Vacation reading

I have two books I'm reading right now  -- one is a fictional account of English department politics in a regional state university (Straight Man) that cuts a little too close to home. When it gets too depressing, I pick up the other book I'm reading -  a book of advice columns by Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things).

From Straight Man, writing about his colleagues:

...We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat, that we were made for better things.  If anyone had told us twenty years ago that we would spend our academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, we would have laughed... We hadn't, any of us, intended to allow the pettiness of committee work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and the increasingly militant ignorance of our students let so many years slip by.  And now in advancing middle age we've chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves.  We've preferred not to face the distinct possibility that if we'd been made for better things, we'd have done those things.

From Tiny Beautiful Things (a letter writer asks about how to get over her jealousy towards friends who have contracts for their books while she does not, despite her degrees from prestigious schools):

A large part of your jealousy probably rises out of your outsized sense of entitlement. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way a lack of it does. There are a lot of people who’d never dream they could be a writer, let alone land, at the age of 31, a six figure book deal. You are not one of them. And you are not one of them because you’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money and wherewithal to fund your education at two colleges to which you feel compelled to attach the word “prestigious.”

I will ponder this.

Intro to possible paper.

I've wanted to have a paper that describes the ideas that get developed in a unit of inquiry - highlighting how very deep these ideas go, even if the topic we cover in 5 weeks is one that most courses cover in 1. -- This semester had some really cool ideas; a few profound, some just cute -- so I thought I could draft a paper based on those. I'm imagining this for TPT. I could also make it a chapter in a book I want to write... but that's too daunting.  It already feels a bit smarmy (?) for TPT.


Wonderful Ideas about Optics:
Student Investigations into Light & the Eye


Writing of her experience as a developmental psychologist, Eleanor Duckworth (1996) describes one 7-year-old boy, Kevin, arranging straws. Upon seeing the straws he has an idea of how he wants to arrange them, struggles, succeeds, and is clearly delighted by the wonderful idea he had—the idea to arrange an assortment of straws in order by length. Reflecting on Kevin’s joy, Duckworth notes, “The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development. And I consider it the essence of pedagogy to give Kevin the occasion to have his wonderful ideas and to let him feel good about himself for having them.” (p. 1) 

It’s tempting to believe that Duckworth is referring to childhood intellectual development and primary school pedagogy; that we cannot expect high school students or undergraduates to be delighted by the Krebs cycle or Snell’s Law in the same way that a first-grader enjoys arranging straws, or expect all introductory physics students to delight and feel good about physics (in fact, students’ emotional responses to physics are often quite the opposite). Reading this story, however, I was reminded of my first experience working in a physics lab as a summer REU student at the University of Washington. My task was tedious and rather mundane—aligning a laser with a mirror—but at some point I saw an unexpected, though easily explained, pattern of light.  I tentatively approached the postdoc to show him and talk through the mechanism behind the observation and was relieved when he shared in my excitement, saying “You have to show Eric! He will get a kick out of this!”  Though most of my summer research experience is lost to me, this event stands out— having and sharing a wonderful idea with a member of the physics community, witnessing his enthusiasm for it, and the sense was that this was the kind of thing that was to be celebrated and shared with the PI. It was striking not only because of the magical quality of that moment, but because of the absence of such moments from the rest of my undergraduate experience.  (“Hey professor! Look at this! I’ve found the eigenvectors for the del-squared operator!” said no student ever.)

Scientific lives are bookended with the having of wonderful ideas — children delight in falling objects, and practicing scientists- as part of their job description- have and share wonderful ideas with colleagues.  It is only during formal education that we find scant opportunities for students to have wonderful ideas and feel good about themselves for having them. Our exams and surveys ask students about scientifically correct ideas - that is, if they have learned and understood others’ wonderful ideas. In reform curricula, we walk students through steps by which they can re-create wonderful ideas. But opportunities for students to construct their own ideas from their own questions and to share these ideas as the raw material of curriculum, are rare.  Given that this is a hallmark of scientific practice - having and sharing novel ideas - its absence is troubling for those concerned with students’ conceptual development. Given the sense of joy, wonder and esteem that having and sharing novel ideas can bring, its absence from our curricula is troubling in an ethical sense as well.

A course on scientific inquiry taught at CSU, Chico, seeks to remedy this. In this course, students examine complex phenomena and construct ideas and representations that account for these phenomena. We use neither textbook nor lab manual. Instead, students work in groups with everyday items, sharing ideas and findings with other groups as the class moves towards consensus models of phenomena.  The syllabus describes the goals of the class as follows:

This is a class on Inquiry — not a class on Light & Color.  (Just like a drawing class might spend time drawing flowers, but the class is not a class about flowers.) You are not assessed on how accurately your ideas mirror the ideas of scientists, but on how accurately your activities mirror the practices that scientists engage in when they study light & color— problematizing phenomena, creating careful definitions, constructing models of phenomena that are consistent with evidence, designing tests to further test those models (particularly competing models), using those models to explain and predict, reading and following the ideas of colleagues (your classmates), critiquing and improving ideas over time, and sharing work via writing.

Despite the emphasis on inquiry (rather than the products of inquiry), student ideas from this class - semester after semester - not only recapitulate major ideas from geometric optics, but they go well beyond ideas from introductory physics, asking questions, devising experiments and developing representations that address core issues in physics. 

In other descriptions of the course (cite) we have described students’ understanding of the nature of science and their engagement in scientific practices, consistent with the goals of the course. Here, however, we emphasize the scientific ideas that students generated during one month during the Fall 2012 semester. The ideas are intriguing in their own right and may prove useful for conceiving of problems and investigations for instruction; more importantly, however, we wish to demonstrate the kinds of ideas that students generate, and that the call by Duckworth for pedagogy that allows students to have “wonderful ideas and to let [them] feel good about [themselves] for having them” can be consistent with the development of deeply scientific ideas - often ones that far exceed goals we might have set for an introductory-level course.




The ideas:

Using gelatin to visualize a focused image
 - by J. Cerdo, N. Etchison, E. Johnson, A. Lerner 

The index of refraction of a contact lens
 - N. Cassel
(why do my glasses keep getting thicker and my contact lenses don't?)

The Schachar mechanism and human lenses
 - E. Honeycutt, M. Gonzales
(we expect that straining our eyes would mean tightening muscles that control the lens; and we expect that tight muscles would flatten out the lens. But we strain to see up close (rounded lens) not far. Why?)

The Cardinality of Infinite Sets: Magnifying Images
- K. Mulhern
(how can we magnify an image without "gaps"?)

Depth perception and virtual images
- D. Barrett
("virtual images" suggest that a magnified image is located behind the actual object - but it doesn't look like that - looking through binoculars doesn't make objects look realllly big and reallllly far away. why?)

Limits of perception: viewing cells
- K. McAtee
(you can't see the resolution of a high def tv when you're viewing it on a low-def tv screen)

Ho Ho Ho! plans for the winter break

I hope to will get the following work-related items accomplished over the next 4 weeks:

1. Submit the revision of the CBE/LSE paper.
2. Have a signed contract with Its About Time for our LSET book.
3. Submit a TPT paper on the concepts developed in Inquiry.
4. Have edited NOS paper and sent back to Irene, ready to submit.
5. Fully planned the Adv. Inquiry class, prepped the iPads and have an iTunes U course ready to go.
6. Cleaned up the office, reorganized the filing cabinets, and ready for Sci Inquiry (IRB printed, syllabus printed, tapes and research ready to go, etc.)
7. Get reimbursed!  - I've actually made some major purchases on grants that I keep forgetting to reimburse. Yikes.
8. Draft a white paper for the dean/provost/president. -- As of Fall 2013 our department will have 2.6 full time faculty.  And, with buyout and chair responsibilities, that means a department with just 1.5 teaching faculty.  We (the 2.6 of us) want either a commitment from the President and Provost, or we want a plan in place to shut the department down.  I'm actually really glad that we're realistic about those as two options-- limping along in the status quo is not a fun way to live. We want to create a clear vision for the department and a strong rationale for that vision to make our case. 



