Thermodynamics in elementary school

The cicadas are humming again. I think I hear what they're saying: "As much sun as there is today, there's a little less than yesterday." They crawl form underground chambers to share their oracles, our oracles. We know how the story ends.

The easy living of early June gives way to the inevitable entropy that follows. You can smell the still subtle fragrance of decay today, soon to be mixed with the sulfury celebration of our country. The Fourth of July is our nation's midsummer night of madness.

We are already harvesting for the winter.

***

Something happened a long time ago. That's how most stories start.

In science, whatever that something was, it was big, and "a long time ago" was just that--an incomprehensibly huge chunk of time between when the "something happened" and now.

If you don't keep that in mind, the story of science, as we know it now (and it will, of course, change), cannot hold.

It all boils down to the Laws of Thermodynamics. The laws are, in a sense, religious, not a trivial point.

Energy/mass cannot be created nor destroyed--we have what we have. Call mass/energy some random string of sounds--let's call it the Great Hedasha--and you found a sect.

The Great Hedasha is all. She cannot be destroyed, only transformed. She is part of everything in existence--she changes forms, but is always whole. The Great Hedasha, as she transforms, loses structure, loses form, becomes more amorphous with every passing moment. She becomes less useful (and "useful" is a huge word). Entropy rules.

Amen.

Unless, of course, she reverts to whatever She was 14 billion years ago or so--maybe the Hindus got that right. No way to know, of course.

***

Science is allusory--we need reference points to make it work. Allude means, literally, "to play with." Science plays with reality, creates stories that then bend back our perception of reality, then plays some more. The natural world, for all our confusion, is remarkably consistent.

When we teach science as reality, we kill it. When we take the play out of thinking, we lose whole universes. It is possible to engineer a better bridge without knowing a whole lot of science.

We may or may not need more engineers, depending on who you talk to--but we could use more science in our early grades.We teach a lot of pseudo-science. We expect kids to believe that the Earth is round, because we say so, that gravity sticks them to the "side" of the Earth because we say so, that the universe is billions of years old, because we say so.

None of those is easily demonstrated in a classroom--but entropy is. Things fall apart. It takes "energy" to put them back together.

 ***

How do we teach entropy? We mostly don't.

While the concepts are, at the heart, simple, the ramifications are huge, and involve things most of us would rather avoid--death, nothingness, everythingness, ommm, ommmm, ommmm.

We dabble with it in high school physics, but couch it in equations, and solving the equations, alas, becomes "science."

Obviously we're not going to toss calculus at kindergarteners. (Even Achieve.org is not that opaque--yet.) But we can still teach thermodynamics.


Things ultimately get cooler. Always. The seeming exceptions are when we warm things up by adding energy to smaller systems within larger ones.

We exist as our prideful orderly selves because the sun keeps streaming onto our planet. When the sun creeps away, as it does every year, things fall apart. Why? Because useful energy scatters, and has for billions of years.

That's about as far into the why you can expect from a young child, which is OK, but that's as far into the why as you can expect from a nuclear physicist.

Humpty Dumpty is all about entropy. As is science. As is life.


Kids know this already. We older folk often forget.

The cicada image is by Gardener41, used under CC
Humpty Dumpty is from Alice in Wonderland
The equations are from Statistical Geofluid Mechanics blog by François Ascani 

Thermometers, again

Thermometers work by magic, or may as well, given the  way we use them in class.

Lorin King, released under CC 3.0

We focus on how to read them, then how to convert one reading to the other. If a child barely has a grasp on Fahrenheit, it's really too much to ask her to convert to Celsius, not matter how much more sense it might make. Kelvin is just Celsius with a degree in pedantics.

A child can observe the triple point of water, at least two parts of it. (Water vapor is invisible--the fog you see is condensed water--droplets of liquid.) A child can tell when water is boiling.

Give a child a thermometer without numbers, without lines. Let her figure out why calibration matters. Otherwise a thermometer is just another talisman in a republic that cannot survive magical thinking.

The worksheet made by Lorin King, released under CC 3.0

It's all there for those who care to look

 This was posted two years ago. I liked it then, and I still do.

It's  late June.

Light life and more light and more life. Little makes sense, but in June the abundance pushes aside the questions.

I have tooth marks in my thumb from a fluke. A snake no longer than a ruler tried to strike me a few hours later. A lone bat heralded dusk.

