Just published on the journal Science's online platform, a group from the Craig J Venter Institute has created a bacterium using an entirely synthetic genome. This is effectively the first time humans have created life from inanimate substances.
Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before this was done, and the future is now. However, while I am entirely for new scientific discovery and inquiry, this really is an eye-opening research result, where humans are 'playing God.' We need to have a very serious discussion on the ethics behind such research, and consider as best we can the unintended consequences of such research. While this was a case of creating a known bacterium, what happens when someone creates a new organism that literally is a brand new, never before seen life form? How can we know what will happen if something that never has existed in Nature comes out of a test tube? While we have that potential on a daily basis with mutations of existing single-celled organisms, this adds a new layer to the possibilities of life that could arise. Ever since humans have learned to genetically engineer organisms, there has been the potential of manufacturing new organisms that could become the ultimate biological weapon, or create scenarios that were once unimaginable. These are issues that most people are unaware of and don't consider, but this must change so political leaders from the global community can address the issue, sooner than later. With new global energy being put into nuclear proliferation, this is the next step in addressing matters that have profound effects on nothing more than global security and the future of human existence on the Earth.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Happy Anniversary - 50 Years of the LASER
Ah, the laser...this stands for Light Amplification of Stimulated Emission of Radiation. They are spread throughout our society, and most of us do not even realize it. Laser pointers. Security systems. CD players. DVD players. Construction. Grocery store scanners. Surgery. Industry. Making holograms. Telecommunications.
The laser was invented some 50 years ago, and the applications only become more numerous by the day. Check out Scientific American's tribute to this amazing device, first predicted in the 1920s by none other than Albert Einstein.
The laser was invented some 50 years ago, and the applications only become more numerous by the day. Check out Scientific American's tribute to this amazing device, first predicted in the 1920s by none other than Albert Einstein.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Some Thoughts on Where We Are...
Life right now is, in a word, interesting, is it not? The world keeps going 'round, the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening, and here in the Midwest we have actually had quite a nice spring thus far. I noticed a truly beautiful sunset this evening, after helping coach my son's first baseball practice of the year. What a way to get some perspective, to remember what is important in life, to see the boys out there getting dirty and having a truly enjoyable time playing a great game, with my daughter and countless other children playing in the background in a park.
I think we adults around the country need to enjoy such moments more frequently, take a deep breath more frequently, and remember what it is like to be caring, thoughtful, responsible, passionate as well as compassionate, and even a bit civil towards our fellow men and women in this country, as we consider, debate, and contemplate where we are as a country. Never in my life, which began in 1968 at the height of civil unrest with Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and shortly thereafter Watergate, have I seen so much of the polar opposite of what I just mentioned amongst adults. I've been relatively quiet on this blog about current events and politics, mostly because of a complete absence of time to dedicate to writing, but also because I am near speechless about the extent of incivility, irrationality, utter partisanship, and downright, for lack of a better word, hatred so many Americans have been showing towards each other in our body politic. As I say so many times to students as well as other adults who know me, we are in a greatly extended period where emotion seems to outweigh logic and honest debate of issues, regardless of one's political slant, ideology, and opinion.
We are in a time when the extremes of both the right and the left have forced themselves to center stage and have the microphone, throwing around accusations, blame, and doomsday rhetoric about our country. We see so many arguing the talking points that feed on emotion to try and drive the masses into a frenzy, never mind facts and evidence that inconveniently get in the way.
We see a time when decades of neglect and inaction on many fronts have finally managed to converge on us all at once, which has developed an environment where emotion is able to trump logic and common sense because of the scope and magnitude of the issues we now face simultaneously. There is an interconnected set of problems that need to be solved, some time very soon, if we are to avoid near catastrophe as a nation. And I do not want to be seen as being nothing but a partisan when I say this, because I truly say this in all sincerity and with as much an open mind as I can - President Obama is the only major player and person in a position of power I see who seems to understand the scope of interconnectedness of the many major issues we face. Think about it - who else has given speeches that go beyond one or two points? Who else makes a case for any sort of political solution to a problem without mentioning how it is related to multiple other problems and issues? I try to think of others who do this consistently, on either side of the aisle, but cannot think of anyone else (Bill Clinton comes to mind, but he is on the sidelines).
The economic collapse of the past couple years. Health care. Social security. Jobs. Energy policy. Climate change. Foreign policy, national security and two wars. The state of education. Immigration. Budget deficits and national debt. Tax policy. The role of government. National infrastructure. The American Dream and our standard of living.
This is all heavy stuff, each one being a major problem that requires serious discussion, debate, compromise, and both short- and long-term solutions. For any administration, taking on any single one of these over the course of a year or two and getting any sort of major deal on it would be a huge accomplishment. Well, having ignored just about every single one of these issues for multiple decades, there is a logjam on the presidential and congressional plates. We have someone who is willing to take on the political risk to actually confront them. Not because he necessarily wants to...but because he necessarily HAS to. And tough problems that require enormous amounts of work and effort and thought make the average person twist in the wind and want to run and hide. Tough problems we do not necessarily like to think about, precisely because they are tough, make many of us mentally adn intellectually shut down. Do you remember being a student in a math or science class, or some other subject you may have struggled in a bit, and you get to a topic or problem that simply does not make any sense when you first see it? What is your instinct? As a teacher, I see this most days of the week with a number of individual students...the tendency of many, perhaps most, is to step away and resist having to work on it. Serious thought...I am talking about the wrack your brain over a number of days or weeks thought about a single tough problem...is utterly exhausting. It can be entirely frustrating. It can lead one to want to quit altogether. It can lead to anger and emotional outbursts because it is easy to feel utterly stupid and inadequate when a solution continues to hide in the dark, and you are without a flashlight.
This is where we are with the problems we face, and the ugly side of problem solving is upon us. Emotional outbursts and anger have arisen from the collective 'wracking the brains over extended periods of time.' The issues are terribly complex. There are no easy solutions, period. Sorry to say, but "Drill, baby, drill!" really will not solve our energy crisis...simplicity, while desirable, is nothing more than wishful thinking and allows us to create catchy, folksy, bumper sticker quotes that dangerously puts the uninformed and short-sighted thinker into an emotional frenzy. Simply saying "Deport all illegal immigrants!" is not a real solution to our immigration woes. Nor is it practical...good luck hunting down 13 million people living in the background and shadows covering millions of square miles. Think about how hard it has been over a nearly ten-year period to hunt down just one person in a vastly smaller area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. As much as I, too, am not thrilled with all I pay in taxes, simply cutting taxes is not the solution to our jobs and fiscal problems. It is just a tad more complicated than that.
Thinking in terms of the ten-word phrase found during political campaign season is dangerous, because it completely masks the complexity of the serious issues facing the nation. An example is energy policy. What you do with energy affects infrastructure, which affects the budget, which affects tax policy. It affects industry and the type of manufacturing that will take place in the country over the next few decades. This affects jobs. The nature of those jobs affects the type of education we must provide to our children, who make up the next generation of the workforce. What we do with energy affects global pollution, our standard of living and climate. The nature of pollution from energy production and distribution affects health care (for example, as I point out to students when they asked about Obama wanting to begin building new nuclear power plants, no one in the US has ever died from us using nuclear power over the past five decades...but tens of thousands become sick and die from the pollution of coal, oil and gas power plants each year...not sure why this is never pointed out in the media). What we do with energy affects foreign policy and national defense.
This is why I say "Drill, baby, drill" is nothing more than a catch-phrase for the masses you want to emotionally charge up and fool into thinking that this is a serious policy statement. Nothing more ever follows those three words in terms of anything that resembles a solution to a tremendously serious, complex issue that is interconnected and intimately related to numerous other serious, complex issues. This is why I say Pres. Obama, whether you agree or disagree with his politics and proposals for issues, is the only one I see out there even attempting to seriously recognize the complexity and severity of the nature of the interconnected problems.
By the way, so you know I am not a complete partisan who thinks Obama can do no wrong, I am disappointed that the President recently authorized new offshore oil drilling. The right keeps saying that with modern techniques and technology, this is a safe endeavor. Tell that to the people on the Gulf Coast, as we have a new disaster in the making from the offshore platform that exploded and is now causing a natural catastrophe of much of the Gulf ecosystem. As bad as this is going to be in terms of environmental damage to all sorts of species, I kept arguing during the campaign when McCain proposed all sorts of new drilling that, when you consider the long-term, this is going to also be our drinking water. There is an impending shortage of clean, potable water in many parts of the US (as well as many parts of the world), and we will have to begin using ocean water some day (sooner than we might think)for our own survival. But no one likes thinking about this issue, so it has been put on a back burner, just like we have done with health care, social security, energy, infrastructure, immigration, and so on. We are paying a heavy price right now for that lack of action and foresight, and we will keep being shortsighted with issues like off-shore drilling and the interconnectedness to other issues like drinking water. History does repeat itself; this is a cliche for a reason.
I am frustrated by the majority of our elected officials who are in campaign mode and who are, perhaps, incapable of thinking about more than one thing at a time. I am worried that short-sighted, emotional outbursts are drowning out facts, evidence, expert opinion and proposals to serious, complex issues, that quite frankly the average person may not be able to comprehend, nor wants to make an effort to understand. I worry about those who resort to name calling and who attack another person's character and integrity if they do not agree with one's own opinion or political slant. It does not make you a 'traitor' or unpatriotic if you do not agree with me. In my mind, if your intent is to help solve a problem and make our nation better, that makes you a patriot, plain and simple, whether I agree with you or disagree with you! Being able to peacefully disagree with each other is largely what makes America unique and great! Why do we want anything less than this? This is why a blanket philosophy of "You are either with us or against us" is so terribly dangerous and UN-American. This is where many Americans are on both the left and the right. My kids' future is up for grabs right now, and I desperately yearn for a day, very soon, where facts and evidence are valued, and where serious and rational thought, debate and compromise will show its face and put this emotionally, partisan-driven nonsense in its grave.
I think we adults around the country need to enjoy such moments more frequently, take a deep breath more frequently, and remember what it is like to be caring, thoughtful, responsible, passionate as well as compassionate, and even a bit civil towards our fellow men and women in this country, as we consider, debate, and contemplate where we are as a country. Never in my life, which began in 1968 at the height of civil unrest with Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and shortly thereafter Watergate, have I seen so much of the polar opposite of what I just mentioned amongst adults. I've been relatively quiet on this blog about current events and politics, mostly because of a complete absence of time to dedicate to writing, but also because I am near speechless about the extent of incivility, irrationality, utter partisanship, and downright, for lack of a better word, hatred so many Americans have been showing towards each other in our body politic. As I say so many times to students as well as other adults who know me, we are in a greatly extended period where emotion seems to outweigh logic and honest debate of issues, regardless of one's political slant, ideology, and opinion.