Notice there's nothing about my grants on that list... hopefully clearing everything else off the list will leave time this Spring to accomplish grant-related research and writing.

"Real world"

A few recent thoughts.

1. When thinking about TE, there's a clear description that these are experiences in one's "everyday life" - which implies that school is not part of that "everyday life." Brian and I have been looking at Engle et al's work on expansive framing to better think about how it is that school can touch on "everyday life," and Engestrom's work on what the object of study is (are you studying the textbook or studying the moon?).  But this also got me thinking about how my friends with private sector jobs - jobs with billable hours and mission statements and branding seminars - things that strike me as silliness arising out of a wacky context - nonetheless talk about their work as the "real world." One friend comes to mind who complains about how coddled undergrads are and that they wouldn't last for a day in the "real world" -- meaning: her/the workplace.  What's bizarre about this isn't that my friends consider their workplace part of the "real world" (they spend 8 hours a day there - it is quite real) but that school is not.  It even got me to thinking that the whole term "real world" - if you tried to explain it to a 14th c. (?) person, or a nomadic tribe - what a weird concept it is.  Like, the term "real world" must have evolved right along with compulsory education.  The correlation is there...

Real world:

Compulsory education:

(1.5 Also interesting is that I *love* thinking of things to feed into google's ngram - the presence of this tool makes me seek out ways to use it. I wrote a paper on this once, about how kids with thermometers  can't help but do science.  The same way that kids with scissors can't help but do damage.  That's how I feel about ngram.  There may even be a message for the gun lobby in that idea.)


2. That actually relates a little to point #2, which has to do with this book that I haven't yet read because it's not yet printed.  The premise of the book - how to walk around a city with the eyes of a ____ (urban sociologist, artist,  geologist, physician, sound designer) - touches on things like professional vision, but not quite. I'd like for my students to walk around the world like a physicist, and I think TE is about that idea. I think inquiry introduces students to how *I* walk through the world -- obsessed with shapes of shadows, excited when I find color in colorless things, thrilled to see the moon doing exactly what I predict it will do, and when I see CMYK dots on something it's like running into an old friend.

3. Final exam in inquiry was yesterday. Students first answer individually and then must collaborate with their lab group to construct their final paper, addressing what was wrong in their initial ideas and how they came to the final idea. The assignment (after doing pinhole theaters and the eye) was to explain how an overhead projector works. They - without asking permission - got  up and grabbed whiteboards, rules, lasers, lenses, mirrors, etc. - One group even saw something cool with the lens + mirror set-up and showed it to other groups. It felt very "real world." :)

4. Thinking about shame and vulnerability conversations... I am a very earnest teacher, and that feels like a very vulnerable thing at times. You can not be cynical when teaching inquiry. You can when teaching a lecture.

5. And Kim - of stronger constitution than me - watched the video from the icky day in inquiry. She says it's not nearly as bad as I remember. I am relieved, but not wanting to revisit it yet!

what it means to be at an underfunded university

Here is a true story: CSU-Chico is broke but not allowed to raise tuition. So we levied a Student Learning Fee (SLF). Because it is a "special fee" it has its own committee. I serve on the SLF Committee, ranking proposals from all the departments who need to purchase materials. I am reading a proposal to purchase chairs right now.  The nursing department literally does not have enough chairs.  The math department has also requested chairs.

To summarize:
(1) There are two departments in my college in need of chairs.
(2) Departments have to apply to a committee to get money to buy chairs.
(3) Part of my job is determining which departments on campus are worthy of chairs.

I found this line in the nursing proposal oddly heartbreaking: "They offer an easy-to-clean vinyl fabric and seem ideal for use."  (As if the statement "it is a chair and we do not have chairs" is not justification enough.)

The real story I'm trying to say is: I'm not working on curriculum, instruction or research - the things I'm pretty highly trained to do and the things that I think need doing - because I'm busy trying to figure out which departments will be able to procure chairs - a thing that should be non-negotiable: students get to sit in chairs. I actually spent a few hours tracking down enrollment statistics and funding history by department to help make an informed decision about who gets chairs.  (I have pretty graphs now that indicate math is, indeed, underfunded.  See below.  My data shows physics to be relatively over-funded; this does not win me friends in physics.)

So then this-- a friend who teaches philosophy at Amherst posted this on his facebook page today:

So, Amherst gives me a 'student entertainment' budget that if I don't spend they take back. And so office hours this week are at the local coffee shop. Amherst will be spending hundreds of dollars on cappuccinos.

Meanwhile, at Chico, 4 students have died this semester from alcohol and drug related incidents - and just this week a 5th student was legally drunk when he stepped out in front of a car, driven by a student who was driving drunk.  He is not likely to live. The administration came to the chairs council to discuss solutions -- and as far as I can tell, everyone was more or less saying "we need to let students know this is unacceptable" .  I think we need to raise taxes and fund higher education, so that I can spend my evenings in coffee shops with students instead of weighing the merits of vinyl fabric while they drink themselves to death.

Why can't we see cells?

You're looking at the world USING cells, so if we want to SEE cells with those cells (assuming cells are of comparable size) we MUST using magnification. Otherwise the cells will necessarily not be resolved by our eye.

It's like when you see a video for an HD tv on your crappy tv, said Daniel.  You can't hope to see HD on a low-def tv.

Just another brilliant idea from my inquiry class!

Describing the large pinhole

Students are writing about why a large hole makes a blurry image. This one knocks it out of the park:

You can think about this in a couple ways. I think about it by saying the larger hole is made of of many small pinholes. In each small pinhole there is the image. Since there are many of them, they overlap [when they reach the screen].  When light overlaps it gets brighter, therefore the outside edges that don't have quite as much overlap look dim.  When this happens, our eye perceives the upside down and flipped image as  blurry. In actuality, each single image is not blurry, it is crisp, but the more light you have overlapping, the brighter it gets.  The most overlap happens in the middle, so the edges are dimmer.

I can't wait to see her paper that describes what the lens does for these tiny images.
(I'm up late grading old assignments - they're mostly good but this one makes my day.)

Going "off book."

A radiolab episode some time back was about "games" and talked about how chess records all the plays from major competitions and calls this the "book" -- and every new game begins in a way that has already been tried before, but a few plays in and there's a moment in all games when the players go "off book."  It's a cool metaphor for lots of things.

I've been thinking about how fun it is when my class goes "off book" -- they throw out an idea or question I had never considered.  And I don't mean the somewhat frequent instances in which students throw out something that takes me a while to figure out how they are thinking through a problem (which is also interesting) but the actual chance to do science with them -- they ask a question about the physics that I hadn't considered. Sometimes I can easily answer the question - but sometimes it's way cooler and I *really* feel like we're doing science together. (I wonder if they can tell these moments are different than every other moment? - like, can they tell that this is uncharted territory for me and them?)

There were three such events in the past week: one about the way a magnified image is not one in which the points in an image get bigger, just farther apart - and yet without gaps.  One about contact lenses - a student said that over the last few years her prescription has changed a lot and her glasses are really thick but her contact lenses haven't changed thickness. (I don't know if that's true, but if so, we decided it must be that the lenses have a different index of refraction.)  And then one that I'm still thinking through - again with magnification; I blogged his question recently - he looked up diagrams and we were looking at a picture of a virtual image and he points out that, looking through the magnifying glass, objects look CLOSER and bigger. Not farther and bigger.  And it got me thinking about how the virtual image wasn't what I always thought it was.  I'm going to sketch out some ideas and then post. I was thinking of having these students write up small papers with me for The Physics Teacher -- but I'm wondering if it would be interesting to write up a more formal paper about these instances and their role in teaching & learning.  (I have another example from Lambertian surfaces a few years back that still haunts me - it's a paper I need to write!)

But in other news...

The student who doesn't like the class is not just vocal about it with me, but with anyone who will listen - other science ed faculty, veteran affairs on campus, the counseling center, and other students.  Last Friday's debacle, I suppose, was the final straw for her. She came by today to talk about it.

