Science Specialist FAQ: The Question Box . . . plus segue

It's been a year and a half since the introduction of the Question Box, and new folks have arrived here and there, so I worry that not all you parents know about The Question Box. In each classroom I have placed a Science Question Box (hand made and finished in clear coat to bring out the natural wood grain, in proper Montessori style). The students are to stuff it with any and all questions that occur to them. On Wednesdays I open it and try to answer the questions.

The original plan was to try to answer them as I pull them out, a big flying game of high-risk Stump the Chump. This year I tried a variation on the protocol, where I read all the new questions out so each child could know that his question had been acknowledged; then I picked one or three to answer this week or to follow up on later.

I don't like how the variation has worked. I think they first thrill to hear their very own question, then they are let down when they do not get air time right away. Or, worse, they are slighted when I read five fascinating questions and then choose only one to actually pursue.

I have noticed the older group has been providing questions at a much lower rate than both (a) the younger group, (b) last year's performance by the older group. Just in time I come to a paragraph in my How To Be A Montessori Elementary Teacher book that informs me of a tendency observed in all children as they enter the Second Plane (roughly age 6-12), a lowered desire to dive into new subject matter or to inquire madly in all directions. As a consolation prize, they develop more interest in a prolonged, deeper inquiry. Their Science Specialist would be well advised to surf on this developmental change.

Skeleton

I imagine you've already heard: our school now boasts a fine 4-foot tall skeleton model. It inhabits the Silver Surfer classroom. Although the K group got a good look at it as well, it was really bought in response to questions from SSurfers, and with plans in mind to develop both science and art lessons for this older group.

Local optician supports science specialist

You may remember a couple weeks ago I was trying to borrow a pair of polarized sunglasses for the science demo. Our friendly local optician, Mickey Stasey of South Austin Optical ( 4413 Pack Saddle Pass, 447 2333) lent me one for the day. Thanks to him, our kids got to see that a pair of polarized lenses at right angles to each other blocks nearly 100% of a laser beam.

Re-usability, and Weekly World News

It was neat to re-use something I built awhile ago for a home demo. A questioner in Silver Surfers had asked How Do Bodies Move. When my li'l one asked me that a couple years ago, I cobbled together a human arm out of two pieces of scrap lumber, a few nuts and bolts, and some string. The pieces of wood represented humerus and ulna, and the pieces of string represented bicep and tricep. When you tighten one of the strings, the lower arm flexes or extends accordingly. I left this model in the classroom for all to try.

The K class had asked about trilobytes - - very convenient as I have a lovely trilobite fossil at home (technically, I borrow the trilobyte fossil that belongs to my daughter). The question had been How Much Does a Trilobyte Fossil Weigh (that group has been asking about two things all year: 1. How much does x weigh, 2. What does the inside of x look like). So we weighed it (1706g). I was about to remark that trilobytes came in many sizes, when a teeny voice piped up "trilobytes come in many sizes". So I agreed, and was about to remark as a general interest item that trilobytes were the first animals to have eyes, when the same teeny voice piped up "trilobytes were the first animals to have eyes".

This week began a new classroom feature, Science News Story of the Week. Every week I receive my Science magazine from the AAAS, a somewhat frustrating process because it usually has about a month's worth of good reading, so that amounts to about 52 months' worth of reading material per year. Anyway, my challenge to myself is to find at least one article each week that can be explained to persons under 9 years old. For the K class, who have been asking about black holes all year, the winner was an article about a gigantic pair of black holes orbiting each other at a distance of 6 billion light years from earth. This where a different teeny voice started piping up from another part of the classroom. Apparently these kids have been reading Science magazine ahead of me or something. He already knew that there was an orbiting pair of black holes, and he even knew that the orbit was expected to collapse in a fabulous explosion in a few thousand years. Apparently the orbital instability is caused by a distortion of space time due to the extreme gravitational force. I'm not clear on the math here, and I probably should have pressed the student for more details ...

Science news of the week for SilverSurfers was about a new approach to selective breeding of corn. It seems that the gene segment that encodes for high vitamin A content has been identified, so now we can go ahead and grow super-nutritious corn -- not by GMO methods, which have their problems, but by good old fashioned selective breeding. But the selection process can be sped up by simply testing the DNA of all your plants rather than waiting for harvest and trying to assay the vitamin A content itself. I don't think the whole story went over completely, but I am pretty sure everybody got the concept of selective breeding and its effect on agriculture.