We are in a time when the extremes of both the right and the left have forced themselves to center stage and have the microphone, throwing around accusations, blame, and doomsday rhetoric about our country. We see so many arguing the talking points that feed on emotion to try and drive the masses into a frenzy, never mind facts and evidence that inconveniently get in the way.
We see a time when decades of neglect and inaction on many fronts have finally managed to converge on us all at once, which has developed an environment where emotion is able to trump logic and common sense because of the scope and magnitude of the issues we now face simultaneously. There is an interconnected set of problems that need to be solved, some time very soon, if we are to avoid near catastrophe as a nation. And I do not want to be seen as being nothing but a partisan when I say this, because I truly say this in all sincerity and with as much an open mind as I can - President Obama is the only major player and person in a position of power I see who seems to understand the scope of interconnectedness of the many major issues we face. Think about it - who else has given speeches that go beyond one or two points? Who else makes a case for any sort of political solution to a problem without mentioning how it is related to multiple other problems and issues? I try to think of others who do this consistently, on either side of the aisle, but cannot think of anyone else (Bill Clinton comes to mind, but he is on the sidelines).
The economic collapse of the past couple years. Health care. Social security. Jobs. Energy policy. Climate change. Foreign policy, national security and two wars. The state of education. Immigration. Budget deficits and national debt. Tax policy. The role of government. National infrastructure. The American Dream and our standard of living.
This is all heavy stuff, each one being a major problem that requires serious discussion, debate, compromise, and both short- and long-term solutions. For any administration, taking on any single one of these over the course of a year or two and getting any sort of major deal on it would be a huge accomplishment. Well, having ignored just about every single one of these issues for multiple decades, there is a logjam on the presidential and congressional plates. We have someone who is willing to take on the political risk to actually confront them. Not because he necessarily wants to...but because he necessarily HAS to. And tough problems that require enormous amounts of work and effort and thought make the average person twist in the wind and want to run and hide. Tough problems we do not necessarily like to think about, precisely because they are tough, make many of us mentally adn intellectually shut down. Do you remember being a student in a math or science class, or some other subject you may have struggled in a bit, and you get to a topic or problem that simply does not make any sense when you first see it? What is your instinct? As a teacher, I see this most days of the week with a number of individual students...the tendency of many, perhaps most, is to step away and resist having to work on it. Serious thought...I am talking about the wrack your brain over a number of days or weeks thought about a single tough problem...is utterly exhausting. It can be entirely frustrating. It can lead one to want to quit altogether. It can lead to anger and emotional outbursts because it is easy to feel utterly stupid and inadequate when a solution continues to hide in the dark, and you are without a flashlight.
This is where we are with the problems we face, and the ugly side of problem solving is upon us. Emotional outbursts and anger have arisen from the collective 'wracking the brains over extended periods of time.' The issues are terribly complex. There are no easy solutions, period. Sorry to say, but "Drill, baby, drill!" really will not solve our energy crisis...simplicity, while desirable, is nothing more than wishful thinking and allows us to create catchy, folksy, bumper sticker quotes that dangerously puts the uninformed and short-sighted thinker into an emotional frenzy. Simply saying "Deport all illegal immigrants!" is not a real solution to our immigration woes. Nor is it practical...good luck hunting down 13 million people living in the background and shadows covering millions of square miles. Think about how hard it has been over a nearly ten-year period to hunt down just one person in a vastly smaller area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. As much as I, too, am not thrilled with all I pay in taxes, simply cutting taxes is not the solution to our jobs and fiscal problems. It is just a tad more complicated than that.
Thinking in terms of the ten-word phrase found during political campaign season is dangerous, because it completely masks the complexity of the serious issues facing the nation. An example is energy policy. What you do with energy affects infrastructure, which affects the budget, which affects tax policy. It affects industry and the type of manufacturing that will take place in the country over the next few decades. This affects jobs. The nature of those jobs affects the type of education we must provide to our children, who make up the next generation of the workforce. What we do with energy affects global pollution, our standard of living and climate. The nature of pollution from energy production and distribution affects health care (for example, as I point out to students when they asked about Obama wanting to begin building new nuclear power plants, no one in the US has ever died from us using nuclear power over the past five decades...but tens of thousands become sick and die from the pollution of coal, oil and gas power plants each year...not sure why this is never pointed out in the media). What we do with energy affects foreign policy and national defense.
This is why I say "Drill, baby, drill" is nothing more than a catch-phrase for the masses you want to emotionally charge up and fool into thinking that this is a serious policy statement. Nothing more ever follows those three words in terms of anything that resembles a solution to a tremendously serious, complex issue that is interconnected and intimately related to numerous other serious, complex issues. This is why I say Pres. Obama, whether you agree or disagree with his politics and proposals for issues, is the only one I see out there even attempting to seriously recognize the complexity and severity of the nature of the interconnected problems.
By the way, so you know I am not a complete partisan who thinks Obama can do no wrong, I am disappointed that the President recently authorized new offshore oil drilling. The right keeps saying that with modern techniques and technology, this is a safe endeavor. Tell that to the people on the Gulf Coast, as we have a new disaster in the making from the offshore platform that exploded and is now causing a natural catastrophe of much of the Gulf ecosystem. As bad as this is going to be in terms of environmental damage to all sorts of species, I kept arguing during the campaign when McCain proposed all sorts of new drilling that, when you consider the long-term, this is going to also be our drinking water. There is an impending shortage of clean, potable water in many parts of the US (as well as many parts of the world), and we will have to begin using ocean water some day (sooner than we might think)for our own survival. But no one likes thinking about this issue, so it has been put on a back burner, just like we have done with health care, social security, energy, infrastructure, immigration, and so on. We are paying a heavy price right now for that lack of action and foresight, and we will keep being shortsighted with issues like off-shore drilling and the interconnectedness to other issues like drinking water. History does repeat itself; this is a cliche for a reason.
I am frustrated by the majority of our elected officials who are in campaign mode and who are, perhaps, incapable of thinking about more than one thing at a time. I am worried that short-sighted, emotional outbursts are drowning out facts, evidence, expert opinion and proposals to serious, complex issues, that quite frankly the average person may not be able to comprehend, nor wants to make an effort to understand. I worry about those who resort to name calling and who attack another person's character and integrity if they do not agree with one's own opinion or political slant. It does not make you a 'traitor' or unpatriotic if you do not agree with me. In my mind, if your intent is to help solve a problem and make our nation better, that makes you a patriot, plain and simple, whether I agree with you or disagree with you! Being able to peacefully disagree with each other is largely what makes America unique and great! Why do we want anything less than this? This is why a blanket philosophy of "You are either with us or against us" is so terribly dangerous and UN-American. This is where many Americans are on both the left and the right. My kids' future is up for grabs right now, and I desperately yearn for a day, very soon, where facts and evidence are valued, and where serious and rational thought, debate and compromise will show its face and put this emotionally, partisan-driven nonsense in its grave.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Rest Before Mental Work a Plus
The Drs. Eide had a brief post about the positive effects of taking a nap prior to doing mental gymnastics that relate to memory and learning. A UC-Berkley study showed a significant gain in learning for those who nap/rested prior to doing the mental activity compared to those who did not nap.
I like the example they use where, at Google, employees have access to what are effectively napping modules (nap pods) that block light and sound. By resting for, say, 30 minutes or so, worker productivity, innovation and creativity should be enhanced by being able to take that quick rest period, particularly if it is just prior to a working group meeting or research period. The brain literally has a chance to reset and blood flow to the hippocampus increases, which is good preparation for the parts of the brain where learning and memory physically take place.
This has implications for education. If there is a more intense period of learning planned towards the end of a class period, where students have already been working for some period of time, a brief few minutes to rest may in fact enhance the learning immediately prior to the more intense learning period. Many teachers, myself included, know that using something like a 20-5 strategy works with students (meaning 20 minutes of activity followed by 5 minutes of practice/rest) seems to be effective for many students. This type of research helps explain why such strategies work, and suggests we should do more of work-rest periods in the classroom help our students maximize what they get from a lesson or activity. A detailed article about what is happening with the brain can be found here.
I like the example they use where, at Google, employees have access to what are effectively napping modules (nap pods) that block light and sound. By resting for, say, 30 minutes or so, worker productivity, innovation and creativity should be enhanced by being able to take that quick rest period, particularly if it is just prior to a working group meeting or research period. The brain literally has a chance to reset and blood flow to the hippocampus increases, which is good preparation for the parts of the brain where learning and memory physically take place.
This has implications for education. If there is a more intense period of learning planned towards the end of a class period, where students have already been working for some period of time, a brief few minutes to rest may in fact enhance the learning immediately prior to the more intense learning period. Many teachers, myself included, know that using something like a 20-5 strategy works with students (meaning 20 minutes of activity followed by 5 minutes of practice/rest) seems to be effective for many students. This type of research helps explain why such strategies work, and suggests we should do more of work-rest periods in the classroom help our students maximize what they get from a lesson or activity. A detailed article about what is happening with the brain can be found here.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Interesting History at CPAC
I'm sitting here watching Michelle Bachmann speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference annual conference, and I'm hearing a really interesting account of history. I'm learning some new things tonight:
- FDR took over a "manageable recession" and spent the U.S. into the Great Depression (last I checked, FDR was sworn in in January of 1933, which, if my math is correct, was some 3.5 years into the global economic collapse);
- Obama is solely responsible for the 'bail-out nation.' (I, too, forgot that there was another bailout prior to Obama taking office. The start of the bank bailout really wasn't during the Bush administration, back in the fall of 2008...Obama was elected and was able to go back in time and do that one...I have forgotten about that);
- the Dems want nothing but 'a state of decline for America.' I guess this must be the case because they don't agree with everything the conservatives believe in. I seem to remember vaguely that a battle-cry from the far right goes something like 'you're either with us or against us' which then translates into 'if you don't agree with me you are not a patriot.' This was then followed on Obama's inauguration day with the cry of 'I hope he fails,' led by Rush himself.
- oh, and as John Pence said during his speech, the solution to all our economic woes is for government to get out of the way, deregulate the market so there are no restrictions on them, and cut taxes across the board, especially for the rich. Well, that was what happened during the last 8 years under Bush...oh, I forgot that was the flawless plan that worked perfectly. The current Great Recession was not started with any issues of a greatly deregulated marketplace. It was all Obama's fault, which he was able to make happen during that same trip back in time he made to start the bailouts. Yes, Mr. Ponce, you are so right...you have the answer for getting us out of this Obama recession.
- There are many Republican state and local officials (such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty of MN) who, in front of one set of cameras, rail against the Obama stimulus bill and how it has done nothing but waste money and create zero jobs, but then in front of another set of cameras back in their states brag about balancing state budgets (such as Pawlenty) and go to ribbon cutting ceremonies for new bridges, highways, buildings, and other infrastructure projects that did produce jobs, that were funded through the stimulus bill. So, which is it? Oh, I forgot they get it both ways, as long as they sneak in that this is another attempt by Obama to help America decline.
