"Is this right...?"

Procedural rules are both useful and arbitrary--we like to have routines, and we like to know the routines already established. (I bet the 20 odd people backed up at Newark Liberty Airport while I fumbled with the check-in procedure would agree.) A child in my classroom might not know that if you want to go to the bathroom, you just sign the in/out book and grab the horseshoe crab shell that serves as the pass.

Because the rules are arbitrary, asking "is this right?" makes sense.

"Is this right?"

A child looks up, not invested enough in the problem to look confused.

Some things in high school science are obvious once you grasp the principles--there is no need to ask. Because there is no need to ask, I no longer feel compelled to answer.

I walk away. When she knows enough to be confused, I'll amble back over.

***

I am still less experienced than my students--they have been at the school game for 11 years, and this is my 6th year teaching. I am getting better.

The child has learned the rules of the game well--extract the right answer, and Teacher gets off your back. Mom gets off your back. The Principal gets off your back. Chris Cerf gets off your back. Arne Duncan gets off your back. Rewards are promised. You can listen to your iPod in peace as you drift back into a world defined by primates.

We tolerate no confusion in our culture. Decisiveness trumps thoughtfulness. Political campaigns thrive on this. Twanging the amygdala pushes us into the certainty of the Light Brigade.

Science doesn't work that way because the natural does not work that way.

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." Albert Einstein

The cartoon is from xkcd, natch!

In honor of errant cannonballs

Most folks who read science blogs probably already know this,
but the folks at Mythbusters managed to put a cannoball through both someone's home and another family's minivan.

In honor of that, here's a repost from two Decembers ago.

I love xkcd, and I love Richard Feynman. I'm fond of zombies, too. I've spent several hundred posts and perhaps a quarter million words to say what Randall Munroe dashes off in a few stick figures above.

The guy's a comic genius, he loves the Pleiades, and he happens to be a physicist, too.

Randall Munroe generously lends his creations out to the bloggers. Really.

My Google-approved, high-tech, zomgilicious overhead projector

We have interactive whiteboards in our classrooms. They are relatively expensive, and a real pain in the arse if you're left-handed, especially if there's any delay in the projection. (This may not seem obvious, go ask a southpaw...)

The Amish do not have anything in particular against technology, but they do have issues with anything that separates the community. Much of modern technology does just that.

I am not opposed to high tech in the classroom, but I am opposed to tech that is no better than what it replaces, especially if it's more expensive. There are some things I can do with a blackboard that cannot be done with a whiteboard, and the interactive whiteboard, despite its flash, is more restrictive than my whiteboard when I am helping children learn how to think.

On a recent post, I wondered aloud about the use of the word "bitch"--I think it's offensive, many young folk disagree, and a brilliant young adult who happens to work for Google sent me a chat given there by Randall Munroe, the author of xkcd. The talk is fascinating, of course, but even more interesting (to me, anyway) was how Munroe illustrated his work. He used an overhead projector.

It was a fancy camera over an oh-so-cool desktop, but still, it was, in essence, an overhead projector.

I still have an overhead projector, and I still have acetate, but I have not used it, mostly because I cannot hear anything over the fan. I have a camera I use just about every day, projecting various objects on the board as the students wander in to class.

And now I have a Google-approved, high-tech, zomgilicious overhead projector--I simply aim my camera at a piece of paper, and I write. The writing gets projected onto a whiteboard where I can scribble some more. Students can scribble on their own whiteboards, or they can scribble on mine. ("Mine" gets less obvious every day in my class.)

Phenology notes for myself: first ospreys seen diving for fish on Saturday, April 9;
the cormorants are back, the loons have yet to leave.

Randall Munroe screen shot from video cited above.

I still think the word is offensive, so I deleted the original xkcd cartoon 

Sorry, Amanda, I just found your letter--it got stuck in the spam section.

Superlative fatigue

We don't know what we want.

Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.

iPad:  A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.

Dell: The power to do more.

Constructing Modern Knowledge: The best educational event of the year. 

Lenovo education: Learn how to ignite learning, enhance efficiency, and have fun.

Acer: Empowering people.

Smart: A new frontier of collaborative learning has arrived.

InterwriteMobi: Collaboration at its finest.

SanDisk: Now you can take it all with you. And when we say ''all'' we mean everything.

To see what we "need" is to see how we see ourselves. And it's frightening.

I get the logic. Create the need, sell the product.
I get the allure of capitalism.
I get that these are just slogans.

What I don't get is why they work so well in a profession ostensibly charged with teaching others how to think for themselves.

xkcd rocks....
Slogans lifted straight off respective websites. Baaaa....