that will provide an electron to pair with.

Not to get too anthropomorphic or anything …

[3] Strictly speaking, you really shouldn’t think of electrons as having a well-defined location until you go looking for them with a “measurement event”. But as far as anyone can tell, they probably don’t stray too far from the positive charge concentrated in the nucleus.

National Chemistry Week repost: Periodic table of wow!

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In honor of National Chemistry Week, another post from the archives:

I suspect I’m late to the party on this one, but I just had occasion to check out The Periodic Table of Videos produced at the University of Nottingham. It’s a collection of 118 short videos (ranging in length from approximately one to ten minutes each), one for each of the elements currently in the Periodic Table of the Elements.

I did not watch all 118 of them, but the ones that I did watch covered, among other things:

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Holy mole-y, it’s National Chemistry Week!

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Your humble blogger is swamped with work, but National Chemistry Week (October 17-23) waits for no overworked academic. So, let me offer a nugget from deep in the archives about why I dig chemistry.

What’s so great about chemistry? Of course, if you’re a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic — something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents’ card table.) But I suspect its real charm for students, at least when it’s taught right, is that it’s a science that looks for the “whys” pretty early in the game. In general, introductory chemistry doesn’t involve much memorization (whether of equations, as in physics, or of Linnaean taxonomy, cell organelles, phases of mitosis, or any of the other important details one has to remember in a biology class). Rather, you learn how to use the Periodic Table almost like a decoder ring to figure out why various substances behave the way they do. From the very beginning, the chemistry student is thinking not just in terms of facts, but in terms of rationalizing those facts. For every weird exception you learn to a regular pattern, the challenge is to understand why it breaks the pattern.

In this chemical universe the student enters, things start to make sense in a way that everyday life hardly ever does. It can be downright seductive. But of course, the orderly chemical universe to which the student is exposed is the product of much labor in laboratories. What happens in the labs can seem chaotic rather than orderly, and sometimes it is only the determination of the chemists to find the underlying order that keeps the going back to the bench to tame the chaos. Needless to say, finding the order in chaos can be seductive, too.

While chemistry often gets props for being a practical subject to pursue (where “practical” usually means leading to gainful employment, and the contrast class is something like philosophy), a lot of the people I know who went into chemistry were led by their hearts more than their heads. Chemistry just felt like the right way to engage with the world.

Primo Levi expressed this as well as anyone else has. Writing about his experiences as a chemistry student in Italy during the rise of Fascism on the eve of World War II, he said he felt

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …

[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers

(The Periodic Table, pp. 45-46.)

Why does it choke me up to see Levi want to conquer matter by understanding it, or to see that his motivation to understand matter is a desire to understand the universe and himself? Coming at a science like this, you can see why a couple centuries ago it was called natural philosophy. As nuts and bolts as the work of a chemist can be — and Levi was for most of his career a chemist who took on problems in different industrial labs, including an IG-Farben lab while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz — the drive here is to understand the substance of reality, to get at knowledge we can be sure of and can hold in common with others. Wanting something like this — to understand of the universe we’re in and how we fit into it, to share our experience with our fellow human beings — feels like the most human of impulses. Science is not the show-offy acting out of the maladjusted braniac, but the labor of the human spirit.

Maybe if more of that got across to science students, and to the public at large, cultivating scientific literacy wouldn’t seem so much like taking a dose of castor oil.

DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students Drive 2010.

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Note to longtime readers: This post borrows heavily from posts I have written for past DonorsChoose drives. If you get a feeling of deja vu reading it, you’ve come by it honestly.

In the science-y sectors of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public’s scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding.

In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.

This year, from October 10th through November 9th, a number of science bloggers, whether networked, loosely affiliated, or proudly independent, will be teaming up with DonorsChoose in a philanthropic throwdown for public schools.

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.

Over the last few years, bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, funding hundreds of classroom projects, and impacting thousands of students.

Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

As economic experts scan the horizon for hopeful signs and note the harbingers of economic recovery, we should not forget that school budgets are still hurting (and are worse, in many cases, than they were last school year, since one-time lumps of stimulus money are gone now). Indeed, public school teachers have been scraping for resources since long before Wall Street’s financial crisis started. Theirs is a less dramatic crisis than a bank failure, but it’s here and it’s real and we can’t afford to wait around for lawmakers on the federal or state level to fix it.

The kids in these classrooms haven’t been making foolish investments. They’ve just been coming to school, expecting to be taught what they need to learn, hoping that learning will be fun. They’re our future scientists, doctors, teachers, decision-makers, care-providers, and neighbors. To create the scientifically literate world we want to live in, let’s help give these kids the education they deserve.