- They discount the Congressional Budget Office's (non-partisan office responsible for providing Congress with budgetary projections and analysis) confirmation of White House numbers that some 2 million jobs have been saved or created since the stimulus bill was introduced that otherwise would have disappeared, flatly saying it is not accurate or true, but then turn around and use the CBO numbers for deficits and long-term budget projections...so is the CBO only competent when the data support your causes and agendas, and completely incompetent when they contradict what you want to say?
- One of the catch phrases every speaker is using is the 'bail-out nation' that Obama has created, and they tie it into the stimulus bill. Again, interesting history I apparently had incorrect in my own mind. I was under the impression these were two completely different bills (TARP vs ARRA). The bank and auto industry bail-outs were done initially in order to save the once thought 'too big to fail' corporations that screwed up the national and global economies. I seem to remember that it was the Bush administration that started the TARP process...and yes, some were throwing around the D word, depression, had this not happened. By the way, I did not hear any speakers yet mention that most of the TARP money given to the banks has been paid back, with a goal of getting it all back in the next few months. Even GM has plans of beginning to pay back money from the auto rescue (by June), that prevented hundreds of thousands of other jobs being lost. The stimulus bill (ARRA) is centered on some $250 billion in tax cuts and credits (the CPAC speakers failed to mention that one for some reason), infrastructure projects (which most reasonable people know we are desperately in need of all around the country; I certainly appreciate the road work that was just completed where I live that would not have happened without the stimulus money), education (as school budgets are imploding around the country, and especially here in Illinois, because of state budget catastrophes and the housing collapse that began under the Bush administration, although I have heard some Republicans even put this one on Obama), transportation (such as the frantic race to submit high-speed rail proposals in red and blue states), and energy (funding for alternative energy projects and businesses, which is already beginning). The new thrust by Obama into construction of new nuclear power plants is going to come from some of the stimulus money. I thought he would get some credit for this last one, but I am waiting for the far right to criticize him some how for going with something the right has wanted for years.
I guess this is a useful history lesson for me because I had it all wrong, apparently. On a serious note, I lose respect very quickly for anyone who twists, or worse, simply makes up, their own self-declared facts and evidence to promote their cause, whatever it is. And because these are 'distinguished' people who are on TV with big microphones, many people who are not familiar with true facts and reality will believe them.
It is all in the name of winning an election, this one being the midterms coming up in November. Heaven forbid they all just shut the f*$& up and work for the many millions of American people who are having a difficult time right now. I am becoming a fan of Evan Bayh, who said the other day that the American people need to vote the incumbents out of both parties who do nothing but contribute to the nasty political gotcha games...screw politics, and do what's right for a change. Reasonable people can sit down and come up with reasonable solutions and compromises to solve many of our problems. There really is a political middle majority within America, and CPAC is NOT that middle. More than one has said since I have been watching that they don't want Republicans elected, but rather Conservatives. This is not the average American being represented, and average Americans will hopefully be able to distinguish true history from CPAC fantasy.
- FDR took over a "manageable recession" and spent the U.S. into the Great Depression (last I checked, FDR was sworn in in January of 1933, which, if my math is correct, was some 3.5 years into the global economic collapse);
- Obama is solely responsible for the 'bail-out nation.' (I, too, forgot that there was another bailout prior to Obama taking office. The start of the bank bailout really wasn't during the Bush administration, back in the fall of 2008...Obama was elected and was able to go back in time and do that one...I have forgotten about that);
- the Dems want nothing but 'a state of decline for America.' I guess this must be the case because they don't agree with everything the conservatives believe in. I seem to remember vaguely that a battle-cry from the far right goes something like 'you're either with us or against us' which then translates into 'if you don't agree with me you are not a patriot.' This was then followed on Obama's inauguration day with the cry of 'I hope he fails,' led by Rush himself.
- oh, and as John Pence said during his speech, the solution to all our economic woes is for government to get out of the way, deregulate the market so there are no restrictions on them, and cut taxes across the board, especially for the rich. Well, that was what happened during the last 8 years under Bush...oh, I forgot that was the flawless plan that worked perfectly. The current Great Recession was not started with any issues of a greatly deregulated marketplace. It was all Obama's fault, which he was able to make happen during that same trip back in time he made to start the bailouts. Yes, Mr. Ponce, you are so right...you have the answer for getting us out of this Obama recession.
- There are many Republican state and local officials (such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty of MN) who, in front of one set of cameras, rail against the Obama stimulus bill and how it has done nothing but waste money and create zero jobs, but then in front of another set of cameras back in their states brag about balancing state budgets (such as Pawlenty) and go to ribbon cutting ceremonies for new bridges, highways, buildings, and other infrastructure projects that did produce jobs, that were funded through the stimulus bill. So, which is it? Oh, I forgot they get it both ways, as long as they sneak in that this is another attempt by Obama to help America decline.
- They discount the Congressional Budget Office's (non-partisan office responsible for providing Congress with budgetary projections and analysis) confirmation of White House numbers that some 2 million jobs have been saved or created since the stimulus bill was introduced that otherwise would have disappeared, flatly saying it is not accurate or true, but then turn around and use the CBO numbers for deficits and long-term budget projections...so is the CBO only competent when the data support your causes and agendas, and completely incompetent when they contradict what you want to say?
- One of the catch phrases every speaker is using is the 'bail-out nation' that Obama has created, and they tie it into the stimulus bill. Again, interesting history I apparently had incorrect in my own mind. I was under the impression these were two completely different bills (TARP vs ARRA). The bank and auto industry bail-outs were done initially in order to save the once thought 'too big to fail' corporations that screwed up the national and global economies. I seem to remember that it was the Bush administration that started the TARP process...and yes, some were throwing around the D word, depression, had this not happened. By the way, I did not hear any speakers yet mention that most of the TARP money given to the banks has been paid back, with a goal of getting it all back in the next few months. Even GM has plans of beginning to pay back money from the auto rescue (by June), that prevented hundreds of thousands of other jobs being lost. The stimulus bill (ARRA) is centered on some $250 billion in tax cuts and credits (the CPAC speakers failed to mention that one for some reason), infrastructure projects (which most reasonable people know we are desperately in need of all around the country; I certainly appreciate the road work that was just completed where I live that would not have happened without the stimulus money), education (as school budgets are imploding around the country, and especially here in Illinois, because of state budget catastrophes and the housing collapse that began under the Bush administration, although I have heard some Republicans even put this one on Obama), transportation (such as the frantic race to submit high-speed rail proposals in red and blue states), and energy (funding for alternative energy projects and businesses, which is already beginning). The new thrust by Obama into construction of new nuclear power plants is going to come from some of the stimulus money. I thought he would get some credit for this last one, but I am waiting for the far right to criticize him some how for going with something the right has wanted for years.
I guess this is a useful history lesson for me because I had it all wrong, apparently. On a serious note, I lose respect very quickly for anyone who twists, or worse, simply makes up, their own self-declared facts and evidence to promote their cause, whatever it is. And because these are 'distinguished' people who are on TV with big microphones, many people who are not familiar with true facts and reality will believe them.
It is all in the name of winning an election, this one being the midterms coming up in November. Heaven forbid they all just shut the f*$& up and work for the many millions of American people who are having a difficult time right now. I am becoming a fan of Evan Bayh, who said the other day that the American people need to vote the incumbents out of both parties who do nothing but contribute to the nasty political gotcha games...screw politics, and do what's right for a change. Reasonable people can sit down and come up with reasonable solutions and compromises to solve many of our problems. There really is a political middle majority within America, and CPAC is NOT that middle. More than one has said since I have been watching that they don't want Republicans elected, but rather Conservatives. This is not the average American being represented, and average Americans will hopefully be able to distinguish true history from CPAC fantasy.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Hope Springs Eternal - Beginning to Develop STEM Standards
I've been writing and talking about needed STEM changes in our science and technology classes for years, and this includes the last deluge of recent posts below. By chance, just today in Education Week is an article describing the just formed national task force charged with developing the initial framework for new STEM standards that will fit into the Obama administration's education policy.
Presently, 48 states are working on new sets of learning standards for the primary areas of reading and mathematics, and this new task force, which is coming out of the National Research Council (NRC), has just stated that the primary philosophical goal is to break away from learning a thousand individual and often disperse facts and concepts, and include a much stronger focus on thinking, reasoning and analytical skills. This is music to my ears!
As wonderful as this news is, we must keep in mind that this new group's purpose is to soley develop the 'conceptual framework' for new standards. Then the results and recommendations from this task force must go to the states and the Department of Education for review and for the details. My hope is that none of these groups go too far in either direction. We need some core concepts and subject knowledge (i.e. content), to be sure. But it is widely believed, and certainly by yours truly, that we have reached a point of near saturation of content knowledge in today's classroom. What we cannot do is go entirely to open-ended and project based classes that then totally ignores subject content. We need balance, where content knowledge is gained, but then also used and applied in a variety of creative and innovative ways, which is where deeper thinking, analystical and reasoning skills are developed and deeper science understanding and literacy are reached.
I have told students, colleagues and many others many times that, personally, I could care less how we do on international tests, which tend to focus almost entirely on content knowledge and recall. I'll gladly take a hit on national testing results in favor of developing a deep thinking, creative generation of students who can solve everyday, complex problems in new, innovative ways. While some different countries place first in international testing, I always like to ask, "OK, but how many Nobels have you won? How many important patents or publications do your scientists produce? How many new industries have you created?" For most countries the answers are none. Innovation, problem solving, analysis, recognizing and making progress in complexity/chaos/networks, communication within multidisciplinary collaborations, and so on are the future in a global economy adn society. This is a first step that is on the right track of reforming our education system so the next generation is properly prepared for such a world.
Presently, 48 states are working on new sets of learning standards for the primary areas of reading and mathematics, and this new task force, which is coming out of the National Research Council (NRC), has just stated that the primary philosophical goal is to break away from learning a thousand individual and often disperse facts and concepts, and include a much stronger focus on thinking, reasoning and analytical skills. This is music to my ears!
As wonderful as this news is, we must keep in mind that this new group's purpose is to soley develop the 'conceptual framework' for new standards. Then the results and recommendations from this task force must go to the states and the Department of Education for review and for the details. My hope is that none of these groups go too far in either direction. We need some core concepts and subject knowledge (i.e. content), to be sure. But it is widely believed, and certainly by yours truly, that we have reached a point of near saturation of content knowledge in today's classroom. What we cannot do is go entirely to open-ended and project based classes that then totally ignores subject content. We need balance, where content knowledge is gained, but then also used and applied in a variety of creative and innovative ways, which is where deeper thinking, analystical and reasoning skills are developed and deeper science understanding and literacy are reached.