School winds down in June.

Next year I plan to start with Darwin's idea of descent with modification. He did not invent evolution. He did, however, figure out that the raw beauty of life's symphony here can be explained without appealing to some central plan that places humans above all else.

It's all there for those who care to look.

If you are going to acknowledge something is unknowable or incomprehensible or too powerful to comprehend, hey, I'm right there with you. Many things will remain unknowable in any scientific sense.

When you try to explain the inexplicable, when you presume to know the "meaning" of existence, though, keep it outside my classroom door. I teach biology, not metaphysics.

I'll be glad to discuss the "unknowable" with you,
ideally by a lake at dusk,
watching bluegill sucking down lightning bugs
enamored by their own reflection.

Just not in class.


Photos taken a few moments ago--grapes, honeysuckle, and sage.

On thermometers

I got sidetracked from science for a bit. Governor Christie came to our school back in March for a private meeting; our Ed Commissioner Chris Cerf tagged along, and took exception to my opinion of his past work. We met again, and then again, though I'm still not clear why.

At any rate, my foray into politics has apparently ended--Trenton is silent, my orneriness again overwhelming what talents I may have. At least I got to spend an hour in the commissioner's glass office, overlooking the Delaware River. I like the Delaware more than I like offices, so next time I'll stay outside.

Back to science. If I should stumble onto anything that might help kids, Mr. Cerf, feel free to use it.

***

We teach a lot of pseudoscience. We praise Aspergerish behaviors in science class. We rewards those children who can mimic our stories, but not those who create new ones.

What does a child know measuring temperature? What do any of us know? A classroom thermometer is a disarmingly simple gadget--a glass tube with some dyed alcohol in it. The way we use them, though, they may as well be cast from the Temple of Delphi.

Alcohol, like most stuff, expands when heated. We tell kids that, and they write it down, spit it back, and wham, we just bypassed one of the most basic and interesting facets of physical science a child will ever get a chance to know.

Let's explore it a bit further....

***

If we shove some alcohol in a tube, leave some space, then seal off the top, we have a thermometer. Gas is far more compressible than liquid, so as the alcohol warms up, it rises up the column. At some point we need to calibrate it, but let's leave it blank for now and give it to a 7 year old.

What can she do with it?

She can watch what it does. Warm things (whatever warm means, and for mammals it's truly relative) it rises, for cool things, it shrinks.

Can a 7 year old grasp that if the liquid rises to the same point that an object has the same temperature? This is a far more difficult concept that it appears. Most adults wouldn't get it. We all talk about temperature, but few of us know what we're talking about.

But let's get back to the thermometer....

***

If the alcohol expands, and we did not add anything to the tube, and we accept the idea that atoms exist, then only a few things could have happened. Either the atoms got bigger themselves, the space between the atoms got bigger, or both.

We're not talking about trivial volumes. You neglect this, and bridges fall down. Our whole story about physical science depends on our concept of atoms. Few of us grasp the model, and even fewer grasp that it's just a model.  We kill science long before a child has a chance to shave unwanted hairs.

We place far more emphasis on the ability to read the thermometer than on the story behind why alcohol expands when heated. The story is not hard to grasp. The particles of alcohol vibrate more as they "warm up"--Michael Jackson needed more space dancing than, say, sleeping.

Temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of particles in a given lump of stuff--kinetic energy is all about motion. The more actively you dance, the more kinetic energy you have. (To be fair, a physicist would argue I put the cart before the horse--the dancing reflects the kinetic energy.)

So tell the 2nd grader the story--the more active the particles are, the warmer they feel. The more the alcohol particles dance, the more space they need. Why? Because....

The "because" dictates the story--we forget this, but children do not. Everything is "because" when you're young. The stories help us sort out the "becauses"--and ultimately, much of this is unknowable.

If I were king of the world, thermometers in early elementary school would not be calibrated. They would not even have lines. They'd just be sticks of colored alcohol, lying about in class. The less said, the better....

***

For a high school student, this is not a trivial matter. We tell them that the molecules are vibrating more, but what does this mean?

We feel "heat"--or rather, our brain processes afferent signals, and determines that skin molecules are vibrating a bit faster than they were a moment ago. Our brains do not love our models--if they did, science would be intuitive. There's a reason, a good one, that sophomores are more interested in sex than science.