Well, okay, it couldn't

Actually I would have diverged significantly from that author's approach in a number of ways, and would come to a polar opposite conclusion. But we all understood it was just good clean fun - - right?

Heh heh - - this could be my house

Enjoy . . .

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/a-dialogue-with-sarah-aged-3-in-which-it-is-shown-that-if-your-dad-is-a-chemistry-professor-asking-%e2%80%9cwhy%e2%80%9d-can-be-dangerous-3/

Bubbles and insights

Because the kindergarteners had heard the word 'cell' for the first time last week (around the yeast-peroxide demonstration), I brought in more yeast along with a compound microscope so everybody could really see the single cells of the yeast organism. Everybody enjoyed seeing the little guys floating around at 400x magnification.

One voice piped up from the back,

"There must be hundreds of them!"

A simple comment, but beautiful for its depth of insight. He realized that the several dozen cells piped onto the TV screen via digicam represented one pencil-point-sized view on a much bigger slide, and the slide was made from one half-drop of solution taken from a beaker with a whole 250ml. Hundreds – probably millions of cells were in that beaker.

He realized that, not only were we looking at things on a scale of teeniness that was outside everything his senses had shown him so far, but also that the teeniness would require numbers that he didn't otherwise need in daily reality. You might pick a dozen flowers, or see a hundred pigeons, or pass a thousand cars on a long day's drive, but those cozy familiar numbers, the ones whose magnitude we easily intuit, just don't do the job when it comes to a question about the yeast beaker.

In SilverSurfers I pulled one of those "I have never tried this before and maybe it will work" stunts, and got lucky. Again I put the yeast cells under the compound microscope; then I added a half drop of peroxide over at the edge of the cover slip, just to see if maybe we could see the cell's-eye view of last week's fizzy demo.

Here is the video. It speaks for itself.

A point of disagreement

Last week in the waiting room at dance school I had a conversation with a non-Primavera parent.

She is a home-schooler. She claimed to have borrowed ideas on science teaching from the Waldorf curriculum. (Not having read extensively on Waldorf, I don't know how accurately she represents their methods). She said she was intentionally postponing science curriculum until around 9 years old. She continued with an example: if your child sees a shooting star, and asks about it, then your accurate answer might "deaden" the subject by closing it off. And science as a whole was omitted in order to allow the child a few years of thinking about the universe in magical or imaginary ways.

She and a third parent chatted on about how they might avoid "deadening," yet still play out the shooting star question with a "what do YOU think" sort of approach. While I thought this had, as they say in those disastrous job reviews where you can kiss your raise goodbye, room for improvement (see end note), my mind was busy racing off on two tracks: on the one hand, trying to find the gentlest non-confrontational way to steer her to do better, and on the other hand trying to gauge how deeply I disagreed with her.

Forty-eight hours have passed, allowing me to conclude that I disagree fundamentally and viscerally. Let me count the ways:

1. An honest answer is not deadening
2. There's plenty of wonder to go around
3. You are starving your child
4. Magical thinking is a gigantic failure
5. There's plenty of imagining to do

1. An honest answer is not deadening

The real answer to what is in a shooting star is fascinating in all its details. It raises dozens of additional questions. It opens doors to understanding the universe in ways that never come up in daily life. A chunk of rock travels 100 million light years in total darkness! I never knew anything was so big! Or so many things lie hidden in the sky! It burns up? I never knew rock could burn! I never knew that air resistance, which I feel as gentle breeze, could grow so fierce!

2. There's plenty of wonder to go around

Go ahead and answer your child's question. Even if you satisfy her on the subject of shooting stars, I absolutely, positively, unconditionally guarantee she will be able to find more questions. She will not run out of wonder. Wonder does not have a Peak Oil moment. The supply of questions, and the supply of genuine mysteries to be asked about, will not diminish. As one of my professors cheerfully quipped, when an algorithm seemed to depend on finding and consuming ever huger numbers, "Don't worry. There are plenty more numbers."

Worse: if you dodge or refuse to answer about the shooting star, you are trying to create a sense of wonder by deliberately withholding information – like OPEC trying to increase oil prices by cutting off supply. Now you have created a type of wonder which is of limited supply, a sort of counterfeit wonder which runs out as soon as your control over the market weakens. A poor trade indeed, discarding the infinite for the artificially finite!