The vet affairs group thinks she should go to the president. Other science ed faculty want her to "write letters." She wants to get out of taking my physics class in the Spring and so is going up the chain of command to do that.

Surprisingly, J. and I still have open open lines of communication and mutual respect - we talked through it for another hour + today; I know enough of her story - which is a life of enormous responsibilities and tragedies and service to others - to empathize and I do still love her, but her way of handling it is the biggest nightmare.

Student - TE?

Daniel, on Wednesday, was curious about how magnifying glasses work. (a pic of his whiteboards and notebook are on an earlier post)
Specifically, he wants to show that the image on the retina gets bigger.
He emails me tonight:

Subject:     Magnifying glass

I've been searching the internet all afternoon trying to find a good explanation for how a magnifying glass works and I keep finding the same explanation; every article I read, or video I watch on youtube just say "light bends when going through a lens, and that is how a magnifying glass works." Its pretty whack. I have taken to my own white board trying to find an explanation, and so far I'm stumped. I am starting to think that the answer is very simple, and I am just over thinking this. Is there any way I can get some guidance here so I can sleep tonight. also I will email you pictures of what I got so far

-Daniel  



This makes my day.
(ps - we hired him to work for us next semester)

I have been trying to write up "standards" for the inquiry class. Not b/c I want to use SBG, necessarily, but to be articulate about what it is I'm looking for.

Here's the attempt I will share with students - I'm not crazy about it, but it does get at some of the things I'm looking for in their work.:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxjZyKrJC9FhQUZIVXVDdl9kSVU

Why not share it with them at the start? - because I want them to realize that, in trying to explain the eye, they have to be clear on what an image is, how l light travels, what blurriness really means, what focus means, what lenses do to light. -- I worry that handing them this sheet would say "the class is not about figuring out what this eyeball is doing, but checking boxes on another stupid worksheet."

Points to areas

Two groups today were intrigued by the question of how lenses lead to magnification. As Kristin sketched the diagrams, she felt certain that what was a point of light on an object must be magnified to encompass an area if we are to magnify an object. How else could you make the image bigger?

She draws this as putting the screen somewhere beyond what we've called the "jellyfish point" where the rays from one point on an object all intersect:

But someone from the other group - Daniel - is really clear that this would lead to blurriness. The "areas" would start to overlap. And magnified images aren't blurry, so this can't be what is going on. But then how can images be bigger if a point is not expanded to an area? 

What a genius of a question - the problematization that Brian and I are talking about as a prerequisite for authoring ideas.

(Daniel is also interested in the question of magnification and is drawing these images of magnifying glasses + our eye lens that get the right idea but don't really engage with this great question of Kristin's. - Daniel's drawing is below. I look at that  picture, actually, of Daniel's sketches and notebooks and think "I'm doing something right - that there looks like science.")

This question came up with Irene a few semesters back (not students) - and we really wrestled with it - I had a hard time convincing Irene that you can magnify an image and still maintain a 1:1 ratio between points on the object and points on the image. I wanted to argue it mathematically and she wasn't buying it. (There are as many points between 0 and 1 as there are between 0 and 10, so you can magnify one stretch of the number line and not get any gaps!  This is Aleph-One and Cantor has a really cute proof of it - and that's about as much as I know about that. And it's really cool to me that thinking about magnification will lead to this kind of thinking about sizes of infinite sets - you know?)


Kristin compared it to zooming a digital picture and it starts to look pixely - one pixel (a "point") becomes four pixels (an area). And if it didn't, then you would get gaps between the pixels if you zoomed out and kept a 1:1 ratio. She even drew it this way - that our magnified image should be dots separated by space.  I LOVE that argument! To me it is like saying if we stretch the number line from 0 - 1 so that it is now the number line from 0 - 10, shouldn't there be some "holes" between the points that made up a line? Don't we need ten TIMES as many points in a number line that's 10 times as long? So we thought through why there wouldn't be gaps, and thinking about the idea that points are infinitesimally small and squished up against each other without gaps - and infinite in number.  It's hard to describe, but this conversation felt so deep - like, we could both identify this as a really profound and subtle idea about space and dimension and image and magnification -- "images are like stretchy sheets" she said.  "Like inflating a balloon!" I said - "points on the surface get farther apart without opening up any gaps in between!"

It makes me think about the universe expanding and how every point is getting farther from every other point, but points aren't turning into volumes.

It's not on tape - it was off to the side of the room and after class. It was delightful.

Mostly just venting.

Some time back I received buyout from a grant and was being arm-twisted into teaching an overload -- with the guilt-trip of "we have no one else who is qualified to teach intro physics." And it's true. And I decided that could not be my problem to solve. But it does bother me. This semester is particularly bad - we're a department with 3 tenure-track faculty, and one is on maternity leave, I'm serving as chair and have buyout so "only" teach two classes, and the third faculty member has $2M in grant funding buying her out of half of her teaching.

Our department teaches future K-8 teachers. They take physics, biology, geoscience, inquiry, and a "capstone" class (in which our students lead 4th grade students through 6 cookbook labs in an hour). Physics is taught by someone with a biology degree (undergrad) and a Master's degree in "science teaching." Biology is taught by someone with an undergrad degree in geology from Chico. Geos lecture (one hour a week) is from a tenure-track faculty.  The labs are taught by a geology consultant (master's in environmental engineering). Then they have me for inquiry. Then the capstone class is taught by someone who was herself a K-4 teacher (very classic I-R-E teaching and very little content knowledge of science).


The final assignment for the intro physics class (which uses PSET) is to create a poster tracking energy transfers through a day. The instructor created a "model" assignment (heating water for coffee using a bicycle generator) to show students what she expected. It is shown below. This kills me.

Monday's goose-bumps.

Kim isn't in class this week - which is fortunate. There's a landmine there between Kim & J. that I don't want to deal with.  At the start of class I acknowledged that Friday was awful, that J. was treated very disrespectfully and that I apologize for not intervening and saying something earlier. But I also don't want to continue to engage with this question and want us to just do some science. This was primarily met with relief. J. spent class in the back corner, arms folded, and spoke not a word. Yeesh.

I began with each group diagramming an eye that is focused on a maglite. With very little variation, they drew the same thing: rays starburst out from the maglite in straight lines; they bend upon entering the cornea, bend again entering the lens, bend upon exiting the lens, and all the rays come together just before reaching the retina.

Why just before reaching the retina?
1. because they need to be concentrated on the macula
2. and they need to have "flipped" because we know images are upside down on the retina.  We know flipping has to do with rays crossing (b/c of the pinhole camera) and so they just extended this idea to the lens situation.

I had them all go back and consider TWO maglites.  I said to the class - should we look at it first, or just diagram? The class voted to just diagram it- and one group protested... so

Three groups went totally bananas with this question:
1 - Andy, Nicole, Bessie and Jose built the thing - a lens, a screen, held two maglites, and then put some jell-o in between to see what's going on. They had it all set up to make things easily adjustable and on the same plane, etc. They image the maglites well enough to see little filamenty things on their screen. I don't have a great picture of the two-maglite scenario, but with one you see this:

it was AWESOME.  (I used some photoshopping to make it easy to see - we had to have all the lights off and it is fainter than that makes it seem... but we really could see two "cones" of light creating two separate spots on the screen.)  I *know* this is what you should see, but this is the first time I've seen it and it just gives me goosebumps. It's just so cool to really see it!

Even cooler? They then looked at two lasers:

The lasers are taped together so that their beams are parallel (why? I don't know - but it means that they are finding the focal point of the  lens.)

2 - Daniel's group (okay, just Daniel... G. is absent, J. is totally done with us, and Danielle is very much caught in the middle of all of this) creates this diagram - Daniel is the author of the "overlapping venn diagrams" theory of large-pinholes, and he can now explain how the lenses un-overlap the venn diagrams -

3 - Sam, Emma and Kayla got to a place where they could explain that there are two "kinds" of crossings - the "jellyfish" crossing (one group described how a maglite-through-lens looks like a jellyfish when it all comes together at one point) and the fry-an-ant spot (where parallel rays all cross and the image gets inverted). They did this mostly theoretically and it was super cool.