It you put one hand in cold water, and the other in hot, then put both in tepid water, the former will feel warm, the latter cold. It's an easy demo for class, and one worth doing. For survival, knowing whether something is warmer or cooler is enough. The thermometer belies our bias.

So we create our stories. If we're going to teach science, we're going to have to stumble along with our stories. There's no other way.

(Yes, I know our stories are bound by what we observe, and are often more easily represented by mathematical models--but we are talking of children, most who will fail in Arne's dream of creating a generation of technophiliacs.)

***

It gets down to matter, and energy, and we do a lousy job explaining either to our little ones, partly because they're hard to grasp, but more so because we fear admitting what we don't know.

If our goal is more engineers, then maybe pushing the stories as reality, concrete as the brains running ed reform, makes sense.

Science, alas, is grounded in the universe, which is to say, it's not grounded at all--the pieces are flying all over the place, each fragment related to every other, but flying all over nonetheless. It's messy, but despite the mess, possibly (possibly) reducible to a few general principles.

***

I could spend a month playing with thermometers and heat in class, but I do not have that kind of time. I'm supposed to teach biology.

Our high school has several patches of "dog vomit" slime mold bubbling about the school grounds, one patch oozing a bloody red liquid. I just found it today.

This is great stuff! Utterly incomprehensible oozing life forms just a few feet from our school's doors. I will fence it off tomorrow, and ask the custodians to leave it be.

Here's the catch--while we pretend that the icky stuff is what we need to capture our kids' interest, the science behind our lowly cheap thermometers would be more than enough to hold the interest of our students if we were more interested in sharing our ignorance of this universe thing than if we were trying to raise engineers.

I've got nothing against engineers--some of my best friends....you get the idea.

We got colleges for engineers. I just want to teach science, the kind based on observations of a universe we cannot possibly hope to grasp perfectly, but one that we can hope to grasp enough to know it more than most of us do.

Enough to know the meaning of finite, the meaning of enough, the meaning of *blush* love.

What do any of us truly know?
Slime photo by Ivo Antuske, who released it to the PD'
The Gov's photo from our school's website.

Thank you, MSUNER

Today I got to hang with about 300 other teachers, honing our craft, talking about what worked and what didn't, at a lovely conference at Montclair State University.

Our Governor was not there. Our union was not there. Our students were not there.

Just us, talking shop, formally and informally.

With the storm clouds rolling in, it's easy to forget why we do this. It's nice to get a pay check, true--despite the howls of the ridiculously rich, there's no shame in earning a living. Still, we get more than that. Far more than that.

I'm good. I want to be better. Most of us do.

Thank you Cheryl Hopper for a wonderful conference.

Stories matter

"Remember when..."

Late June is a great time to be an American. Stories are told during the long, soft dusk. Lightning bugs almost make up for the skeeters. Talk swings from baseball to beans, passing through epic feats of failure, now funny stories weaved between births and deaths.

"Jodie's not so well... Gawd, how Anna has grown! 6 months?... Really? She barely shows....We're hanging on, barely....What a wedding!....Goodness, it's lovely out tonight....."

We laugh, we drink, we eat, we share.

Your children are not truly competing with the Chinese children or the Finnish children or the Indian children. Our children are now seen as chattel, penned in the same cell as any other child. They are all competing against an international corporate structure that protects their own children at the expense of all others. No, it's not some sekrit international plot--it's just human nature gone amok....

It doesn't have to be this way. We got good earth, and water, and trees, for now. We have seas with fish, and plains with grain, for now. We have coal and wind and sunlight. We have a reasonably moderate climate, for now.

We also have a story, a good story, and a constitution, a good constitution. We have wonderful parables--Johnny Appleseed, Annie Oakley, John Henry. We're the goofy, kind folks who left our native lands, folks who  can solve pretty much any problem tossed our way, in unexpected ways.

When did arrogance and efficiency and misplaced elitism become our story? Why do we care what Bill Gates and Eli Broad have to say? How does a man like Arne Duncan become the national figurehead for what used to be education?

When did we stop wanting to be Americans?

***

I'm not raising children to be chattel. A well-educated child, one who knows where she came from, knows her land, and knows what's possible, makes for a lousy slave.

There's a good reason literacy creates turmoil in tiered cultures.

Literacy takes time.
Education takes time and room.
Living well takes time and room and wisdom.