3. You are starving your child

Here at Primavera, the Question Box quietly invites the five- to seven-year-olds to ask questions. They respond with a never-ending river of questions. They want to know about plants, bugs, evolution, disease, death, stars, snakes, rocks, metals, fire, molecules, planets, electricity, machines, and rockets . . . and that's only in the first five minutes. They have a huge appetite for knowledge. Omit science from the curriculum, and you starve that appetite. A child grows complete and healthy on a balanced diet whose Food Groups include art, language, writing, social interaction, real world knowledge, story telling, and physical activity. Starve the mind of an entire food group, and expect to harm the growth of the whole.

4. Magical thinking is a gigantic failure

Some abilities come to us naturally. The ability to eat, and enjoy food; the ability to walk and run: we acquire these just by growing in a normal environment. The infant's drive for language acquisition seems to be hard-wired, as does the parents' complementary skill of language teaching.

Other abilities do not come naturally. For example, humans do not seem to have a built-in genetic tendency to read and write. Reading and writing are acquired because adults insist on their acquisition. We deliberately construct the rules, conditions, and actions that support reading and writing.

Scientific thinking is another ability which, uncultivated, can utterly fail to grow. Thousands of years' experience shows that people are quite able to get through life believing the earth is flat, stars are friendly spirits, diseases are caused by vapors, and so on; and they will fail to acquire – indeed, violently reject -- information that is acquired by other means, as witness Galileo's unpleasant experiences with the Inquisition.

Magical thinking, by contrast, seems to occur naturally. When you watch the football game, and clench your fists to give the quarterback extra strength for that critical throw, you are doing magical thinking! It's harmless in sporting events, and may serve nicely as a sort of social bonding technique ("we're all pulling together hoping Johnny passes his exam"). It has real uses, in storytelling, in facing and reconciling one's emotional states. But as a real world problem-solving technique, magical thinking fails over and over. It doesn't build better mousetraps, win or prevent wars, or cure disease (despite numerous attempts, the bubonic plague was never cured by murdering one's local population of Jews). And yet we see magical thinking all around us. My neighbor feels that global warming is probably just part of a natural cycle. Why does he think so? He just sort of feels it must be right. Worse yet, he votes based on his magical conclusions.

Children need to learn a method of thinking with inquiry, observation, and logic. Otherwise they risk growing into handicapped adults who support nutty political schemes, fall for Ponzi scams, buy products that fail to solve problems that didn't exist in the first place, and generally bring danger to themselves and others.

5. There's plenty of imagining to do

A passage from one of Maria Montessori's books explains the importance of imagining in the curriculum. She does not mean a day-dreamy sort of cotton candy and butterflies imagining. I have an uncle in America, she suggests. I have never seen either America or this uncle, but I use the facility of imagination to bring them both into my mind, and to build knowledge around these facts that I cannot observe directly. Imagination, combined with discernible rules about how the universe works, gives us the power to understand the world broadly and deeply: the Keys to the Universe.

Imagining, like wonder, does not have to be parcelled out, and does not have to be enhanced by deliberate ignorance. We do not need to imagine that maybe the shooting star is a sparkling fairy. We can imagine many real things about the shooting star, and we can extend our imagination with more questions – especially if we are confident our teachers will support us with all the knowledge we ask for.

- - - - - -

Endnote: "what do YOU think the shooting star is". This is an unfair response to the child. You are taunting her by refusing to divulge information. She does not know the answer, and she does not have a plausible way of guessing or inferring the answer. Your refusal to answer is like bringing dinner to table and then forcing the hungry child to wait, not allowed to eat until you finish your weird quiz game. Worse: by demanding an answer from her, you've suddenly put her under uncomfortable pressure -- even guaranteed her failure, because of course she has no way to provide the right answer.

We in Science Specialist class often respond to a question with "what do YOU think", but only in circumstances where the knowledge generally available, plus application of creative reasoning, might yield an answer: as in, "why do YOU think the dolphin needs to swim extremely fast?".

Experiments, quizzes and Pimsleur, and bubbles

The nematode experiment was a resounding failure. Remember we had these beneficial nematodes which are supposed to help gardeners by preying on grubs. So, I got two beakers, and dug up a couple grubs, and put one grub in each beaker (along with some vegetation and dirt), and then added nematodes to only one of the two beakers.