Other groups were doing great stuff too -- we'll need to pick up on Wednesday with those groups.

one thought. We have a new major - the BA in Natural Sciences - that's supposed to be the track for people who want to do middle school science. With little exception, these students are not doing as well in this class as students who don't think of themselves as science-types. I think that might be related to how students find their way into the BA in NS: they are elementary ed majors who like science (which often means that they like doing demos and creating worksheets) or they are pre-med/nursing who were "counseled out" (failed one to many courses) of that track and looked for a major/career that could still use these courses they've already taken.

Friday's disaster.

Friday we discussed the first four chapters of Gallas's book - Talking Their Way Into Science. I was nervous going into it and have been putting off meta-discussions like these about the class itself because - really for the first time - there is a vocal and upset student for whom this class isn't working. But we had a long day on Friday (because I gave them a day off before Thanksgiving break) and we're near the end of the term, so it was time to discuss.

As predicted, when the time came for J.'s group to share their chapter, discuss quotes they found intriguing and implications, things turned to why this class isn't working.

What I wish I had done: made the conversation about the book and been explicit that this is not time to critique our own experiences of the class or even critique the author of the book.  And I wish I had stopped the conversation earlier.

Why I didn't do that in the moment: I really do believe that J. is a puzzle to solve and want to hear more from her and so I was just mostly caught up in the conversation. - her reaction to the class is one that I can imagine physics professors having ("they're just talking in circles and they are SO VERY WRONG"). -- I once showed a video of inquiry students in Paul & my's class discussing how electrons might move in conductors and their arguments were about the density of the material -- are the atoms of the material stepping stones across which electrons move, or are those atoms road-blocks that impede the motion of electrons? (and the students, of course, were less clear than I am right now - they probably got the terms mixed up and weren't sure about what is an atom, molecule, charge, or electron. and they weren't sure if styrofoam or metal was more dense - but they were talking about particle density, not mass density!) -- This was at Haverford - a small, expensive private school. When it was time for discussion, there was shock at how little the students knew -- it was as if the point of my talk were to introduce them to this weird culture of undergrad girls with their wackadoo science ideas.  I felt indignant for the students and depressed by the faculty response.

J. is reacting like the faculty -- I would pull out quotes but I haven't had the stomach yet even to download (let alone watch) Friday's discussion.  (Really, the camera - with its 2 hours of video - looked toxic to me on Friday!) One of her claims is that this class doesn't match her learning style - she is really good at learning and memorizing facts and then sharing those ideas with others, but when we just sit in a circle and talk all the time she doesn't know what she's supposed to be remembering and when she goes home to look it up she finds out that all our ideas are wrong. But more than that - it's not just about learning style - it's that there are so many right ideas to learn why waste our time on these wrong ideas?  (She's not asking this as a question - it's just critique.) (I will add that I don't think she is understanding what the ideas she looked up are all about, and doesn't know how to productively critique others' ideas because she doesn't know exactly why they are wrong.)

What happens next: Students take up defense of the class. Kim sees herself as another student in the class, and chimes in -- "okay - that right there, though? - 'learning style'? - that doesn't really exist. Research shows it doesn't exist."  J. digs in - Kim pushes back. It got emotional and J. - who has vented about the class with others in the class - starts calling them out on not backing her up now. It was ugly. :(

Yuck. It was really yucky.

Two thoughts that I have right now:

1. Part of it is a framing issue: the class is no more about acquiring canonical scientific knowledge than an art class is about recreating the Mona Lisa. And that's weird (relative to all other science classes  - even ones that I teach) and not obvious enough.  I think SBG could help with this. I think a better syllabus and continued emphasis and conversation about this would help.

2. Part of it is a vulnerability issue: it is really vulnerable to share your ideas in class - the dismissiveness J shows towards her peers' ideas is - it's almost cliché to say - evidence of the dismissiveness she has towards the value of her own ideas. And I haven't done enough (though I do a LOT!!) to make it safe to share ideas. There's a real safety and lack of vulnerability in following procedures/memorizing others' ideas - so if I'm going to pull that safety net away I need to make it clear that you're still safe.

And one other thing:
I can appreciate the fact that this class evokes strong emotional responses, and that the classroom is a place where we can share and discuss those responses.

Two nice things that happened in the conversation:
Andy described our ideas as "definitions without terms" - he said in most classes you memorize the term "photosynthesis is how plants make food" without actually knowing anything about what photosynthesis does. And in this class we have all these ideas and just don't have the names to go with them. (I agreed - noting how this 'ray crossing' spot we were talking about is what physicists call the focal length.)

Ali said something about how you have to have a passion for something if you're going to really understand it - you have to love it. The way she said it made me really happy.

Private blog

I've thought for a bit that I should make the blog private - after a really miserable class on Friday, and wanting to blog about it, I'm making this a private blog. I added the emails of those who I know regularly read and comment.

Great day

We've had ONE day with lenses and already we're putting things together. I started the day by having each group demonstrate something cool/interesting/perplexing they had seen, and then - if they could - diagram what was going on. The conversation on why rays bend in a lens is going to be worth looking into more carefully, so I'm blogging what I remember from the day...


Group 1. Amy had this idea that our retina is kind of like those "executive toys" (why are they called that?) pin art things -- and we build up images from these tiny dots of cones/rods. It's a crazy but true idea that just seems so obvious to me now -- it was nice to have a student articulate it and be excited by her idea (and now crazier to me is that we perceive "wholeness" at all!).  I gave them some tips on things to notice and explain - mainly having to do with our peripheral vision. They think that the middle of our eye - the macula - has closely spaced pins while the periphery is further apart and yet, they note, we don't see "holes" in our vision - which they think must be a problem the brain solves.

On to Group 2. They were taking a cut-out shape, shining a light through it, and then through a magnifying glass. As they moved the glass back and forth, the image of the cut-out shape would "flip" - the point of "flip," they note, is like a pinhole -  the rays are all crossing. They sketched it like rays crossing IN the lens and then again outside the lens - so it was kind of iffy.

On to Group 3 - Here they were using lasers and had two lasers - one red & one blue - held side-by-side so the rays are parallel.  If you move the screen back and forth, you first see the red-on-right, blue-on-left - then they cross. It's consistent with group 2, but the diagram was more clear. Two rays enter the lens (from the right), on the other side they exit aimed towards one another, and then they cross. Very clear.  Awesome. They've also brought in jell-o because it reminds them of the vitreous humor and diagram how that travels through the jell-o - it's offset from where it would be without the jell-o. They compare it to how a straw looks "bent" in water -- though they're far from the explanation, these connections are cool...

(as I'm typing I'm looking back at the video and realizing it's only 25 minutes of video. This should be 2 hours. ARRGH!)

Group 4 had been interested in the humor too, so had been looking at laser light in cups of water - then (at my silly suggestion) added a bit of milk from their latte to make the lasers more visible. Instead what they noticed was that the blue laser light was scattered, the red wasn't. I'm pretty sure this is Mie scattering they're seeing... they had ideas about how the humor might protect the eye from blue rays - but mostly they were just perplexed by a phenomenon pretty unrelated to the eye. I would let them continue with that, but with 2 weeks left I thought better of it and clued them in.

Still, they showed the demo, and it's different in jell-o than in milk (see above - yellow jell-o, green transmitted, blue goes nowhere).

Group 5 had been modeling the eye's parts as three separate lens-like elements: cornea, humor and lens. They took three lenses in a row and could see images in them. It's upside-down, as we've heard images are ... no good sketches from this group, though.