One classroom project at a time, we can make things better for these kids. Joining forces with each other people, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The challenge this year runs October 10 through November 9. We’re overlapping with Earth Science Week (October 10-16, 2010) and National Chemistry Week (October 17-23, 2010), a nice chance for earth science and chemistry fans to add a little philanthropy to their celebrations. There are a bunch of Scientopia bloggers mounting challenges this year (check out some of their challenge pages on our leaderboard), as well as bloggers from other networks (which you can see represented on the challenge’s motherboard). And, since today is the official kick-off, there is plenty of time for other bloggers and their readers to enter the fray!


How It Works:
Follow the links above to your chosen blogger’s challenge on the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected. Or more than one project, if you just can’t choose. (Or, if you really can’t choose, just go with the “Give to the most urgent project” option at the top of the page.)

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! But you’re also allowed to play favorites.)
DonorsChoose will send you a confirmation email. Hold onto it; some bloggers (including me) will be offering donors nifty prizes. Details about the prizes and how to get them will be posted here soon!

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the leaderboards to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity.

Even if you can’t make a donation, you can still help!
Spread the word about these challenges using web 2.0 social media modalities. Link your favorite blogger’s challenge page on your MySpace page, or put up a link on Facebook, or FriendFeed, or LiveJournal (or Friendster, or Xanga, or …). Tweet about it on Twitter. Sharing your enthusiasm for this cause may inspire some of your contacts who do have a little money to get involved and give.

Here’s the permalink to my giving page.

I’ll be sharing links to other giving pages, plus details about some fabulous “thank you” prizes, soon. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

What a nine-year-old doesn’t know about teaching.

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Last night, the younger Free-Ride offspring came upon me grading a stack of quizzes. (Suffice it to say that the younger Free-Ride offspring did not grab a pen and offer to help with the grading, although there was a bit of showing off by explaining the informal fallacies on the quiz to me. “Am I as smart as a college student?”)

But then things took a turn that reminded me that there are some pieces of my everyday experience that are total mysteries to a kid.

Younger offspring: Did I say the right thing to explain what was wrong about the reasoning?

Dr. Free-Ride: Pretty much. See for yourself on the answer key.

Younger offspring: (Noticing the answer key is handwritten, in purple ink) Wait, did you have to write the answers yourself?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, of course.

Younger offspring: It’s good that you’re smart enough to know the answers.

Dr. Free-Ride: I’d better know the answers, since I wrote the quiz.

Younger offspring: (Eyes widening) You had to write the quiz yourself, too?

Dr. Free-Ride: Kiddo, where did you think quizzes come from?

Younger offspring: I didn’t know.

Video dispatch from the mouth of the cave of grading: why do we write the essay before the lecture?

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Another week, another stack of essays to collect (and read, and comment upon). This week, though, a student actually asked the question in class that I imagine many ask themselves: why are they writing essays on material before I’ve lectured on it, rather than after?

Because I’m too tired to type, I take on that question in a brief video dispatch.

Job opening to support STEM students who are low-income, first-generation college students, or have disabilities

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From Kim Hannula of All of My Faults are Stress-Related comes news of a position being advertised at her fair college as a director of a STEM student services program. Kim says:

We recently received a grant from the Department of Education, to provide support for science/technology/engineering/math students who are low-income, first-generation, or have disabilities. We have a similar program (the Program for Academic Advancement) for students college-wide, but this new program will support math, science, and engineering students. I’m excited about this program – our PAA program does a fantastic job helping students finish their degrees and move on to graduate school or the workforce, and I’m looking forward to working with the STEM3 program.

Here are the details (which you can also find here in the official job posting):

Director
STEM3 Student Support Services Program
Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado

Fort Lewis College invites applications for the Director of its new STEM3 Student Support Services Program (a federally funded TRiO program). The position is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that requires application for renewal every five years. The Director is responsible for organizing and managing support services for 120 academically and/or economically disadvantaged college students. Services include tutoring and academic, career, financial aid, and graduate school advising for eligible students in the STEM disciplines. STEM disciplines include the Sciences (Agriculture, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Exercise Science, Geology, Geoscience, Physics, and Psychology), Technology (Computer Science Information Systems), Engineering, and Mathematics. The Director will also be responsible for approving expenditures, maintaining budget control and responsibility for the appropriate use of grant funds; facilitating and overseeing development and implementation of effective, objective project evaluation; maintaining data collection and a program database for monitoring and tracking of participant progress and outcomes; working closely with the Dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the FLC STEM faculty to ensure program delivery will meet STEM student needs; overseeing preparation of fiscal and technical reports for the U.S. Dept. of Education and Fort Lewis College; managing and supervising program personnel; providing intrusive academic advising and monitoring, and financial aid advising to a small caseload of participants; attending STEM Department Chair meetings; and serving on relevant college committees.