Both grubs died.

Learning opportunity: failed experiments are a constant in the scientific process. For every ingenious experiment that advances The Cause, there are hundreds that just fizzle out and fail to teach us anything at all. All this trying and failing is the creative process that leads you to devise a real winner of an experiment.
In response to this, we spent part of the class trying to think of better beneficial-nematode experiments. We didn't come up with anything so compelling that I want to rush ahead and try it, but the kids threw in some pretty good beginnings of ideas. We'll return to the subject next session.

Onward to the quizzes. Last year, when I wanted to learn some Arabic, I purchased the Pimsleur Method instructional CDs. One thing I noticed was that after they taught you a new word, they'd go off onto other content for about 90 seconds, and then ask you out of the blue to repeat the new word. You could just feel the darn thing trickling down the memory hole "dang it, they taught me how to say The Store Is Closed and I nearly forgot!" , and I'm sure the point of it was to catch that moment and cue your brain to transfer the word from short term to middle term to long term storage. (After the 90-second interval, they leave it for 180 seconds and then ask you again . . . etc)
With this in mind, we tried our first Science Test. Naturally this was nothing like those paper things with 100 multiple-choice and 50 short-answer questions, and all your prestige riding on the results. Think of Test as a synonym for Experiment. "Hey, let's do a brain experiment. I wonder how much is left in your brain from what we learned last week! Do you remember the part about the black holes or the sugar crystals or the intestinal cells? Was it trickling out the memory hole?"
Preliminary results:
1. We remember some very detailed information while at the same time totally losing other details. And I mean totally. Big, blank, empty space.
2. We remember some core concepts while at the same time totally losing other core concepts.
3. If student #1 remembers "A" but forgot "B", then student #2 might remember "B" but forget "A".
Interesting things, brains. You know that the ability to forget is essential to true intelligence, right? Collecting mountains of data is all very nice in its own way, but the real value is in organizing and structuring the data. Think of the last time you did a big garage organization project. Your most powerful ally? The trash can. The same is true of data in memory. Structuring requires weeding. And learning requires mistakes – such as overaggressive weeding of the data.

Of course we also had a fun demo. One of our Primavera parents led me to this one. (hint, hint: do you know a neat thing to do in a science class? Don't keep it secret) . This one is easy to do at home. Just throw some yeast into a bit of hydrogen peroxide. The yeast sets about destroying the (poisonous) peroxide, reducing it to oxygen and water. The sudden production of oxygen means . . . . BUBBLES ! . . . which means . .. WHOOPS OF JOY! For more spectacular bubbles, add a bit of soap before you add the yeast.

Nematode mania

Maybe somebody got a little tooo charged up about those nematodes. I came in armed with

• as requested by the class, etymology of the word nematode ("nema", thread: hence, "threadlike things"
  
• a dozen amazing nematode facts courtesy of UCal Berkeley via the www
  
• nematode anatomy information: musculature, neurophysiology, cell layers
  
• Electron microscope images of nematodes
  
• cross-section diagrams of nematodes at various points
  
• a box of actual nematodes from the garden store, plus microscope to look at them
  
  
  
  
• some actual grubs from my back yard, for an experiment, to see if the nematodes from the garden store will eat the grubs as advertised
  

Well, nobody complained about too much nematode content, although I fear the focus may have faded a bit by the end and I am not entirely sure how many of the class quite grasped that there was a controlled experiment being launched. I'm writing from on the road here so I haven't had a chance to check back. Like all real experiments, this one has a good chance of giving muddled and illegible results: like for example if my trusty helpers don't remember to water them and the grubs just all die of thirst whether they are in the "with nematodes" beaker or the "no nematodes" beaker.

As far as K class, I was even tempted to bring them a few hundred thousand nematodes too. Then I reflected, they haven't even seen The Invention (see post from a couple weeks ago), and we could have a pretty good thrill just looking at sugar and salt crystals in the stereomicroscope. Which we did.



The Question Box was so stuffed they hadn't even been able to cram more Question Cards into it! Is this a fabulous gang of kids or what? I emptied the box, and am saving the cards for posterity. I wonder if I can get these things bronzed.



No class 14 Nov (due to my travel) or 28 Nov (ditto).