Group 6, however, had taken three different lenses and played around (essentially) with focal length by imaging a flashlight.  Coincidentally, the small lens was the short focal length, so that's throwing them off - One of the perplexing things they note is that it seems like the lens-retina distance is fixed, so shouldn't dilating our pupil change the focal length? (this is b/c they think that diameter of lens affects the focal length) -

I highlight differences in how groups 2, 4, and 6 are drawing the lens and *thought* that group 4 had shown rays inside the lens (they only showed them in the jello). So in pointing this out, D. has an idea - he'd read that light travels slowly in a lens, so maybe that's what's doing the bending. In fact, I think he read more than he let on -- he has an idea that it's like a car driving into mud and one side hits first and slows and so the car pivots.  (The Khan Academy video on lenses says exactly this.) What's nice about this way that he brought it up, though, was that others could challenge it -- he just tossed it out as an idea as opposed to a fact he looked up, and M. said she thought a car was the wrong analogy - rays are like motorcycles, not cars! I *love* this. K. says something similar - that a car would pivot, but the rays would shatter a little - or separate. But then they think maybe a motorcycle would pivot too, a little? - and the mechanism is consistent with our observations... direct-hit rays don't bend.  This is going back-and-forth for a while so I paused and asked the 0 - 5 question (show with fingers if you're following the debate)- folks were either 0's or 5's - so I recapped on the board and offered Carlie's rowing analogy from a few semesters ago.

Anyway, I was beyond impressed at how far they had gotten in a day, the range of ideas they brought up, they way they were connecting observations and theories, the precision that a few groups were using.

PERC ideas

Maybe everyone who has organized a PERC had similar ideas, but I really want to do something cool with the PERC! - particularly things that relate to the idea of affect (not that these all do).  Some ideas, and I'm curious how these sound to my readers:

1. Poster session clustering:
use some software (a friend told me what I'd need to do...) to come up with a range of cool ways to cluster papers: keywords, citations, lineage, content-area. What I'm really picturing is an interactive online tool - a network diagram that you can organize by citations or keywords or whatever. So you can see how posters might cluster based on different kinds of things.  We'll probably cluster by a loose topic/content - but you could visualize other ways of clustering and find the posters that might be similar to your own, if far away location-wise.

2. Journal club:
Ask one or two of the speakers to recommend a paper of theirs that they would like to discuss, and then organize a group to meet over lunch or dinner to discuss the article. Or perhaps set this up so that it's a group that reads several papers - one from each speaker - in advance of the conference and then set up meetings with the authors while at the conference.

3. First-timers:
Other conferences organize meet-n-greet for first-time attendees. Maybe we're small enough that we don't need to do this - but I bet that's not true.

4. Twitter:
There are some strongly pro and strongly anti twitter-at-conferences folks. But there's cool stuff you can do with twitter - ask questions, "see" other talks that you didn't, alert others to a cool poster they should see, send out tweets of where to meet up and when, etc.  Other research communities I know about through colleagues (digital literacies and data visualization) are reallllly active on twitter and it works well.

5. Blogger meet-ups?
Blogging (periodically - when I'm really "on") changes my research life. Seems like we could do something with that.

6. Informal spaces
Not sure what I mean by that just yet.

Imagining a TE paper...

I'm imagining a paper on TE that really highlights for physics faculty the drudgery of what goes on in most intro physics labs, and compares this to Inquiry and then presents some ideas about the differences between the two classes. I have more ideas about where it goes from here... something perhaps for PERC with Brian?

“Right now, our group is working on the idea of how glasses and contacts change the shape of your cornea to balance out a person's misshapen cornea. We thought we could explain it by explaining that people with near-sighted vision need glasses with thicker glass on the sides and that people with far-sighted vision need glasses with thicker glass in the center. However, we only knew what near-sighted glasses looked like. We didn't know what far-sighted glasses (e.g., reading glasses) looked like. When I was at Walgreen’s the other day, I saw some reading glasses and decided to investigate. And sure enough, the glasses were thicker in the center and as the intensity of the prescription increased, so did the thickness of the center. I was so proud of our group to turn out correct!”  - Student, May 2011

In one unit of the course Scientific Inquiry, students (primarily future elementary teachers) begin by dissecting cow eyes and, through reading case studies regarding vision and designing their own experiments, work to describe the roles the various parts of the eye play in vision.  There is no textbook or lab manual, and students struggle to describe how it is that a lens, cornea or the internal humors bend light rays so that they “reconvene” at a particular point. One group may be examining lenses more generally, another group is trying to describe what we come to call the “fry an ant” spot, a third group puzzles over why it is that different animals have differently-shaped pupils. They use everyday materials: laser pointers, chalk dust, water, magnifying glasses, and shapes cut in tinfoil. They begin to discuss phrases like “the curvier the lens, the more light bends,” and, as they discuss between groups, students work to refine these ideas to precise descriptions of the refraction of light rays. They wonder whether the thickness or the curvature of the lens is the important factor, or simply the angle at which the ray strikes the lens. One student comments “all curves seem flat if you’re small enough” - like an ant on the surface of the earth - so perhaps what matters is not curvature so much as the angle of incidence. Over time, these conversations lead towards ideas about how the shape of a lens creates a focused image on the retina. One group extends this to examine their own glasses— they try to figure out why glasses don’t work if worn “backwards” and how the thickness of glasses should change for near- v. far-sighted vision. It is this group that begins to construct hypotheses that are finally verified at Walgreen’s in the quote above.

In the physics labs across the creek, science majors are enrolled in introductory physics and are doing a lab on Snell’s Law - the very law the students in the Inquiry class are moving towards constructing. They aim large HeNe lasers at the center of the flat edge of an acrylic semicircle from Pasco. The semicircle is used so that a ray will refract upon entering but not upon exiting the medium, making  later calculations easier to perform. Students measure the angle of incidence and angle of refraction for a range of incident angles, as described by the lab manual.  They choose how to record and plot the data, and are asked to use their plots to establish the index of refraction of acrylic and “prove” that two angles are related via a simple formula: Snell’s Law.  Their work is measured on two criteria: whether their value for n matches the accepted value within the limits of the uncertainty of their measurements and if they can explain how their graph is consistent with Snell’s Law.

The elementary education majors never arrive at Snell’s Law. They develop the less-quantitative notion that the more that light is “grazing” a surface, the more it will bend upon entering, and light that hits “straight on” does not bend at all. They do not relate this relationship to the speed of light in various media (the n of Snell’s Law) or have an explanation for why the relationship is what it is— the finding is purely phenomenological. When we look at these students through the usual classroom assessments of physics: do they know and can they apply the laws of physics, the elementary education majors - already behind the science majors in terms of scientific literacy - are falling farther behind their peers across the creek.

For the science majors, however, surveys reveal that they are not particularly excited by their findings. They rarely seek out opportunities to apply ideas from class to everyday phenomena; when friends and family ask about school, they do not talk about Snell’s Law; they do not report seeing examples of Snell’s Law in everyday places or perform experiments on their own time to extend their understanding of the phenomenon. This is not particularly surprising to most physics faculty, who are routinely disappointed by their students’ ennui (and who are perhaps underwhelmed by Snell's Law). But for the elementary education majors, their survey responses are markedly different:

• “My roommate has said that although the pinhole [camera] is interesting and how the eye works, she is tired of me bringing it up each time after [I] have class.”
• “My friends are actually annoyed by me with asking so many questions.”
• “I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why one side of the spoon produced an 
upside down image while the other side produced a right side up image... I think I figured it 
out!”
• “I truly am interested and am weirdly getting into wanting to be an eye doctor.”

In some regard, then, the experience of the elementary education majors more directly mirrors that of scientific practice, where questions are pursued, at least in part, because they are inherently interesting, questions are taken up with friends and colleagues, and puzzles haunt you long after leaving work at the end of the day. 

More info on my favorite ESTJ

Students are reading "Talking Their Way into Science."  I posted this on my private blog but want to add it here, since we were discussing this idea here recently:

In the book, Karen Gallas describes a student, Donald:

This is a very raucous discussion. I notice that all the children are participating except for Donald, our most knowledgeable science buff. I realize that he never speaks in a Science Talk unless he has had prior information on the topic.  He is unable to engage on this one. I wonder if too much prior knowledge makes you less able to work on open ended questions. In some ways these talks make a level playing field…

Later in April, my notes record this observation during the talk, Does the universe end?