I have told students, colleagues and many others many times that, personally, I could care less how we do on international tests, which tend to focus almost entirely on content knowledge and recall. I'll gladly take a hit on national testing results in favor of developing a deep thinking, creative generation of students who can solve everyday, complex problems in new, innovative ways. While some different countries place first in international testing, I always like to ask, "OK, but how many Nobels have you won? How many important patents or publications do your scientists produce? How many new industries have you created?" For most countries the answers are none. Innovation, problem solving, analysis, recognizing and making progress in complexity/chaos/networks, communication within multidisciplinary collaborations, and so on are the future in a global economy adn society. This is a first step that is on the right track of reforming our education system so the next generation is properly prepared for such a world.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Summary of STEM Posts
We have issues with STEM education in America. My last three posts go into great detail about different aspects of the problem, and suggestions of how to fix the STEM education system. Unfortunately some may not want to read through the long posts, so here is a much shorter summary.
The main problems, as agreed upon at a recent conference of experts from all education levels, industry and STEM professionals include:
• We do not have appropriate teacher training and certification systems in place to ensure STEM teachers in Preschool – High School can in fact provide what is needed for students. Reform and progress in STEM areas cannot ever happen if we do not have teachers in place who can properly work with students;
• Federal education policy places a focus on content only, and not skills needed to reach levels of ‘critical thinking’ and complex problem solving. This runs contrary to what is needed in STEM education and for college to be successful in STEM;
• We continue to treat education in America as five disjointed, and at times disconnected, levels. We must move into a mindset of one continuum of education, Preschool – college, and then use this to our advantage and vertically align the system to reach the end goals we want.
We have limited success stories out there of schools that are producing high-powered STEM students, to be sure. But these stories are, unfortunately, few and far between. Assuming that federal mandates and education policy continue to emphasize content only for the foreseeable future, educators and STEM experts need to be clever about how to try and get more success stories to blossom, despite the systemic obstacles that are placed in our way.
A start is to make use of technology and network with each other. From our conference, there is a new Ning setup for such communication. This is at http://stemdist219.ning.com/. For those of us who have had some successes, we need to share our methods and experience and encourage our colleagues in other districts to try it. Blog about your ideas, tell us what works and what does not. For example, I have put a large amount of information and documents on my school research web site. There are links to past student papers (which shows the high level high school students can work at when unleashed!), links to university departments with suggestions of how to make contacts and how to develop research ideas, and a research booklet with all sorts of suggestions that have worked for me as I tried to establish a research program. I will put some references to published articles I have written at the end of this post, so you can get more details about some things that have worked for me over the years.
If you are unable to get research started, then perhaps getting students involved in STEM competitions is a possibility. We get at least our top kids involved in JETS TEAMS contests, WYSE Academic Challenge, the STEM Olympiads, Physics Bowl, science essay contests, bridge building competitions, independent studies into any area of science or math that they are interested in (such as quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, robotics, Lagrangian mechanics, and so on), writing computer simulations with C++, Java, Matlab or other software, peer tutoring and mentoring (to get them thinking more deeply about STEM subjects), and whatever else you can think of. Students being able to actively do things they want to do is invaluable for building a love of STEM subjects and get them deeper into the process and skill-building that is necessary at the college and professional levels. By getting them into projects of any kind outside of classwork, a new level of independence is reached, and often more involved problem solving and synthesis of new, challenging material are required. This is the value of academic extracurriculars. Just provide outside opportunities for kids, and let them lose. Often you will be amazed at what they end up doing! These are the things we no longer have time to do in classes, because we need to focus on content for ‘the test.’ I don’t see this changing any time soon, even with the Obama administration. However, if we are willing to work on projects and contests outside of class time, we can begin to hook more students into STEM areas, and properly prepare them for advanced work in college and beyond. We have no choice if the system does not change. It is more work. It is more difficult than it needs to be. But our children’s future and the country’s future depend on such efforts.
While we are at it, please share any thoughts or activities that have been successful for you. Join the Ning and join the discussion with a larger network. We should organize and contact political leaders who are in charge of education policy, as well as State Boards of Education and University deans for schools of education to adopt new training and certification programs to develop well-trained STEM teachers of the future. There is much to get done, as quickly as possible.
Let’s get to work!
Some references related to how to build and maintain high school STEM/research programs:
1. M. Ngoi, M. Vondracek, “Working with Gifted Science Students in a Public High
School Environment.” Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, vol. XV, no. 4,
141-147 (Summer 2004).
2. R. Horton & M. Vondracek, “Creating and Maintaining a High School Physics
Research Program.” The Physics Teacher, vol. 42, 334-338 (September 2004).
3. M. Vondracek. “Diminishing the Gap Between High School and University
Research Programs – Computational Research.” The Physics Teacher, 44 (Oct.
2007).
The main problems, as agreed upon at a recent conference of experts from all education levels, industry and STEM professionals include:
• We do not have appropriate teacher training and certification systems in place to ensure STEM teachers in Preschool – High School can in fact provide what is needed for students. Reform and progress in STEM areas cannot ever happen if we do not have teachers in place who can properly work with students;
• Federal education policy places a focus on content only, and not skills needed to reach levels of ‘critical thinking’ and complex problem solving. This runs contrary to what is needed in STEM education and for college to be successful in STEM;
• We continue to treat education in America as five disjointed, and at times disconnected, levels. We must move into a mindset of one continuum of education, Preschool – college, and then use this to our advantage and vertically align the system to reach the end goals we want.
We have limited success stories out there of schools that are producing high-powered STEM students, to be sure. But these stories are, unfortunately, few and far between. Assuming that federal mandates and education policy continue to emphasize content only for the foreseeable future, educators and STEM experts need to be clever about how to try and get more success stories to blossom, despite the systemic obstacles that are placed in our way.
A start is to make use of technology and network with each other. From our conference, there is a new Ning setup for such communication. This is at http://stemdist219.ning.com/. For those of us who have had some successes, we need to share our methods and experience and encourage our colleagues in other districts to try it. Blog about your ideas, tell us what works and what does not. For example, I have put a large amount of information and documents on my school research web site. There are links to past student papers (which shows the high level high school students can work at when unleashed!), links to university departments with suggestions of how to make contacts and how to develop research ideas, and a research booklet with all sorts of suggestions that have worked for me as I tried to establish a research program. I will put some references to published articles I have written at the end of this post, so you can get more details about some things that have worked for me over the years.
If you are unable to get research started, then perhaps getting students involved in STEM competitions is a possibility. We get at least our top kids involved in JETS TEAMS contests, WYSE Academic Challenge, the STEM Olympiads, Physics Bowl, science essay contests, bridge building competitions, independent studies into any area of science or math that they are interested in (such as quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, robotics, Lagrangian mechanics, and so on), writing computer simulations with C++, Java, Matlab or other software, peer tutoring and mentoring (to get them thinking more deeply about STEM subjects), and whatever else you can think of. Students being able to actively do things they want to do is invaluable for building a love of STEM subjects and get them deeper into the process and skill-building that is necessary at the college and professional levels. By getting them into projects of any kind outside of classwork, a new level of independence is reached, and often more involved problem solving and synthesis of new, challenging material are required. This is the value of academic extracurriculars. Just provide outside opportunities for kids, and let them lose. Often you will be amazed at what they end up doing! These are the things we no longer have time to do in classes, because we need to focus on content for ‘the test.’ I don’t see this changing any time soon, even with the Obama administration. However, if we are willing to work on projects and contests outside of class time, we can begin to hook more students into STEM areas, and properly prepare them for advanced work in college and beyond. We have no choice if the system does not change. It is more work. It is more difficult than it needs to be. But our children’s future and the country’s future depend on such efforts.
While we are at it, please share any thoughts or activities that have been successful for you. Join the Ning and join the discussion with a larger network. We should organize and contact political leaders who are in charge of education policy, as well as State Boards of Education and University deans for schools of education to adopt new training and certification programs to develop well-trained STEM teachers of the future. There is much to get done, as quickly as possible.
Let’s get to work!
Some references related to how to build and maintain high school STEM/research programs:
1. M. Ngoi, M. Vondracek, “Working with Gifted Science Students in a Public High
School Environment.” Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, vol. XV, no. 4,
141-147 (Summer 2004).
2. R. Horton & M. Vondracek, “Creating and Maintaining a High School Physics
Research Program.” The Physics Teacher, vol. 42, 334-338 (September 2004).
3. M. Vondracek. “Diminishing the Gap Between High School and University
Research Programs – Computational Research.” The Physics Teacher, 44 (Oct.
2007).
How to Fix STEM Education
In my previous post, I asked the question, “Where are we with STEM education?”
The brief answer is we are systemically set up in precisely the wrong way to bring about any large-scale reform to STEM education. The main reasons, in my opinion, include: we are presently a test-crazed society, which has prevented schools from having the time to create programs that work on the skills needed to get children to the often mentioned realm of ‘higher-level” or “critical” thinking skills, terms that you hear a lot in education and from politicians; our teacher training and certification programs do not produce STEM educators that have true research experience, and though everyone wants more hands-on and inquiry learning as well as more student research, we do not have the personnel in the classrooms who know what this involves; and we have a mindset issue by thinking of our education system as a series of separate, distinct levels – pre-school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college – rather than simply thinking of it as a continuum that needs to have flowing communications and be vertically aligned from one year to the next.
What needs to be done to change this mixed up system? I could just say “A LOT” and run for the hills, but let me offer some suggestions.
I could take the easy way out and simply say we need more money to fix all the problems. While STEM education does cost large sums of money for equipment, supplies, facilities, and properly trained teachers, there is much more to it, unfortunately. I mentioned above that it is a systemic problem, and mean this in every sense of the word ‘systemic,’ from top to bottom.
A major issue is that we are not doing a very good job of getting quality science and technology education to our youngest students in pre-school. This is where we want to hook them into the process of STEM disciplines. While content expertise cannot be expected with 3-4 year olds, that is not the point of good STEM exposure at this age. THEY ARE NATURAL SCIENTISTS AT THIS AGE and we should be encouraging them to observe, question, think, analyze, and present their thinking in as many ways as possible, so that they learn this is the expectation for learning and that it is fun to do. Every single presenter, for example, at a STEM conference I recently attended emphasized the need to excite students about STEM subjects throughout their schooling, and that having skills was as important as any content knowledge they possess by the time they get to college. Any teacher knows bad habits are harder to break as a student ages, so let’s give them good habits and great encouragement and energy when they first start formal ‘schooling.’ Check out an earlier post about pre-school STEM education, and an attempt to get a real curriculum for that age level.