Marbles, voice, creative thinking

Ever since one student asked in August "just what is electricity" I've been puzzling about how to make a demonstration. This week I brought in electricity demo v2 (version 1, in August, was really no good at all). In v2 I have routed out a shallow elliptical channel in a 2x12 wood plank. I load the channel with marbles, while explaining that copper atoms
(a) unlike hydrogen atoms, have a whole lot of electrons (29)
(b) are willing to share with their neighbors.
Then I claim that this heap of marbles shall represent electrons, and I kind of swirl them along so they go around the track.
I don't know.
Everybody was pretty nice about going along with it, and nobody complained. I feel like taking a survey

As to that demo - - would you say
(a) Wow! I like totally understand electricity now
(b) I guess there's sort of a connection. Thanks for trying.
(c) Can we play marbles now?

The creative input from the younger members of Team Science was superb. The question box in K included

What does the inside of a tree trunk look like

which is just the perfect question to ask of a guy who has arrived in class lugging a huge section of 12x2 pine ! Not only did we have the chance to discuss annual rings, but the various surfaces on the plank offer an interesting lesson in 3D geometry, if you try to realize that the straight lines on one face have a connection to the circular lines on another face.

I have to bring that plank back in and leave it for closer inspection.

Over in Silver Surfers it was a pretty busy class as we had a repeat of the electricity marbles, plus a discussion about nematodes (there are a lot of them. everywhere) (yes, they are really tiny. and that imposes serious constraints on their complexity. No eyes, nose, mouth. No hands, arms, heart, lungs. No brain!). The discussion was very lively and I had to cut it off because I was eager to cram a third item into the agenda. But I will be back with more nematode mania next week.

Following up on a question about how voice boxes work, I brought in a sound-making device consisting of a piece of dried plant stem and a brass tube. The idea was to show that the mouthpiece alone makes a plain squawk (just as your voicebox makes a plain undifferentiated noise) and the brass tube allows us to refine and shape the sound (just as your mouth shapes the voice into speech sounds). Fortunately one of our creative thinkers caught me before class and said "are you going to play a Halloween song on that thing?" and I said, "Can you tell me please what is a Halloween song", and so she hinted at one, so later I did exactly what she said and that turned a simple science demo into a great big classroom hit! Thanks!

( no class 24 Oct)

No class - - schedule conflict - - we knew this would happen occasionally - -

10,000 things to do with a peanut

In the K class we did an actual experiment. Often we do demonstrations, which people who are not careful about language may misidentify as experiments. I figure if I already know how it's going to come out, it's not an experiment. I also think people get through school with absolutely no idea how hard it is to do an experiment, or how valuable it is; and I blame this partly on sloppy use of the word experiment to describe any mundane exercise they happen to be assigned on an average school afternoon. Real experiments are often hard to design, chaotic, and tend to collapse into a chaos of illegible results on the first dozen tries. Real experiments are driven by a maddened curiosity that simply will not let you quit trying until you get some kind of answer.
What's that? Step off what? Oh. That soapbox. Under my feet.
Okay.
The experiment concerned a child's question about the smartness of birds. As an example of how smart birds (especially corvids) are, consider the stashing behavior of the Pinon Jay.


Every year the pinon trees release a huge yield of pinon nuts (AKA pignolia nuts at Central Market) in a short season, and the jays have to make that food last all year. What they do is hide the seeds, one by one, until after a few weeks' work they have stashed some ten thousand seeds in ten thousand hiding places in the landscape. Months later, when they are hungry, they actually remember where each seed is hidden. Experiments have shown that they do not just go on random searches. They know exactly where to go when they need a snack.
So, my experiment was on human intelligence. I gave one child a peanut, and asked him to hide it. Then we chatted about something else, like comets or dolphins. I asked the child to go find the hidden peanut, and he remembered where it was. I gave the next child three peanuts to hide. We chatted about something else, like the inside of the sun. I asked the child to go find the three peanuts, and he remembered all three. The next child hid nine peanuts. As soon as she was done, I asked her to go get all nine. She showed considerable difficulty, and relied on associative clues (" . . I have no idea . . I think there was one over here somewhere . . wait, I remember it had something to do with the trash can . . YES now I remember, it was behind the trash can. . "). In the end she retrieved eight of nine. So the experiment shows that human five- and six- year olds are very clever indeed, even if they can't quite match what a jay can do.
At this point we have three children who have received peanuts, and a dozen feeling a bit left out. This is where one child suggested I give one (1) peanut to absolutely everybody, which shows that human five- and six- year olds are also creative and empathetic, and explains that peanut you found in the lunchbox that afternoon.