Donald entered this discussion first to clarify the question and then to make an extensive display of knowledge. He spoke in very quick spurts, like he was reading from a book, kind of a staccato delivery of facts… His vocal intonation was very high pitched, authoritative, and impatient…

The pattern that seemed to be emerging that first year, was that Donald would participate only when there was no risk in joining us because he could display his knowledge, and when he did say something the tone of his remarks was always intimidating.

… Perhaps the talks violate their sense of what science is. In other words, they have been prepared before entering school to feel “scientific.” For them, science is like saving money in a bank: Acquire an extraordinary amount of information, and that makes you scientific.

 My ESTJ student recognizes herself in this! - she notes:

I’m Donald in the book! Ha ha!

I don't entirely agree-- she's not intimidating (or not deliberately so - she has a very strong presence but you don't feel threatened by her) - but it's fascinating that she sees herself as the Donald of our class (and I do agree, in part, with that assessment). I'm also excited to hear how it is to read a book saying the Donalds are not doing the "right thing."  And she might be able to say "here's how it feels to be Donald" - someone who enters a class with a strong science identity that has the class structure undermine that.  I really want to get her ideas on this.

INFP/ESTJ

Last week one of my favorites was exasperated by the inquiry class -- and since she's one of our majors, she will be in my advanced inquiry class, so was asking someone else about it when I wandered by. I asked about the conversation and she was kind about it, but very clear that this style of class just isn't working for her. A few things about her: she's former military, then law enforcement before being disabled in a training injury. She's a mother, is manager of an orchard, and whatever bar you set for her she will exceed it with enthusiasm. She's never late, often stays after to help pick up, never misses an assignment.  She brought pistachios to class last week (after the morning harvest); brought plums earlier.  She gets things done. And the lack of a clear bar in this class is driving her nuts. She notices herself mentally checking-out and that's also driving her crazy. Early on, when we were starting to set up questions and research them, she created detailed power point presentations after searching out information online. Over time it became clear that this wasn't the thing to do -- though I did reference their slides and we did talk about the ideas they brought up, there's definitely been a lack of power-point the last 5 weeks.  There have been two instances in the class where I feel she's been somewhat publicly recognized as not fully "owning" the information she found online -- (1) she researched cones with color vision and notes that we have millions of cones in our eyes - when asked if we have a cone that detects purple, she said yes.  I (conversationally) said something like "actually - no, and that's the weird thing. We do have millions of cones, but only three different types...".  Then (2) I mentioned something about covering up the top half of our pinhole and she said, quickly, "well then we'd lose the bottom half of our image." Someone else said "no, that's just a smaller pinhole. It would get dark but clear." 

I should also say that I really really *like* her-- she's direct, open, incredibly kind, and steely-strong. And her work ethic makes me embarrassed if I drop the ball and return an assignment late or feel as though I am under-prepared.  So it bothers me that she doesn't like the class.  I don't like wasting people's time, especially people who use their time well and have little time to spare.  So that's the preamble.

I had them take the Myers Briggs personality test over the weekend. (I'm hesitant to talk about it b/c I don't know how pseudo-sciencey or pop-psychology this personality type thing is. But when I first took it it was a revelation to me and I still feel a strong identity as an "INFP"- like that says something stable and important about me.  "INFP"ers feel like "my people" more than, say, PER does or Atkins or whatever.)  I thought of this because I remember taking it with my roommate - and there were questions about "I like it when things are settled" or "I like keeping options open" and "I am happier after I've made a purchase" -- things like that -- where I was shocked to see that Monica was squarely in the prefer-things-all-wrapped-up category. Who likes that? it's like prefering to have OPENED your presents instead of having a room full of wrapped presents. (I've thought before that my Myers Briggs type says a lot about how I like to teach - and even predicted to Sam that Hunter and I would be the same type. We are.)

Monday I divided the room into sections: Extravert v. Introvert and then Perceiving v. Judging.  (Jung's types, I think?) Within those sections, they further subdivided N/S F/T.  I had the students in each section talk about how they respond to this style class and whether this is something they have in common with others from their "type" -- this can be kind of hokey and I said it was something I was just curious about as opposed to certain that the correlation would be there.

Some information from Wikipedia on I/E:

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.

And information on P/J:

• judging types like to "have matters settled".
• perceptive types prefer to "keep decisions open".

I'm a solid I P.  The three other students in my corner of the room were my people. And, true to expectations, in the opposite corner was the exasperated student, and others who I would completely expect to be there. They want rules! they want answers!  J. talked about how she goes home to show her son the things we do and what we've learned, but when we're just talking all day she doesn't have a concrete thing to share and talk about. A. - over in my corner - talked about how he'll walk around all day after class looking at things - a spot of light - and thinking more about how it came to be that way. The

It was really fun for the introverts to talk about how we *enjoy* being alone-- A. talked about having "social bodyguards" who go out with him and prevent him from needing to interact with other people. (He also said something Richard and I joke about all the time -- how much we hate getting our hair cut b/c we're expected to make small talk for a half hour.)  Some were surprised "you're an introvert? but you're not shy!" - and so we got to talking about shy v. introversion.  And it was also cool to see everyone in the room sitting among their kind -- the talkative ones on the left, the less chatty on the right. The give-me-rules in the back, the here's-an-idea in the front.  Some surprises (E. & K. both were in the back, though on the expected sides) but mostly people sat where I expected them to. 

The whole conversation felt great -- really fun, and insightful, and gives us a new vocabulary for things. Instead of 'why are we still talking about this??' you can say 'ah - there are those perceptive-types, mulling it over and over and seeing all the sides of things.'  And instead of thinking "those bone-headed students don't get it" (which I wouldn't think!) - I can think "here's someone who enjoys a different kind of knowledge than I enjoy."


Anyway, it led me to wonder what it is I expect from, say, this student I mentioned above. -- I want my students to like science and to feel that class is not a waste of their time.  But what does that mean-- can everyone like the same things? What *is* a personality - is it the kinds of things you enjoy?  If we're talking about affect and enjoying science, what does that mean in terms of personality types?  Do I want her to enjoy not knowing and having lots of loose ends?  That seems like something I can't want for her (and if it was something I wanted for her, it seems futile) -- happiness with loose ends seems rooted in something more fundamental to a person than (even) identity.

I also think about Amy's research on how people do research.

asking all the right questions

Some of this is posted on my grant blog - but it's password protected, so I'm adding more notes here...

In inquiry yesterday (and Monday too) we spent the entire time discussing specular & diffuse reflection. The question that started it:

If light reflects off of something and everyone can see it (diffuse reflection) did that light bounce off like a pool ball (equal angles - GR's theory) or did it come in at one angle and reflect off at all angles (shatters - AL's theory)?

This led to two ideas:

1. Light must go off in all directions if we can all see it, so it shatters.
2. It pool-ball-bounces off of microscopically rough surfaces, so it goes everywhere even though it reflects off at just one angle.

Since we know "smoothness" matters (the smoother the surface the more it seems to "pool ball" in one direction) it seems that idea 2 is the key idea. Plus they think there's something "atomistic" about light -- what is "half" of a red light ray? -- what would it mean to "shatter" light into pieces?

From there we debated the two ideas:

1. Suggests that a light ray is a thing that divides into many.
2. Suggests that a light ray is a bundle of things that separate.

-- most groups like the rough-surfaces/bundle-of-things idea.
-- one group thinks that if it's a bundle, the spot of light we see wouldn't be a nice uniform spot - it would send one ray one place, another another place, and look patchy.   So it must fragment. But they don't know how such a fragmentation happens. And don't know how to respond to the question of how light can be broken in pieces.