Building process and skills in pre-school leads children into elementary school (K-5). But here we begin running into systemic problems. It is well-known that K-5 teachers generally have the strongest background in language arts and mathematics, and that a good majority acknowledge their weakest subject area is science. Let’s fix this, once and for all by modifying the certification training for elementary teachers. We know that the good jobs of the future are going to be largely STEM jobs, so why do we continue with the same old teacher training programs? It does not make sense. Require more science, and more importantly require some minimal time in science labs working on slightly longer-term projects so elementary teachers learn what the actual scientific process is and what skills are needed to do science. Again, at the youngest ages developing skills and understanding how to do science is as important, if not more important, than content, and this will not happen if teachers do not know what the process is or what is needed to do science.
A second problem has arisen in the past decade. No Child Left Behind (NCLB). While the idea of being accountable for every child learning is undeniably the right idea, how NCLB has been administered has done great damage to STEM education. Because school standing, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), relies on a standardized test and performance in math and English/reading, that is where schools are literally forced to focus. Content is everything, and skills have fallen effectively out of sight. Students need to be able to regurgitate facts and follow a prescribed writing format in order to do well on the test. Schools have no choice but to spend numerous hours, days, and weeks on test prep rather than on hands-on and portfolio assessments, where students can have a chance to be creative and perhaps select from a variety of activities. Creativity from students and teachers has suffered, as has innovation in the classroom, because that will not help with scoring well on the test. In addition, AYP status and yearly increases suggest the belief that all kids should be at the same place, across the board, at the same time. Any reasonably intelligent adult knows for a fact that this is a ludicrous belief, and therefore reject the premise behind the assessment of NCLB. Politicians who are in control of education policy, however, find this to be politically reasonable. In the end, most elementary schools have cut back on science and social studies time in order to focus on the tests for math and language arts.
Similar problems exist at the next educational level, middle school. Teachers in STEM subject areas generally have coursework in that subject area in college, however the same problem of not having any real time and experience in the lab holds true. This problem continues for the vast majority of high school teachers, too. Because the training of teachers places emphasis on content almost exclusively, that is what is presented in class in middle school and high school. While content is important, as there are numerous facts, theories, principles, calculations, and simple experiments to understand if one wants to advance to higher levels of learning in the field, we need to keep in mind what every college professor and instructor at the conference said: more important than content coming into a college STEM program is enthusiasm and skills!
If a student can think, analyze data, understand and interpret graphs, know how to do basic measurements, how to report findings, how to find information about specific questions that arise in research, how to take large volumes of information and data and figure out what is important and what is not, and find patterns in data and observations that can lead to logical, evidence-backed conclusions, they will teach you the content. But not knowing how to test content and what to do with content, that is much more difficult to teach to older students. Bad habits have been formed, misconceptions have been developed, and there is not the time in a semester class to make up for 13 years of either mis-training or no training at all in how to do STEM. It is ironic that many of the professors who were making these statements are at universities that trained the K-12 teachers in the first place…and they did not train them with the skills necessary to get students to where they need to be in order to be successful in STEM college programs. STEM departments do not communicate very well with schools of education within the same university structure.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot, and it is a systemic problem!!
However, here is another level of complexity to the system. State Boards of Education.
A State Board of Education is generally a politically appointed body. It may vary tremendously from state to state what the expertise of Board members include, but I would guess not many on state boards have extensive STEM expertise, and I would also guess not many members have a great deal of experience in K-12 classroom education. Many are administrators, some are from business areas, and some are politically well connected with the governor’s office. Whatever the case, the important piece is that the state Boards set certification criteria for teachers in the state. For real reform to occur in STEM areas, state boards of education need to change the current standards. Teachers in training MUST be required to have some amount of STEM research in the lab. Science teachers must know what scientists actually do, and how the process works. Teachers must know what goes into setting research questions, how to develop and plan experiments, how to properly analyze data and present it, and how to interpret data and observations to draw reasonable conclusions. Learning about the scientific method is very different from a textbook than from actual experience in a laboratory.
I guarantee that present calls for more research and higher-level research for high school students will NEVER happen within the current system simply because more high school science teachers do not know how to do research themselves. It is that simple.
Communication between levels in the education system
Let’s assume we get more research trained STEM teachers into classrooms. There is then the issue of lacking facilities and equipment to do any sort of high-level, original research with students. This is a real problem at the vast majority of middle school and high schools around the country. There is a growing list of options becoming available to pre-college teachers and students, due in large part to the Internet.
Many people may be surprised at how easy it can be, especially in the physical sciences (life science research tends to require more expensive and sophisticated equipment than chemistry or physics), to use more basic equipment to do clever science research in a high school, or even in a student’s home. But to learn how to do this for the first time, and to even get an understanding that this is possible, requires help. It is my own experience that the vast majority of professors are very willing and able to give suggestions for research topics and ways of studying the topic. Sometimes they will make their own equipment available for certain measurements, or even take in a student into their lab. Other times they will email a relevant article, or put us in touch with a colleague who can be of more assistance.
Many professors are willing to be e-mentors for high school and even some middle school students. This, I suspect, is in its infancy, and more and more college level research groups will make members available to give ideas and some amount of guidance to young students while they do their work in some other part of town or even in other parts of the country. This can be done effectively and efficiently with email, video conference calls, distance learning platforms, webcasts and podcasts, online videos for demos or illustrations or even online lectures about the topic, remote access to lab equipment (such as with the iLab Network), computer simulations, some Google applications, wikis and Nings, and other clever uses of Web 2.0 applications and technologies.
The point is it is very possible for one-on-one contact with university experts and advisers, but this is presently being done on a small scale, with individual high school teachers. A system could be developed to make it easier for more Preschool-12 teachers to contact experts for advice and help.
Systemically, we need to take an approach for STEM education to identify, at the professional and college levels, what skills are absolutely essential by the time a student enters college and the workplace in a technical industry. These need to be fed to a State Board of Education, so they then can put in place policy and certification criteria for teachers in that state. The State Board needs to work with the teaching training colleges and get them to develop the necessary courses to meet those certification criteria. Then those newly and properly trained teachers will filter into the preschool-12 education system. This is not an easy process, but a necessary one. This will be difficult to do if we do not change the mindset that we have a single education system, rather than five different levels and parts of the education system. Better vertical alignment is needed if we are to do this right.
All of what I just suggested becomes a moot point if the federal education policy does not change. With a continued emphasis on content being proposed in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top law, the status quo will remain. If STEM training is to be the dominant area in the 21st century schools, time must be provided for students to have research experiences in STEM classrooms. They will not be able to develop skills needed in college otherwise. We need to lobby political leaders in control of education to get off the testing bandwagon and onto the STEM bandwagon, where students will truly learn more advanced analysis skills and how to think, ask questions, and find good information among the endless online resources.
I fear the politicians will not change education policy or assessments any time soon, and we will continue to have isolated bright spots in the education landscape, but nothing on a scale that the country needs to maintain its dwindling lead in STEM. China produces millions of engineers a year, and send large numbers of their top college students to American schools for the skills training that has kept American scientists ahead of the rest of the world for the past 60 years. Our dominance is not quite where it used to be, and with us producing scientists and engineers in far fewer numbers (some 2-3 orders of magnitude less than the Chinese, not to mention India, too) we can expect further declines in our STEM lead. Those of us in education, and specifically in STEM education who know what is needed and what needs to change, need to mobilize and address our concerns to the powerbrokers at the state and federal level. This is a call to action!
The brief answer is we are systemically set up in precisely the wrong way to bring about any large-scale reform to STEM education. The main reasons, in my opinion, include: we are presently a test-crazed society, which has prevented schools from having the time to create programs that work on the skills needed to get children to the often mentioned realm of ‘higher-level” or “critical” thinking skills, terms that you hear a lot in education and from politicians; our teacher training and certification programs do not produce STEM educators that have true research experience, and though everyone wants more hands-on and inquiry learning as well as more student research, we do not have the personnel in the classrooms who know what this involves; and we have a mindset issue by thinking of our education system as a series of separate, distinct levels – pre-school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college – rather than simply thinking of it as a continuum that needs to have flowing communications and be vertically aligned from one year to the next.
What needs to be done to change this mixed up system? I could just say “A LOT” and run for the hills, but let me offer some suggestions.
I could take the easy way out and simply say we need more money to fix all the problems. While STEM education does cost large sums of money for equipment, supplies, facilities, and properly trained teachers, there is much more to it, unfortunately. I mentioned above that it is a systemic problem, and mean this in every sense of the word ‘systemic,’ from top to bottom.
A major issue is that we are not doing a very good job of getting quality science and technology education to our youngest students in pre-school. This is where we want to hook them into the process of STEM disciplines. While content expertise cannot be expected with 3-4 year olds, that is not the point of good STEM exposure at this age. THEY ARE NATURAL SCIENTISTS AT THIS AGE and we should be encouraging them to observe, question, think, analyze, and present their thinking in as many ways as possible, so that they learn this is the expectation for learning and that it is fun to do. Every single presenter, for example, at a STEM conference I recently attended emphasized the need to excite students about STEM subjects throughout their schooling, and that having skills was as important as any content knowledge they possess by the time they get to college. Any teacher knows bad habits are harder to break as a student ages, so let’s give them good habits and great encouragement and energy when they first start formal ‘schooling.’ Check out an earlier post about pre-school STEM education, and an attempt to get a real curriculum for that age level.
Building process and skills in pre-school leads children into elementary school (K-5). But here we begin running into systemic problems. It is well-known that K-5 teachers generally have the strongest background in language arts and mathematics, and that a good majority acknowledge their weakest subject area is science. Let’s fix this, once and for all by modifying the certification training for elementary teachers. We know that the good jobs of the future are going to be largely STEM jobs, so why do we continue with the same old teacher training programs? It does not make sense. Require more science, and more importantly require some minimal time in science labs working on slightly longer-term projects so elementary teachers learn what the actual scientific process is and what skills are needed to do science. Again, at the youngest ages developing skills and understanding how to do science is as important, if not more important, than content, and this will not happen if teachers do not know what the process is or what is needed to do science.
A second problem has arisen in the past decade. No Child Left Behind (NCLB). While the idea of being accountable for every child learning is undeniably the right idea, how NCLB has been administered has done great damage to STEM education. Because school standing, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), relies on a standardized test and performance in math and English/reading, that is where schools are literally forced to focus. Content is everything, and skills have fallen effectively out of sight. Students need to be able to regurgitate facts and follow a prescribed writing format in order to do well on the test. Schools have no choice but to spend numerous hours, days, and weeks on test prep rather than on hands-on and portfolio assessments, where students can have a chance to be creative and perhaps select from a variety of activities. Creativity from students and teachers has suffered, as has innovation in the classroom, because that will not help with scoring well on the test. In addition, AYP status and yearly increases suggest the belief that all kids should be at the same place, across the board, at the same time. Any reasonably intelligent adult knows for a fact that this is a ludicrous belief, and therefore reject the premise behind the assessment of NCLB. Politicians who are in control of education policy, however, find this to be politically reasonable. In the end, most elementary schools have cut back on science and social studies time in order to focus on the tests for math and language arts.