Our national leaders spent their lives rushing to "there" without ever knowing "here"--hard to love a land you know only abstractly. Hard to love anything you know only abstractly. It's impossible to rightly care for something you don't know how to love.

Love of our land can start with the simple act of putting a bean seed in a recycled milk carton, filled with dirt scooped up by a child's hand from the ground next to the school building. It can start with a walk to the closest stream. It can start with listening to a grandmother describe what her town looked like a few decades ago, when people knew what a stoop was for.

Not sure growing a bean will help a child on the NJASK, our tithe to the NCLB nonsense. But I am sure of this:

A child who has a love of place, of life, of the universe has a better shot at happiness than one who does not. Few things are more dangerous than an educated adult with no sense of place. Right now they're running the show, and telling the tales.

***

You don't need a tinfoil hat anymore to be a conspiracy crank. Here's a headline from today's Star-Ledger:

N.J. hedge fund leaders create group to financially back education reforms supported by Gov. Christie

Last week we got this:

Christie's proposal would give private companies unprecedented control of failing N.J. public schools

Chris Cerf, our Acting Commissioner of Education, used to be the CEO of Edison Schools--ask him how things went in Philly and Baltimore. He knows the problems. He's bright, he's personable, and I trust his heart is in the right place. I tend to trust a lot.

Yet here we go again. How does a bright man with an intimate role in the history of failed privatization of public schools keep doing what he does?

I have a hypothesis (hey, I'm a science teacher)--I suspect that he and those he hangs with share different stories, stories framed by private schools, hedge funds, and power. While Mr. Cerf was cutting his teeth as a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School, I was busy chelating lead poisoned kids in Newark.

Fancy day schools will pluck out an occasional child of color from the inner city--makes making the websites and pamphlets more, um, democratic. They won't be taking the child whose brain has been severely damaged by lead. They won't be taking the child whose life crises leave a legacy of outrageous behaviors. 

They don't need to--it's not part of their story. They don't know those children even exist.

But I do.

 

To his credit, Mr. Cerf did spend some time with me, far more than I could have hoped for.
I don't want Zuckerberg's money, I don't want to administrate, I don't care much for meetings.
I do care about the kids, and I do care about my profession.
I know a bit about both. 

Solstice graduation

"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

Bottom, Midsummer Nights Dream

Except in June.

Just about every day this week I grabbed a few small, dark cherries from the small trees lining Liberty Street--just the right bitterness to counter the almost too rich fruitiness. The sun seems to have frozen in the north, teetering a week or two before starting our slow plunge back to darkness.

Life brims mid-June, feeding on the energy that bathes the Earth this time of year. The energy starts to dwindle tomorrow. Tonight I put my shoes away for the summer,unless, of course, there'a a wake. I took them off as I left our graduation ceremony. The ice returns in just a few months, as inevitable as the wakes that keep my shoes busy.

If you pay attention to these things, the dwindling light, the mad dancing of organisms in the June dusk, the aroma of honeysuckle drifting through your skull, the incessant buzzing of hundreds, thousands of critters aware of you, you'd go mad, of course, a Mid-Summer's Night Dream kind of insanity,

And many of us do--pay attention and go mad--mid-June, midsummer, when living requires little, as fine a time as any to toss a class of young adults out into the world.

And how many are "college and career-ready"? Not sure what that even means.

But I am sure of this--several hundred children from many different cultures, from many different lands, from many different circumstance, left our building tonight having an idea of what is possible, of what democracy can look like. A lot of them left our building "college ready" for schools they cannot afford, and "career ready" for jobs that left north Jersey a generation ago.

They are kind, they are brave, they are bright, and they are now adults entering a world Arne does not (or will not) recognize. As we turn inexorably to November, to darkness, to fear, I hope that a child's new-found knowledge of how the natural world gives her pause before she plunges into cynicism, or to self-loathing.

It's a beautiful world out there, but a world defined by limits imposed by our sun, our soil, or water. Our children are of this world, so long as they live. This matters more than any games imposed by wealthy gentlemen governing from hundreds of miles away.

Congratulations to our Class of 2011. This is your world, get to know it beyond the boundaries imposed by human words and limited ideas. Embrace it like you own it.

Because you do.

Teaching matters.
The print is Titania, by Joseph Noel Patton, 1850.