Which led to Andy's idea --

light is like a push on something with all these springs attached to it - and those springs all start to wiggle. It's not like a superball at all (our model of diffuse reflection: superballs on cobblestones).  It's like a push.  You can't say the same push came "off" something as was pushed "on" something. It's not like matter. (he has not had a physics class or looked at models of matter as being connected by springs - crazy right?)

At the end of class, I mentioned how they're asking all the right questions (I can't remember what that comment was in response to) and they laughed (which surprised me) and I said something about how across the creek (in the physics building) students are finding out the answers to your questions and they don't even know it.  Kristin looks to the physics building and wails "Tell us your ways!"

I thought of Kristin this morning while I taught a physics lab (as a sub) where they have the answers and don't even know it.

Anyway, I was reminded of a quote by Irwin about art - he's telling his biographer about his development as an artist and interjects:

“You know, you have to be careful in taking these things I’m saying and working them into too clear an evolving narrative. There’s a danger in spelling these recollections out so lucidly that your reader gains the impression that at the time I knew what I was doing and where all this was leading in some sort of intellectual way.  You have to make it very clear to anyone who might read your essay, especially any young artist [me: scientist] who might happen to pick it up, that my whole process was really an intuitive activity in which all of the time I was only putting one foot in front of the other, and that each step was not that resolved. Most of the time I didn’t have any idea where I was going; I had no real intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing. Usually it was just a straightforward commitment in terms of pursuing the particular problems or questions which had been raised in the doing of the work.

Maybe I was just gradually developing a trust in the act itself; that somehow, if it were pursued legitimately, the questions it would raise would be legitimate and the answers would have to exist somewhere, would be worth pursuing and would be of consequence. Actually, during those years in the mid-sixties the answers seemed to matter less and less: I was becoming much more of a question person than an answer person.

The thing that really struck me that most as I got into developing my interest in the area of questions is the degree to which as a culture we are geared for just the opposite.  We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and n a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution.  We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, whereas it’s really fairly clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time. Now, I’m not anti-performance, but I find it vey precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves.”

How do you not?

After showing an inquiry video many summers back, Hunter asked how I got the students so interested. I oh-so-cutely replied "how do you not?"  Hunter has since made me realize that (a) that's a lame answer, (b) that's an important question and (c) I don't know the answer. I see the TE grant as trying to answer that question.

Today I subbed for intro physics labs, where they're proving that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and Snell's law. It has been a *while* since I've been in a traditional lab. Probably 12 years ago (wow). -- This is the lab they're doing for 3 hours (verbatim); it is their first introduction to light rays; and it's a case study in how to make something not interesting:

Introduction. When a ray of light is incident on the boundary between two different media, part of the light is reflected and part is refracted, as illustrated below. What distinguishes the media is the relative speed of light in each. The velocity of light in medium 1 is c/n1 and the velocity of light in medium 2 is c/n2, where n is the so called index of refraction of the medium. Obviously the vacuum is a ‘medium’ with n=1. If the angle made by the incident ray with the normal to the boundary is θ1, then the angle made by the reflected ray with the normal (θR) will equal the incident ray angle:

θ1 = θR (1)

The angle θ2 of the refracted ray will be related to the incident ray angle (θ1) by:

n1sinθ1 = n2sinθ2 (2)

where n1 and n2 are the indices of refraction of the respective media. In this experiment we will investigate the validity of eq. (1) and eq. (2). 

The second equation describing refraction is also known as Snell's Law.

Procedure:
1.    Place the semicircle on a piece of clean paper and trace its outline on the paper. Mark on the paper the location of the midpoint of the flat face and draw the normal to the face passing through this midpoint.
2.    For 6 widely spaced angles... (etc.) Place a ‘dot’ on the paper directly below where the light strikes the triangle, using the triangle’s vertical edge as a guide.

Analysis.
 Question: Why is it vitally important that the laser ray strike the midpoint for all rays?
1.    Make a table with columns: | Ray # | sinθ1 | sinθR    | sinθ2

2.    Make plots from your data that will test the validity of eq. (1) and eq. (2).

It was DRUDGERY. I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. "What do we put in this column?" they would ask and I was so bored by this that I found it hard to want to get them to reason through it with me. "What do we plot?" "why?" I'd forgotten how awful it could be.

So, then, how does this lab make them (and me) so disinterested, while the inquiry class gets people arguing animatedly about all of these topics?

When we study refraction in inquiry, we begin by dissecting an eye -- we've looked at and made sense of the pinhole camera, and are starting to put together the idea that the eye functions, in part, like the pinhole camera -- but that this can't account for why objects are so clear (the pupil is big enough that things should be extreeeemly blurry). So then some groups turn to the lens and what it does.  They examine the "fry an ant spot" and sketch what the rays of light must be doing for such a spot to exist. They use phrases like "steeper angles bend more" and "straight-on rays don't bend" -- qualitatively describing some of Snell's law.  They draw these kinds of sketches, trying to figure out the relationship between the angles:

We're studying how we see, and refraction becomes part of that -- we don't just study "refraction."

some ideas:

in inquiry we're developing a narrative for light (including mechanism); people are drawn to narratives.
in physics lab they're doing data-entry; no one (?) is drawn to data entry.

in inquiry they're solving a puzzle
in physics lab they're learning the puzzle solution (?) but don't even know what the puzzle is.

Engestrom reading: in inquiry the objective is to figure out what light is doing so that we can make sense of our pinhole theaters or vision -- which leads to other observations we want to understand.
In physics lab, the objective is, as they state, to  "investigate the validity of eq. (1) and eq. (2)" -- except CLEARLY that's not the objective -- are they really examining the validity? if they find it's not valid, then what? - no. the point is (1) get points for a grade (could be true in my class, but the conversation isnt' graded) by (2) producing the required graphs.  I tried pointing out how images look distorted when you look through the acrylic, and used some chalk dust so we could really see the bending ray.  And for a minute a student looked at me, puzzled and said "why do we see the ray only when there's chalk dust?" - but then went back to working on the lab and had no other questions.

Pugh looks mainly at features of students (right?) - goal mastery orientation, etc. - rather than classrooms.


Some thoughts:
Read quickly through the readers-digesty-paper "Interest- The Curious Emotion" (I find it annoyingly written) -- but it includes the quote "Interest is thus a counterweight to feelings of uncertainty and anxiety (Kashdan, 2004)." -- which made me think about how to overcome stereotype threat by making things interesting.

Dentist

In inquiry, I often mention my professional life - that I have a grant with Brian, that I meet regularly with a writing group, and that I meet regularly with a reading group. I show them how, when I meet with my writing colleagues, we send a draft and instructions on how to best help us with that draft. (And then the extensive feedback I get from that group.)  And when we read an article, I show the google doc that my colleagues and I make of "questions we have about the reading/questions inspired by the reading" (I should also share screen shots of the whiteboards from the EP reading group!) -- I do this so that they have a sense that what I'm asking them to do with reading and writing isn't just a school-based practice, but is something to carry into their professional lives. It's also to show them a window into my life and the life of professors in general, to see that I take teaching very seriously, and they should too.  I never quite know how these comments go  over with them - if it makes an impact at all.

My dentist yesterday mentioned that she's in a reading group that includes my orthodontist and talked about a study they recently read and how it relates to my orthodonty (root resorption). I was so delighted to hear this, and think "if that's how students feel about me when I talk about my reading, writing and research, then this is a good thing to do."

Sensemaking

Some scattered thoughts on understanding images in pinhole theaters:

We've come up with some pretty good ways of drawing light ray diagrams -- straight lines from source to object, then reflects off of the object in a million directions, still traveling in straight lines, only a few of which go through the hole, and those land on the screen and make an upside down image.