Minimum qualifications are as follows:

  • Masters Degree in Social Sciences, Education, Educational Administration, Student Personnel Administration, Counseling, or related field and a BS / BA in a STEM discipline (see above)
  • At least four years experience working with disadvantaged students (low-income, first generation, students with disabilities) in higher education
  • At least two years experience designing comprehensive programs that include courses, activities, workshops, tutoring or supplemental instruction, student monitoring, or other services that promote retention of SSS eligible STEM students at the postsecondary level
  • At least two years experience implementing procedures for delivery of services, data collection, program evaluation or similar procedures that enhance program effectiveness and promote student retention in SSS or similar programs at the postsecondary level
  • At least three years of administrative and supervisory experience that includes budget oversight and management.

Preferred qualifications include:

  • Experience as a disadvantaged (first-generation, low-income, or disabled) college student
  • Experience working with a TRiO program or other program with a similar mission
  • Ability to provide ad-hoc tutoring support, especially in mathematics
  • Successful grant writing and grant management experience.

This position is a full-time, 12 month position. Candidates must be willing to work flexible hours including evenings and weekends. Some travel is required to statewide, regional, and/or national meetings. Salary is $42,000 with full range of benefits. The position is anticipated to begin in November 2010. Individuals with experience as a disadvantaged individual or assisting disadvantaged students are encouraged to apply.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Interested and qualified applicants must submit: 1) a letter of interest detailing experience that meets the minimum and preferred qualifications, 2) a current resume, and 3) the names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three professional references electronically to:

stem3directorsearch@fortlewis.edu

Deadline: Complete applications must be received no later than 5:00 pm on Monday, October 18, 2010 to receive consideration.

Fort Lewis College does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or veteran status. Accordingly, equal opportunity for employment, admission, and education shall be extended to all persons. The College shall promote equal opportunity, equal treatment, and affirmative action efforts to increase the diversity of students, faculty, and staff. People from under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.

If this sounds like your kind of job (and the qualifications sound like you), for heaven’s sake apply!

If this sounds like someone you know (especially if he or she is currently on the market), please forward this information.

Friday Sprog Blogging: the glorious return of the science fair!

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At least, the Free-Ride offspring’s elementary school thinks it has money in the budget for a science fair this Spring. Sure, I know that grown-up science is frequently constrained by a rapidly changing funding landscape, but I’m not sure that including this element of scientific activity is what will catch a kid’s imagination.

Anyway, I asked the sprogs to jot down their current thoughts on what they might want to do for the science fair this year. Here’s what they gave me.

The elder Free-Ride offspring (now in sixth grade) hasn’t really latched on to one idea yet. The current list of options reads as follows (with my commentary in square brackets):

  • Which food does Snow like best? [We definitely need to read up on the rules about observational studies of domestic animals in science fairs. As well, this kernel of a project idea requires some careful thinking about controls.]
  • Snails or slugs: which are more efficient? [Efficient at what, wonders Dr. Free-Ride.]
  • Which is more viscous, honey or syrup? [I reckon we’d need a few more substances in the comparison. Plus some exploration of what it is about each substance that makes it more or less viscous.]
  • Trick people’s palates! [Intriguing! But also cryptic. Is this going to be about food chemistry, or tastebuds, or psychology?]
  • How heat affects bunny naps. [Again, we need to get right with the rules on animal observational studies. And we may be running out of really warm days to use as data points.]

The younger Free-Ride offspring (now in fourth grade) has been gravitating toward an idea inspired by a family camping trip at Lassen Volcanic National Park:

Working with sulfur.

Found in Sulfur Works, Bumpass Hell, & Devil’s Kitchen [all sites at Lassen].

What do you have to do to make sulfur smell like rotten eggs?

Can we find sulfur in foods we have in the house (besides eggs)? How could we get the sulfur out?

What happens if we put wet soil and trapped steam (don’t know how) in a bowl, then put sulfur soil (ground sulfur to a powder) on the top layer?

This could be really interesting … but I’m wondering now if our kitchen is going to need a fume hood.

Stay tuned.