Similar problems exist at the next educational level, middle school. Teachers in STEM subject areas generally have coursework in that subject area in college, however the same problem of not having any real time and experience in the lab holds true. This problem continues for the vast majority of high school teachers, too. Because the training of teachers places emphasis on content almost exclusively, that is what is presented in class in middle school and high school. While content is important, as there are numerous facts, theories, principles, calculations, and simple experiments to understand if one wants to advance to higher levels of learning in the field, we need to keep in mind what every college professor and instructor at the conference said: more important than content coming into a college STEM program is enthusiasm and skills!
If a student can think, analyze data, understand and interpret graphs, know how to do basic measurements, how to report findings, how to find information about specific questions that arise in research, how to take large volumes of information and data and figure out what is important and what is not, and find patterns in data and observations that can lead to logical, evidence-backed conclusions, they will teach you the content. But not knowing how to test content and what to do with content, that is much more difficult to teach to older students. Bad habits have been formed, misconceptions have been developed, and there is not the time in a semester class to make up for 13 years of either mis-training or no training at all in how to do STEM. It is ironic that many of the professors who were making these statements are at universities that trained the K-12 teachers in the first place…and they did not train them with the skills necessary to get students to where they need to be in order to be successful in STEM college programs. STEM departments do not communicate very well with schools of education within the same university structure.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot, and it is a systemic problem!!
However, here is another level of complexity to the system. State Boards of Education.
A State Board of Education is generally a politically appointed body. It may vary tremendously from state to state what the expertise of Board members include, but I would guess not many on state boards have extensive STEM expertise, and I would also guess not many members have a great deal of experience in K-12 classroom education. Many are administrators, some are from business areas, and some are politically well connected with the governor’s office. Whatever the case, the important piece is that the state Boards set certification criteria for teachers in the state. For real reform to occur in STEM areas, state boards of education need to change the current standards. Teachers in training MUST be required to have some amount of STEM research in the lab. Science teachers must know what scientists actually do, and how the process works. Teachers must know what goes into setting research questions, how to develop and plan experiments, how to properly analyze data and present it, and how to interpret data and observations to draw reasonable conclusions. Learning about the scientific method is very different from a textbook than from actual experience in a laboratory.
I guarantee that present calls for more research and higher-level research for high school students will NEVER happen within the current system simply because more high school science teachers do not know how to do research themselves. It is that simple.
Communication between levels in the education system
Let’s assume we get more research trained STEM teachers into classrooms. There is then the issue of lacking facilities and equipment to do any sort of high-level, original research with students. This is a real problem at the vast majority of middle school and high schools around the country. There is a growing list of options becoming available to pre-college teachers and students, due in large part to the Internet.
Many people may be surprised at how easy it can be, especially in the physical sciences (life science research tends to require more expensive and sophisticated equipment than chemistry or physics), to use more basic equipment to do clever science research in a high school, or even in a student’s home. But to learn how to do this for the first time, and to even get an understanding that this is possible, requires help. It is my own experience that the vast majority of professors are very willing and able to give suggestions for research topics and ways of studying the topic. Sometimes they will make their own equipment available for certain measurements, or even take in a student into their lab. Other times they will email a relevant article, or put us in touch with a colleague who can be of more assistance.
Many professors are willing to be e-mentors for high school and even some middle school students. This, I suspect, is in its infancy, and more and more college level research groups will make members available to give ideas and some amount of guidance to young students while they do their work in some other part of town or even in other parts of the country. This can be done effectively and efficiently with email, video conference calls, distance learning platforms, webcasts and podcasts, online videos for demos or illustrations or even online lectures about the topic, remote access to lab equipment (such as with the iLab Network), computer simulations, some Google applications, wikis and Nings, and other clever uses of Web 2.0 applications and technologies.
The point is it is very possible for one-on-one contact with university experts and advisers, but this is presently being done on a small scale, with individual high school teachers. A system could be developed to make it easier for more Preschool-12 teachers to contact experts for advice and help.
Systemically, we need to take an approach for STEM education to identify, at the professional and college levels, what skills are absolutely essential by the time a student enters college and the workplace in a technical industry. These need to be fed to a State Board of Education, so they then can put in place policy and certification criteria for teachers in that state. The State Board needs to work with the teaching training colleges and get them to develop the necessary courses to meet those certification criteria. Then those newly and properly trained teachers will filter into the preschool-12 education system. This is not an easy process, but a necessary one. This will be difficult to do if we do not change the mindset that we have a single education system, rather than five different levels and parts of the education system. Better vertical alignment is needed if we are to do this right.
All of what I just suggested becomes a moot point if the federal education policy does not change. With a continued emphasis on content being proposed in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top law, the status quo will remain. If STEM training is to be the dominant area in the 21st century schools, time must be provided for students to have research experiences in STEM classrooms. They will not be able to develop skills needed in college otherwise. We need to lobby political leaders in control of education to get off the testing bandwagon and onto the STEM bandwagon, where students will truly learn more advanced analysis skills and how to think, ask questions, and find good information among the endless online resources.
I fear the politicians will not change education policy or assessments any time soon, and we will continue to have isolated bright spots in the education landscape, but nothing on a scale that the country needs to maintain its dwindling lead in STEM. China produces millions of engineers a year, and send large numbers of their top college students to American schools for the skills training that has kept American scientists ahead of the rest of the world for the past 60 years. Our dominance is not quite where it used to be, and with us producing scientists and engineers in far fewer numbers (some 2-3 orders of magnitude less than the Chinese, not to mention India, too) we can expect further declines in our STEM lead. Those of us in education, and specifically in STEM education who know what is needed and what needs to change, need to mobilize and address our concerns to the powerbrokers at the state and federal level. This is a call to action!
Where are we with STEM Education?
The 21st century is being labeled with a number of names, ranging from the Age of the Internet; The Information Age; The Age of Globalization; and a new one I just heard, the Age of Conceptualization. And still others call it the Age of STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. I’ll stay away from the Age of Terror that I’ve heard some mention in a more political/warfare sense. In many ways, it does not matter if one chooses any of these because at a basic level they are referring to the same thing.
I was recently at an all-day conference on STEM in the Chicagoland area, where leaders in education (middle school through college was strongly represented), industry, science and engineering (speakers included an astrophysicist, a particle physicist, a robotics specialist, a nanotechnologist, and lead engineer who designed and built the Dubai Tower), and politics (the keynote speaker was Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Illinois 9th) met at Niles North High School to begin a networking group focused on how we should be approaching STEM in schools, with an additional focus on how to improve student research and active involvement in STEM areas while in K-12 schools. It was a wonderful turnout (some 140 leaders from dozens of high schools), and I had the pleasure of being asked to be the table leader for student independent research. Many thanks to the gang from Niles North for putting this together and hosting. I also must compliment Niles North for being a leader in developing a broader STEM program that includes a wonderful facility for research and for getting large numbers of students doing true research.
Where are we with regards to STEM in K-12 education? Like so much in public education, the answer to this question depends almost entirely on where you happen to live. The leaders in STEM tend to be from wealthier suburban districts or magnet-type schools such as the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), whose charter mandates students to do research and pursue scientific/technical activity. The major reason such schools lead the way is that it requires money for students to do research on a larger scale, as well as to recruit and hire instructors with strong research backgrounds to begin setting up programs for students. In Illinois it is especially difficult to break this cycle because of the way schools are funded, which depends severely on local property tax revenue.
News headlines have for some time had a focus on how poorly the U.S. compares on international tests of science and math to the rest of the world. The average American student does not hold up well on such tests. Our top students continue to do extremely well, but there is a growing gap for the overall average. A couple reasons were identified at the conference and there has been a growing consensus over the last couple years as to why this is the case. These include:
• A lack of training and research experience of teachers at all levels of K-12 education. Even in high schools, a shockingly large percentage of science teachers have never actually done research, meaning they have never actually done science. There is a Grand Canyon sized gap between coursework from textbooks and actually doing long-term research in the lab;
• A lack of expertise and time devoted to science and technology in early grades (typically K-5). This has continued to worsen in the age of No Child Left Behind, as time is taken away from science and social studies to focus on reading and math, the two subjects that are tested and go into a school’s AYP status;
• A lack of funding in K-12 education, in terms of having facilities and equipment/supplies to do higher level research. In Illinois and other states that have enormous deficits, this will continue to be the case;
• A disconnect between K-12 and college levels of STEM, largely because of a lack of communication. And I’ll include industry as well. High schools can be at a loss in terms of understanding what, exactly, are the required skills colleges and the workplace are looking for. This has been exasperated by the fact the high schools have been under intense focus for specific science content in order to pass state tests for No Child Left Behind mandates. Colleges and employers are not necessarily only interested in what specific content students have had, but rather they have become more interested in what skills students have developed in order to be successful in college STEM programs and in the workplace.
What can we do about all this? What should we be doing about all this? The answers are NOT being addressed by the federal mandates, and that includes the soon to be new education policy called “The Race to the Top,” which will be the Obama administration’s education policy that replaces the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. By being on a school board, I have had early exposure to Race to the Top because we had to decide whether or not to send in a Memo of Understanding that was required to be registered with the state board of education in order to be eligible for money coming out of competitive grants. There is a competitive grant program set up between states to meet a large number of criteria in the Race to the Top legislation that will be given to Congress in the not so distant future.
There is a similar flaw in the national and state education policies that have then been dumped on local school districts. It has to do with the mindset of those writing the laws, almost all of whom have never taught in classrooms before. This is what we get by having non-experts writing education policy. What I mean by mindset is that too many still think of education as five separate entities. There is preschool; there is elementary school; there is middle school; there is high school; and there is college. Finally, there is the workplace. There are separate districts in many locales, where preschool is its own entity, then there may be a K-8 elementary district that then feeds into a separate high school district. The districts are often within different boundaries, meaning a K-8 district could feed into multiple high schools, as is the case where I live. There are state tests that are given to K-8, which are written separately from the state tests that are given to high schools. This has been a disaster in Illinois, for example. The elementary test, called ISAT, tests a set of standards that are not aligned with high school standards. In other words, for the past ~8 years of testing for No Child Left Behind, kids passing the ISAT have been promoted to high school thinking they are well prepared, but then they find out they are behind because the standards for the high school test, called the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE), are set at a higher level. So a good number of freshman in high school find out their levels of reading and math and already behind where they need to be to meet the standards set up for their junior year of high school, which is when the PSAE is given according to federal law. How messed up is this??? And the tests both come from the same state board of education.