But as Brian and I were talking today, we were noticing how, for some students, this isn't an explanation yet. In his class someone called "bullshit" on this describing an image. (I had a student a year back who similarly said, at this stage, "Am I the only one who's completely lost with this whole thing? Like I can't grasp any of this... Like none of this makes sense. Does none of this make sense? Does-- like everyone's talking about all these ideas and I literally have no idea what's happening. Like does the image go through the hole? Does it reflect through the foil? Like-- does anyone get what I'm saying?" - she's one of my all time favorite students.) And before the start of class on Monday, two students talked through the issue - "okay, I can draw these lines and I see how that makes it upside down and backwards, but I don't get it - does the light like pick up the image and throw it through the hole?"  And ultimately they got the idea by the start of class.

So drawing good diagrams doesn't mean that students really have developed an understanding of the ontology of an image (that's my diagnosis of the trouble - if you think an image is a thing flying through the air, then it's hard to make sense of these diagrams - and it's even hard to critique or talk about these diagrams in a meaningful way.  But they don't recognize that's the issue. I think of it like learning that i^2 = -1. You can't make sense of it and you don't even know what it could mean to say this number "exists" so you can't even critique this kind of meaningless definition for i.) 

As I talked to Brian I was thinking that using diagrams to predict things, instead of as posthoc explanations of observations (or even representations without much explanation), would force the issue of simply applying some rules v. really using them to make sense. But I don't know - b/c you can apply the rules for i and never quite know why it works. I do think there's something to this idea that the diagram should function as narrative, not just sketch, for its author.  And I'm not sure how to get that going. (I'd say 20 - 25% of the diagrams suggest the students aren't treating it as a narrative.- meaning it isn't  a story of how light creates an image.)

Anyway, I have this idea that tomorrow in class I'll ask students to sit in an area of the room (after talking about i?) -- maybe divide the room in half: (1) I can diagram things pretty well and see how that relates to the image - but there seems to be something missing; (2) I'm actively developing these ideas (out loud or silently) and they really help me make sense of why we wind up seeing what we see on the screen.  And see if group 2 can articulate or explain or something in such a way that group 1 gets it? - and then you can move from one area of the room to the other. (and we don't stop until everyone leaves group 1?)

Models of blurriness

Students had to diagram in their groups what happens when the hole increases in size that accounts for why the image gets blurrier. I jotted on the board the following ideas that came up, taken verbatim from students:

1. The bigger the hole, the more they [rays of light] intersect at multiple points.
2. [With a bigger hole] multiple rays are hitting at the same point on the screen.
3. [with a bigger hole, you will have] multiple overlapping images.

Two other ideas (not verbatim):

1. When a lot of light is allowed into the box, some of those light rays ricochet off the sides and walls of the box and the result is that the entire box is illuminated instead of creating just one image.
2. Since our eyes are adjusted to the dark, when we let in a lot of light we cannot respond to the really bright screen correctly. (That is, this is as much a problem of our eyes/brain as it is of the image cast onto the paper.)

Love these ideas. Want to think through this, perhaps with the lens of univocal v. dialogic.

Fall to-do list

Can't keep up! Falling behind! Quick moment to remind myself of what needs to be happening, mostly as it relates to research or classes related to research.

This week:

☐  Send complete book proposal to I.A.T. (thursday)
☐  Create job ad for bio & physics lecturer faculty. (thursday)

☐  Advertise for NSCI 321? (friday - email faculty)

☐  Develop portfolio homework for 321. (thursday)

☐  Rev. and resubmit responses to Deb. (friday)

☐  Edit, discuss survey with Brian (friday)

Next week:

☐  Finish revisions to the NOS paper... send to writing group for Friday

☐  Hire for next semester 321 (Emma? Kayla?)

☐  Transcribe amazing day of blurriness representations.
☐  Work on rev & resubmit.

 
Eventually:

✓  due Dec. 3rd - applications to buy lab materials.
☐  Chapter 3 of LSET - add instructor's guide/tips (this is perfect for long plane rides)
☐  Turn my poor little reject perc paper into a short PRST-PER paper
☐  Strengthen my Energy/Inhaling Calories paper with data

☐  iPad app.

☐  prep for 341 for spring - all digital...

☐  ... and apply for jobs. Yep.

Chico

I went to a dinner-with-the-professors event tonight in the freshmen dorms and, as a thank you gift, the faculty there were each given a mug. But the mug had been printed for an earlier event ("Scholarly Achievement Banquet 2012") and that title had been lightly sanded off the mug (though not entirely). On a good day, I love this kind of thing from my scrappy, underfunded university, and I think warmly of the earnest student employee sanding 50 mugs to hand to the professors who just ate some terrible cous cous with them. But today it just made me really sad.

Radiolab, and telling other people's stories

If you listen to Radiolab, you should listen to this week's podcast/show and then read this blog post - this is a spoiler.

In Radiolab, they tell the story of Yellow Rain, a chemical weapon (a fine yellow powder) dropped by the Russians on the Hmong after America pulled out of Vietnam.  They interviewed a Hmong immigrant who remembered seeing this powder and its effects -- whole villages sick and many dying. His niece translated for them.

According to the story, President Reagan used the discovery of this chemical weapon to justify producing nerve gas and renewing our chemical weapons program.

But it turns out it wasn't a chemical weapon at all -- it was bee poop. (And we learned some fascinating things about bee poop along the way - bees don't poop in their hive and, after hibernation, leave en masse to poop - leading to "yellow rain.")  The symptoms of the Hmong were likely due to dysentery and other diseases that ravaged the area during the war and they mis-attributed it to the bee poop.

But the story takes an interesting (and exceedingly uncomfortable) turn when the Hmong interviewee and translator respond to the "bee poop" theory - furious and in tears - they feel set up: they've been brought in to finally tell the story of the atrocities the Hmong faced in Vietnam - but instead these atrocities are shown by Radiolab to be "bee shit." You hear their voices, and then you hear a Harvard biologist and chemical weapons expert. The Hmong man protests: "With my own eyes I saw this... ". The interviewer is inappropriate - really pushing the case - "but he can't say ..." and, "this is hearsay."

Finally the translator says: "for the last 20 years no one was interested in the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested.  No one has cared and you were interested. That the story would be heard and the Hmong deaths would be recognized."

The Radiolab staff present the debate they had regarding whether or not to air the interview. Krulwich argues that there is a truth of the story - chemical weapons weren't used; the Hmong were confused; America used this misinformation to further its own chemical weapons industry - and that this story is important to tell and tell truthfully.  To the  interviewees, however, this isn't the story that needs telling (or it's one of many) - the story they want to tell is the atrocities faced by the Hmong - a story that never gets told and they felt they finally had someone who would hear and tell their story.

It made me think (anew) about whose story we're telling when we do research (and think about Amy's paradigms). We presented to our department seminar two weeks ago - and one of the 4 students we studied closely (and discussed during the seminar) was there at the seminar.  Though we used pseudonyms it was clear that it was her. In the story we tell, her scores don't budge when discussing the nature of science across the semester, but her actions do - her group does some really profound stuff. So it's an interesting story - but to stand there, with her in the room, and tell *her* what she learned, and how that knowledge was not declarative knowledge - felt like I had robbed her of the agency I sought to provide in the inquiry class.  We pulled her into the conversation about what she had learned, she didn't seem dismayed by our analysis, and I felt like we offered a meaningful and, in one way, truthful representation of her experience in inquiry.  At the same time, it was *me* pointing to what, from her experience, *I* found useful and worth telling.  And in that was I was silencing her  and saying what part of her story needed to be heard.

It also makes me think about who chooses what we focus on when we teach. Inquiry does a good job at this (though lately I think I've steered conversation towards the parts I find most meaningful). - I remember reading something a while back about how science takes something kids find fascinating - like a frog, a butterfly, or trucks or something - and strip away a lot of what they find interesting and beautiful to present a scientific fact/truth/theory. You ask people to give up something when they do science.  In inquiry, students with glasses study their glasses - the shape and what lasers do as they travel through; they've brought in pictures of their cats' eyes; data from their ophthalmologist; talked about working with bulls and speculate about bull color vision, etc. This feels like it somewhat addresses the thing I'm concerned about, but I would like to see more of the participants' stories (as authored by the participants) in my work.