In Silver Surfers, I brought along some specimens for the compound microscope. I am very pleased with my invention (see last week) and wanted to just look at . . well . . stuff. The big hit of the day was this nematode


found in a bit of sludge from my compost bin. We also looked at blood (mine) (I have a glucose test kit which makes it easy) and onion skin (of course). The enthusiasm was delightful. Do microscopes make learning fun? No. Learning is already fun, and microscopes let you do it.

Invention! Also, Inside story, with poll

The big deal for Silver Surfers was my New Invention



What, you ask, is that thing? It's an adapter that lets me plop the digital camera onto the microscope, perfectly aligned, and leave it there, hands free. This not only frees my hands to move specimens around, it also ends the annoying wobble of a handheld camera. In the case of high magnification, handheld wasn't just difficult: it was impossible. But now - - O delight - - we can use the compound microscope in class, showing the specimens on the big screen TV!



The new stereomicroscope has some prodigious powers of magnification, as shown in this progressive series zooming in on a zinnia.












I am having some trouble getting the images correct on the TV. I think the microscope light is too intense, and the TV tends to flare to all red. I need to try the low-power setting on the light source.

Silver Surfers were also dispatched to do The Weighing Work, with my little digital scale.

The big deal for the K class was our formerly out sick student was back again so I could do the demo that had been secretly planned the previous week. He had submitted a huge heap of questions all of the form

What does the inside of _____ look like?

The Science answer is

I dunno. Let's go find out!

He had asked (among other things) about the insides of electrical cords, batteries, and hearts.
We cut open an electrical cord with a stern advance warning of Do NOT Try This At Home.
We cut open a battery



with a sterner advance warning of Do NOT Try This At Home, reinforced by the vivid example of Your Science Specialist wearing goggles and gloves, and newspaper carefully spread out to a great distance, and the follow up of Your Science Specialist cleaning the site twice just to be sure of complete hazmat removal. Notice also, in the photo, that the battery crud seems to have eaten a hole in the newspaper. Yummy!
In the process we discover another Science answer

Well that's pretty interesting, but now there's more I don't know

Like, what's the gray goop? What's the black goop? Why a wire attached to one end and not the other? ( "One is zinc and the other is copper", a student cheerfully informs me. By now I have learned to take this stuff in stride when it come to Primavera students, and I wouldn't even have blinked if he started telling me that anodes oxidize and cathodes reduce).
As for hearts, why, they're available at your local HEB in the beef section. They seem to consist mostly of . . . well . . . meat, with a hollow spot for the heart chamber. Advance notice was provided, whereby those who felt that hacking up meat in science class was a little too gross could move to a quiet table at a safe distance.
Another Science answer here is

Things are what they are

You may find it gross or creepy, but it was there, and it was the way it was, before you looked at it; it will be that way after you are done looking at it; in between, the choice to open or close your eyes is your own.

Feel free to vote in the poll (at the right hand side of the screen)

Drama and neurons

Hokay yall just a short entry to beat the 168-hour deadline.

I experienced a perils-of-teaching drama in (K). I had a whole bunch of demo stuff lined up in response to a persistent line of questioning from one student. Then, to my horror, he is out sick! What to do? I don't want him to miss all the features that were created with him in mind! We did a bunch of Question Box questions and I carefully tap danced around the missing demo - - I think they forgave me.

Silver Surfers got to build their neurons (with brown dendrites and brass axons)

and had a followup on Temperature, and why we have both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. I think the abstraction of two numbering systems was a little lost on the class, but we had a nice time naming things that are hot, Very Hot, Very VERY Hot, medium, cold, and outrageously cold.
The one and only (ulp) question box entry was about human evolution, which worked best when we shrunk it down to a question of why are Big Brains a selective advantage? (I found that if you include furlessness, upright posture, and other traits - - then the whole conversation just gets too lumpy).