The MINDSET of thinking about 5 levels of education is entirely flawed! We need to think about this as a continuum, not as a disjointed system of education and learning. I am convinced, as are all the other participants at the conference after I brought up the concept of mindset to the group, of an overarching Preschool – College education system. The entire system must have some level of communication and organization that allows for some level of vertical alignment of curriculum and skills-building. This mindset would put us in a model of a pipeline with a continuous laminar flow for students, rather than the turbulence that results from transitions between districts and standards that vary from one level to the next due to nothing more than the rear not knowing what the front is doing. Without this model and way of thinking about education, I fear no reform is possible. Period.
If we buy into this mindset of a continuous, flowing education, then what? How do we begin to fix specific problems with STEM education? For starters, we need to think about where students need to end up by the time they get to the workplace in their early twenties. What skills are going to be needed twenty years from now, for a young child today to be able to compete in tomorrow’s world, where we do not presently even know what jobs are going to exist? This gets tricky because it requires long-term projections and planning, but it is a very good guess that the bulk of good future jobs will require STEM backgrounds. But here’s the thing so many cannot get their heads around – we have to be thinking in terms of SKILLS as much, if not more so, than CONTENT.
Content is important, don’t get me wrong. Going through school, one needs to learn how to write and spell correctly and understand the basic rules of math, and know about the Constitution and how the country works, and know some fundamental principles that science is built upon. Such facts and content is vital in order to continuously build knew knowledge. But whether it is No Child Left Behind or the new proposals in Race to the Top, the end results are focused entirely on content. Schools have been rated in NCLB solely on those tests at the end of the year. Race to the Top will in principle do a little better because the claim is it will focus on academic growth of students, rather than the ridiculous notion that all students should be at the same place at the same time as NCLB assumes. However, the end game is going to be on end of year testing. Race to the Top will take it even one step further, with teacher and principal evaluations being based on test results (that is good for me since I teach AP, and my kids will pass state exams 100% of the time; what about the special ed teacher, though, whose juniors come in reading at a 3rd grade level, and not a single one will pass the test? Am I a better teacher than she is? Probably not, but federal law treats me as far superior since my kids passed the test…a crazy way of doing education!).
End result of both federal education laws: Content is going to continue to rule the day.
Now here is the kicker. To a person, when asked at the conference what does a college professor want from an incoming freshman, every professor in attendance I spoke with and who participated in table discussions as well as the eight featured speakers to the whole group, not a single one mentioned content! They did not care about how much content, beyond the basics that is, a student had in their STEM area. They can teach the content, they all said. But what IS needed, and what IS presently lacking from a majority of incoming college freshman, are skills. For STEM areas, students need to be able to do 2 things according to every professor: be able to read technical literature for understanding, and have the ability to think about and find information to reach logical conclusions, i.e. problem solving (this includes being able to identify how to know what you don’t know, and then be able to go figure out the answer). Skills matter as much and more than specific content for college. The underlying reason for this, by the way, is that many believe we are in a paradigm shift of ages – we are moving from the “Information Age” into the “Age of Conceptualization.” We have collected more information in the past twenty years than human civilization collected in the past 10,000 years combined, and now we have moved into an age of having to figure out what to do with the information. This is why higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills come in, for STEM fields have progressed from single disciplinary to multi-disciplinary. We have moved beyond knowing what is in the textbook, and into an age where textbooks in some fields are changing every few months with new discovery…students must be trained to think on the fly and how to synthesize large volumes of information and find the connections between topics from different fields.
Because we treat our education systems as separate blocks of education, we have systemically developed a lack of communication between the blocks. We are focused on the wrong things in the test the content dominated K-12 blocks compared to what the kids should be doing to properly compare for college and the workplace.
We need to take the end result, higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills, and work backwards. What do we need to do year-to-year in pre-college education in order to reach the end goals? What are some best practices that allow us to develop not only good content knowledge in students, but also provide an environment and system where skills are developed, too?
Future posts will focus on these last questions.
I was recently at an all-day conference on STEM in the Chicagoland area, where leaders in education (middle school through college was strongly represented), industry, science and engineering (speakers included an astrophysicist, a particle physicist, a robotics specialist, a nanotechnologist, and lead engineer who designed and built the Dubai Tower), and politics (the keynote speaker was Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Illinois 9th) met at Niles North High School to begin a networking group focused on how we should be approaching STEM in schools, with an additional focus on how to improve student research and active involvement in STEM areas while in K-12 schools. It was a wonderful turnout (some 140 leaders from dozens of high schools), and I had the pleasure of being asked to be the table leader for student independent research. Many thanks to the gang from Niles North for putting this together and hosting. I also must compliment Niles North for being a leader in developing a broader STEM program that includes a wonderful facility for research and for getting large numbers of students doing true research.
Where are we with regards to STEM in K-12 education? Like so much in public education, the answer to this question depends almost entirely on where you happen to live. The leaders in STEM tend to be from wealthier suburban districts or magnet-type schools such as the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), whose charter mandates students to do research and pursue scientific/technical activity. The major reason such schools lead the way is that it requires money for students to do research on a larger scale, as well as to recruit and hire instructors with strong research backgrounds to begin setting up programs for students. In Illinois it is especially difficult to break this cycle because of the way schools are funded, which depends severely on local property tax revenue.
News headlines have for some time had a focus on how poorly the U.S. compares on international tests of science and math to the rest of the world. The average American student does not hold up well on such tests. Our top students continue to do extremely well, but there is a growing gap for the overall average. A couple reasons were identified at the conference and there has been a growing consensus over the last couple years as to why this is the case. These include:
• A lack of training and research experience of teachers at all levels of K-12 education. Even in high schools, a shockingly large percentage of science teachers have never actually done research, meaning they have never actually done science. There is a Grand Canyon sized gap between coursework from textbooks and actually doing long-term research in the lab;
• A lack of expertise and time devoted to science and technology in early grades (typically K-5). This has continued to worsen in the age of No Child Left Behind, as time is taken away from science and social studies to focus on reading and math, the two subjects that are tested and go into a school’s AYP status;
• A lack of funding in K-12 education, in terms of having facilities and equipment/supplies to do higher level research. In Illinois and other states that have enormous deficits, this will continue to be the case;
• A disconnect between K-12 and college levels of STEM, largely because of a lack of communication. And I’ll include industry as well. High schools can be at a loss in terms of understanding what, exactly, are the required skills colleges and the workplace are looking for. This has been exasperated by the fact the high schools have been under intense focus for specific science content in order to pass state tests for No Child Left Behind mandates. Colleges and employers are not necessarily only interested in what specific content students have had, but rather they have become more interested in what skills students have developed in order to be successful in college STEM programs and in the workplace.
What can we do about all this? What should we be doing about all this? The answers are NOT being addressed by the federal mandates, and that includes the soon to be new education policy called “The Race to the Top,” which will be the Obama administration’s education policy that replaces the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. By being on a school board, I have had early exposure to Race to the Top because we had to decide whether or not to send in a Memo of Understanding that was required to be registered with the state board of education in order to be eligible for money coming out of competitive grants. There is a competitive grant program set up between states to meet a large number of criteria in the Race to the Top legislation that will be given to Congress in the not so distant future.
There is a similar flaw in the national and state education policies that have then been dumped on local school districts. It has to do with the mindset of those writing the laws, almost all of whom have never taught in classrooms before. This is what we get by having non-experts writing education policy. What I mean by mindset is that too many still think of education as five separate entities. There is preschool; there is elementary school; there is middle school; there is high school; and there is college. Finally, there is the workplace. There are separate districts in many locales, where preschool is its own entity, then there may be a K-8 elementary district that then feeds into a separate high school district. The districts are often within different boundaries, meaning a K-8 district could feed into multiple high schools, as is the case where I live. There are state tests that are given to K-8, which are written separately from the state tests that are given to high schools. This has been a disaster in Illinois, for example. The elementary test, called ISAT, tests a set of standards that are not aligned with high school standards. In other words, for the past ~8 years of testing for No Child Left Behind, kids passing the ISAT have been promoted to high school thinking they are well prepared, but then they find out they are behind because the standards for the high school test, called the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE), are set at a higher level. So a good number of freshman in high school find out their levels of reading and math and already behind where they need to be to meet the standards set up for their junior year of high school, which is when the PSAE is given according to federal law. How messed up is this??? And the tests both come from the same state board of education.
The MINDSET of thinking about 5 levels of education is entirely flawed! We need to think about this as a continuum, not as a disjointed system of education and learning. I am convinced, as are all the other participants at the conference after I brought up the concept of mindset to the group, of an overarching Preschool – College education system. The entire system must have some level of communication and organization that allows for some level of vertical alignment of curriculum and skills-building. This mindset would put us in a model of a pipeline with a continuous laminar flow for students, rather than the turbulence that results from transitions between districts and standards that vary from one level to the next due to nothing more than the rear not knowing what the front is doing. Without this model and way of thinking about education, I fear no reform is possible. Period.
If we buy into this mindset of a continuous, flowing education, then what? How do we begin to fix specific problems with STEM education? For starters, we need to think about where students need to end up by the time they get to the workplace in their early twenties. What skills are going to be needed twenty years from now, for a young child today to be able to compete in tomorrow’s world, where we do not presently even know what jobs are going to exist? This gets tricky because it requires long-term projections and planning, but it is a very good guess that the bulk of good future jobs will require STEM backgrounds. But here’s the thing so many cannot get their heads around – we have to be thinking in terms of SKILLS as much, if not more so, than CONTENT.
Content is important, don’t get me wrong. Going through school, one needs to learn how to write and spell correctly and understand the basic rules of math, and know about the Constitution and how the country works, and know some fundamental principles that science is built upon. Such facts and content is vital in order to continuously build knew knowledge. But whether it is No Child Left Behind or the new proposals in Race to the Top, the end results are focused entirely on content. Schools have been rated in NCLB solely on those tests at the end of the year. Race to the Top will in principle do a little better because the claim is it will focus on academic growth of students, rather than the ridiculous notion that all students should be at the same place at the same time as NCLB assumes. However, the end game is going to be on end of year testing. Race to the Top will take it even one step further, with teacher and principal evaluations being based on test results (that is good for me since I teach AP, and my kids will pass state exams 100% of the time; what about the special ed teacher, though, whose juniors come in reading at a 3rd grade level, and not a single one will pass the test? Am I a better teacher than she is? Probably not, but federal law treats me as far superior since my kids passed the test…a crazy way of doing education!).
End result of both federal education laws: Content is going to continue to rule the day.