Moons to Shrooms

The K class was brimming over with their usual enthusiasm. This week's demo was my lovely digital kitchen scale. I left the scale in the classroom so everybody has the chance to weigh things all week long. Classical Montessori apparatus includes a traditional two-pan balance (with a collection of 1g,5g… weights), so you get a sense of how the measuring is done. By contrast the digital scale just gives you an answer by what appears to be magic. There are lessons in this, too, such as: working with good equipment allows you to collect data quickly, so you get lots of data, which can lead you to ask more and harder questions; but you also have to accept a certain level of mystery about how your gear really works.
The biggest discussion topic was the moon, and why it appears light to us, and why it has phases. I claimed that the sun's light bounces off the moon to us, which was received fairly well, although there was a determined minority opinion that the moon was lighting the sun. I didn't specifically disagree with this, because it could be a syntax issue (somebody who really meant to say the moon Is Lit By The, but the words come out as the moon Lights Up The. English is a very tricky language). I did draw a nice big diagram with rays of light zooming all over space. Astute helpers insisted I also add the lightness and darkness on earth.
Somebody interjected a question about asteroids, which I thought was going to give us an elegant segue to How Did Dinosaurs Become Extinct which has been languishing unanswered in the question box due to lack of time. The segue was not to be, because everybody had $0.02 to chip in about the moon, its movement, and light. It was a shock to realize we had run out the clock when we were all having so much fun. I know in show biz you're supposed to leave 'em wanting more, but this was more like "I can't stop the express train". We even had one very upset student who felt he just couldn't go home without getting his chance to comment. Fortunately, we're talking Primavera here, not Just Any School. His Guide managed to find me after Silver Surfer class so we could have a little Science Supplemental. To us big people, it's just one additional minute off the clock - - say hello, listen as the child expresses his way of visualizing the sun and moon. To the child: it is the difference between squelch ("Science Guy has gone for the day. Fuhgeddaboudit") and respect ("I can see this is important to you. I'll go get him").

In Silver Surfer I hoped to continue the winning streak with You Can Model Anything With Styrofoam Balls. But, alas, we were sunk by what I call non-point-source noise pollution. You've heard of non-point-source water pollution, where the bit of antifreeze on your driveway mixes with a bit of diazinon from your neighbor's lawn, and a camera battery that your other neighbor's F10 ran over, and the collective effect is some truly nasty runoff water in the creek despite the lack of a single major polluter. Sometimes in class each of us has just one teeny little harmless sentence to murmur to our pal, not enough to really disrupt anything, just a clever insight, or something so funny it couldn't wait - - and the collective effect of ten of these is an impenetrable wall of sound. Well, it happened, and unfortunately we lost so much time that the demo got killed by the clock. Ouch. I guess we should start with it next session.
I heard that quite a number of students did their Temperature Measuring worksheets. I'll have to catch them in one-on-one sidebar time and see their results.
I offered the Mushroom Challenge. Our classroom has a new field guide to the fungi. I brought in photos of a mushroom I found,

and photos of one that a student found last year. The challenge is to find the names of these mushrooms in the field guide. I think the 6-8 age range is when we just start getting into this frame of mind where we enjoy examining (and mentally cataloging) every single page of a reference-type text. Next week I get to find out who succeeded.
New library books: one on brains/nerves, and one about germs and plagues.

Curiosity

Styrofoam balls again! Everyone in K built a spider. Key points:

• Eight legs
  
• Two body segments, the cephalothorax and the abdomen. As of last Wednesday, everybody in K can say "cephalothorax"
  
• Lots of eyes
  

I also brought in my nice cattleya plant from home, just because it's nice to look at, and also in case the concept of epiphytes might be a conversation starter. It wasn't, but everybody liked smelling the flowers.



Naturally the cattleya and spider-building had to be squeezed in around the corners as your star questioners had all sorts of things they wanted to ask about, including a big agenda of How Much Does x Weigh.

Over in Silver Surfers, the Question Box suddenly and delightfully kicked into high gear, yielding great heaps of questions. There was widespread interest in how brains work, and how large they are, and whether they are made of chunks, and if so how large are the chunks. I diagrammed a neuron with the usual dendrites and axons, and some suggestions about learning as synapse formation. (Segues on brain lesions, electricity, size and quantity of cells . . .)

Intriguing meta-question from the audience: "How can we not know how brains work? They're right here and available for inspection all the time, and we use them constantly!". As always, I have forgotten the wording of the question, so it comes back to you in fully analytical adult language. One of these days I will learn to transcribe, or memorize, or record, questions as asked. In the meantime, this becomes a cognitive-science observation. I remember the question with perfect accuracy in terms of what did she want to know and what did she ask for, but have no record of either the words or the sounds and phonemes that were used. This tells us something about what brains do and do not store.
Also essential in the brain discussion is the we do not know part of it. Key messages for Science Specialist class are

• Nobody knows the answer to that (I'm not just hiding the answer, and it doesn't mean there is something wrong with your question)
  
• This doesn't mean a dead end to your question. You could even make it your work - - later - - to find the answer. Although I cannot fulfil your request for knowledge today, you can see that as an opportunity rather than a setback.
  

Between that and the other questionBox contents, and some logistics around the orchid ("I can't smell the flower yet! ! Bring it closer! !") we actually ran through the whole time available without getting to Demonstration. I take this as a sign of success, when curiosity and participation are pumped up to this level.
The pre-class sidebar time worked well, too, as a child had the opportunity to ask me about What Do Germs Look Like. I sketched for him an e. coli , a staphylococcus, and a spirochete. The fact that we were not in circle makes the conversation very tightly connected, as computer guys say, and I think he is therefore more attentive to His Personal Answer. Also, we attract eavesdroppers like fruitflies to a banana. "What's going on here? I want to know too! Let me see!" Which is a fine way for learning to happen.

100%

In K class, I got to complete the ice-water-steam-vapor demonstration that was cut off due to lack of time the week before. The demo gets more exciting when you show that "other things also have solid and liquid states". To do this, you melt some butter (smells nice), then you get out your pocket butane torch and melt some solder, which is an eye-opener for somebody who's never seen metal turn runny, and drip and splash.
We also talked about lava and spiders.
Lava and spiders?
Sure, great combination.
Actually it was mostly about spiders, and the lava is more like a universal constant - - everybody loves lava, you can talk about it at any time of day or night, and kind of weave it into unrelated conversations. Would you like Corn Flakes or Cheerios? I'd like Corn Flakes, with molten lava please.
The spider discussion - - launched by one question in the question box - - achieved a marvellous 100% participation rate. Sometimes I think that you are wondering, does my child participate in these science fandangoes? In this case, the answer is yes because absolutely everybody had at least one question or a comment. 100%.
A remarkable question during the Q&A concerned whether spiders are reptiles. That might sound odd, but it gets interesting when you hear the full question as asked:

Since spiders lay eggs, does that mean they are reptiles?

Now we see that the questioner is thinking really hard, and very rationally. I want to construct large sweeping rules of categorization! I have data, but I need more data! How significant is egg-laying as a classifier?

For Silver Surfers we had an action dramatization of the role of blood in the body. As a blood cell, I ran around the circle of body cells (the role of body cell was excellently played by a cast of Silver Surfers), and brought needed cell nutrition (represented by peanuts) to the cells, and took away metabolic waste (represented by peanut shells). I also handed out a few choice oxygen molecules (the ubiquitous styrofoam balls) to those cells that needed them.
I wonder if I could make like a leitmotif of always including at least one styro ball in every class.
Science as conceptual/performance art.
Maybe Yoko would be interested.
Did the action drama work? Do all the students suddenly understand blood circulation? Let me know if any clues pop out. Sometimes we find out many months later, when a remark pops out of the blue "sure, Mom, I know what blood does. It carries food just like our science specialist handing out peanuts!"

Insect blood (or, hemolymph anyway) is quite different. For one, it doesn't actually flow in tubes. It just slops around. So you'll never see an insect as big as a Golden Retriever because the system for getting nutrition to cells is just not good enough. As we say in computer science, it's not scalable. For another thing, insect hemolymph does not carry oxygen. At all. It's just not in the job description.

Scientist in the Crib

I love this gem from The Scientist in the Crib. While most of the book is about babies, here's a paragraph about adults:

When we look attentively, carefully, and thoughtfully at the things around us, they invariably turn out to be more interesting, more orderly, more complex, more strange, and more wonderful than we would ever have imagined. That's what happened when Kepler looked carefully at the stars, when Darwin looked at finches, when Marie Curie looked at pitchblende ore.

now put it ALL together . . .

And it's also what happened when Jane Austen looked at a provincial village and Proust looked at a Madeleine cookie, when Vermeer looked at a girl making lace, and Juan Gris looked at a café table.

. .. yeah

Alex the Parrot, 1976 - 2007

Sad news of the death of Alex the parrot.

I found the link where you can watch Alex do some of his feats of cognition. (Scroll down in the page until you find ENTERTAINING PARROTS).