Now here is the kicker. To a person, when asked at the conference what does a college professor want from an incoming freshman, every professor in attendance I spoke with and who participated in table discussions as well as the eight featured speakers to the whole group, not a single one mentioned content! They did not care about how much content, beyond the basics that is, a student had in their STEM area. They can teach the content, they all said. But what IS needed, and what IS presently lacking from a majority of incoming college freshman, are skills. For STEM areas, students need to be able to do 2 things according to every professor: be able to read technical literature for understanding, and have the ability to think about and find information to reach logical conclusions, i.e. problem solving (this includes being able to identify how to know what you don’t know, and then be able to go figure out the answer). Skills matter as much and more than specific content for college. The underlying reason for this, by the way, is that many believe we are in a paradigm shift of ages – we are moving from the “Information Age” into the “Age of Conceptualization.” We have collected more information in the past twenty years than human civilization collected in the past 10,000 years combined, and now we have moved into an age of having to figure out what to do with the information. This is why higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills come in, for STEM fields have progressed from single disciplinary to multi-disciplinary. We have moved beyond knowing what is in the textbook, and into an age where textbooks in some fields are changing every few months with new discovery…students must be trained to think on the fly and how to synthesize large volumes of information and find the connections between topics from different fields.
Because we treat our education systems as separate blocks of education, we have systemically developed a lack of communication between the blocks. We are focused on the wrong things in the test the content dominated K-12 blocks compared to what the kids should be doing to properly compare for college and the workplace.
We need to take the end result, higher-level thinking and problem solving and creative skills, and work backwards. What do we need to do year-to-year in pre-college education in order to reach the end goals? What are some best practices that allow us to develop not only good content knowledge in students, but also provide an environment and system where skills are developed, too?
Future posts will focus on these last questions.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Some Posts on STEM: Early Childhood, Part I
I will be putting up some posts up regarding STEM education in our schools, at all levels. STEM is something educators see a lot, but for those who are not familiar, it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. While many say this is the way to the future, I must say the future is here and has been here for the past decade. The rest of the world realized this and have been investing heavily in STEM areas of education at all levels, and especially at the college level. Why have China and India been rising so quickly economically, and why have countries such as the aforementioned been 'stealing' America's technical jobs? Because of their rapid rise in STEM education and the number of technically trained workers (e.g. China is training millions of engineers and scientists each year, the U.S. is in the tens of thousands per year). This, and because wages are a fraction of what American workers make, are the primary reasons many believe China is the next superpower in this century.
The first item to put out there is a necessary change that is needed as far as what our pre-school children are capable of with regards to science. An article from Education Week deals with this, and a new curriculum designed for those 3-4 year olds. Keep in mind, if you have kids or young siblings, think about how they learn. They are scientists! They actively investigate everything. They experiment. They go through trial and error, learn from mistakes, and actually try to predict what will happen as they 'play' with new toys. They are natural curious about everything, and over time make connections between different items and experiences. They learn language through intense observation and build off of what others do. Through group play, they teach and learn from each other. Is this not what we want from our high school graduates?! Is this not how successful research programs behave and operate?
As is stated by a researcher in this article,
" “Most teachers will have a science area in their classroom, ... and if you look on plans, you would see something listed as science but, in reality, there would be some shells, some magnets, and maybe a pumpkin, or a book about animals in winter,” said Nancy Clark-Chiarelli, a principal research scientist at the Education Development Center, a research group based in Newton, Mass. “But those items are not conceptually related, and they don’t promote children’s independent exploration of them.” "
The curriculum featured in this article is called Young Scientist, and is funded through the National Science Foundation. It is a start that is, I suppose, better late than never. There is more to come about STEM topics and issues.
The first item to put out there is a necessary change that is needed as far as what our pre-school children are capable of with regards to science. An article from Education Week deals with this, and a new curriculum designed for those 3-4 year olds. Keep in mind, if you have kids or young siblings, think about how they learn. They are scientists! They actively investigate everything. They experiment. They go through trial and error, learn from mistakes, and actually try to predict what will happen as they 'play' with new toys. They are natural curious about everything, and over time make connections between different items and experiences. They learn language through intense observation and build off of what others do. Through group play, they teach and learn from each other. Is this not what we want from our high school graduates?! Is this not how successful research programs behave and operate?
As is stated by a researcher in this article,
" “Most teachers will have a science area in their classroom, ... and if you look on plans, you would see something listed as science but, in reality, there would be some shells, some magnets, and maybe a pumpkin, or a book about animals in winter,” said Nancy Clark-Chiarelli, a principal research scientist at the Education Development Center, a research group based in Newton, Mass. “But those items are not conceptually related, and they don’t promote children’s independent exploration of them.” "
The curriculum featured in this article is called Young Scientist, and is funded through the National Science Foundation. It is a start that is, I suppose, better late than never. There is more to come about STEM topics and issues.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Quite Amusing...
In case NBC is looking to replace Jay Leno altogether, perhaps they'll consider Gov. Sarah Palin. She made a classic one-liner in a response to reports that she is being hired to a multi-year deal with Fox News, as a commentator I would think. Her press release included the statement:
"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."
Waa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good line, Mrs. Palin.
"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news."
Waa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good line, Mrs. Palin.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!
I hope everyone is able to enjoy the new year, and remain happy and healthy so you can pursue all your goals and dreams!!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Importance of Imagery for Memory & Learning
Thanks to the Drs. Eide for a post on imagery studies and how they play a role in memory and learning. If you reflect on instances when there is some physical activity or complex calculation or cognitive exercise you need to do, can you remember a time when you tried to 'see' yourself doing it ahead of time? It may seem to be an instinctive process or action, but I certainly have imagined doing a tough calculation prior to a math test, or have caught myself imagining myself playing a tough trumpet lick on a bus as we drove to a music contest. Professional musicians and athletes often refer to this mental practice since they are on the road so often, without the ability to physically practice like they are used to doing. Read a good article on this topic here.
Mental imagery is something that can help build memory for particular actions or cognitive activities, largely because neuroimaging experiments show as much as 90% of the neurons that are used in the actual, physical activity are firing in mental imagery exercises. To the brain, imagery is not so different from the real thing. Imagery can help us with the following:
- not only visualizing what the activity is, but also gaining spatial, auditory and kinesthetic information and practice and memory for that activity;
- helps with activities with high levels of organization, multi-steps, and decision making;
- positive imagery has a positive effect on real performance results: for example, golfers do 30% better on putting when positively imagining sinking putts, and 20% worse when imagining missing putts;
For readers, 60% of 5th graders report naturally using some imagery during 'think aloud' breaks in reading stories. It appears to be a natural reaction, even for children, to try and 'see' the scenes that words are trying to convey in order to develop memories of a story that we, ourselves, are not part of in reality. Humans are more visual creatures, as I like to tell my own students, and it is important to remind and also teach students how to visualize physical events and experiences. In fact, in problem solving in physics, I try and teach as an essential part of every single problem to draw a picture and mentally 'see' what is happening in the problem. We use a technique that requires making pictures and labeling all forces on the picture, and then use the picture to actually set up the math (for F = ma problems). So science and imagery are naturally connected, just as reading, writing and imagery are connected. Memory improves when visualization and imagery are used for stories or for how physical events play out in reality. The experimental finding that a good majority of the brain used for the physical activity is used in imagery, too, begins to explain why this process works.
Imagery is used extensively in elementary grades, and the combination of mental imagery with drawing pictures and other hands-on, physical activities makes for a powerful way of building memory and learning. We tend to actually decrease the use of imagery techniques as students progress into higher grades. Perhaps imagery is used most extensively in science classes by the time students get to high school, but it seems as if the use of imagery and hands on activities decreases significantly in literature and history/social studies classes, at least via anecdotal evidence and through conversations with students. Perhaps this is something educators need to consider more in practice.
Mental imagery is something that can help build memory for particular actions or cognitive activities, largely because neuroimaging experiments show as much as 90% of the neurons that are used in the actual, physical activity are firing in mental imagery exercises. To the brain, imagery is not so different from the real thing. Imagery can help us with the following:
- not only visualizing what the activity is, but also gaining spatial, auditory and kinesthetic information and practice and memory for that activity;
- helps with activities with high levels of organization, multi-steps, and decision making;
- positive imagery has a positive effect on real performance results: for example, golfers do 30% better on putting when positively imagining sinking putts, and 20% worse when imagining missing putts;
For readers, 60% of 5th graders report naturally using some imagery during 'think aloud' breaks in reading stories. It appears to be a natural reaction, even for children, to try and 'see' the scenes that words are trying to convey in order to develop memories of a story that we, ourselves, are not part of in reality. Humans are more visual creatures, as I like to tell my own students, and it is important to remind and also teach students how to visualize physical events and experiences. In fact, in problem solving in physics, I try and teach as an essential part of every single problem to draw a picture and mentally 'see' what is happening in the problem. We use a technique that requires making pictures and labeling all forces on the picture, and then use the picture to actually set up the math (for F = ma problems). So science and imagery are naturally connected, just as reading, writing and imagery are connected. Memory improves when visualization and imagery are used for stories or for how physical events play out in reality. The experimental finding that a good majority of the brain used for the physical activity is used in imagery, too, begins to explain why this process works.
Imagery is used extensively in elementary grades, and the combination of mental imagery with drawing pictures and other hands-on, physical activities makes for a powerful way of building memory and learning. We tend to actually decrease the use of imagery techniques as students progress into higher grades. Perhaps imagery is used most extensively in science classes by the time students get to high school, but it seems as if the use of imagery and hands on activities decreases significantly in literature and history/social studies classes, at least via anecdotal evidence and through conversations with students. Perhaps this is something educators need to consider more in practice.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Hypocrisy in Government? Perhaps a bit....
At least there is some media coverage bubbling up about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are fighting the Obama/Democrat attempt at health care reform. A good number of the Republican Senators who are leading this fight, who argue that they worry about a huge increase in the federal deficit with a 'government takeover' of health care, were the same ones who sponsored and supported and voted in the Medicare prescription drug program that passed a few years ago under Pres. Bush, when Republicans also had control of the Congress. That plan was truly a giveaway to the drug industry, as it was entirely deficit funded. It has added over a half trillion dollars to the deficit since its inception, and also provided the infamous 'doughnut hole' in funding for drugs for seniors.
Check out the article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091225/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_deficit. But now, the resistance to health care reform is based on a lack of evidence as far as how it is funded. There are savings built in and, yes, some tax increases on the wealthy, that help pay for the reforms. In fact, not only does the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score it as cost neutral, but actually will reduce the deficit by some $130 billion over the next decade. Projections may or may not be accurate depending a whole series of assumptions that are made, but this is generally the official budgetary analysis that is provided to the Congress for bills that are being considered.
While I am singling out the GOP on this one, as I and most people I know are so completely frustrated by the circus that is called the Congress, let me make it clear that both sides show this type of hypocrisy in the name of partisanship battles. It just depends who happens to have majority power during a particular political cycle. It is part of the game called politics, and it is at least beneficial to be aware of the game. We will see what happens.
Check out the article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091225/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_deficit. But now, the resistance to health care reform is based on a lack of evidence as far as how it is funded. There are savings built in and, yes, some tax increases on the wealthy, that help pay for the reforms. In fact, not only does the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score it as cost neutral, but actually will reduce the deficit by some $130 billion over the next decade. Projections may or may not be accurate depending a whole series of assumptions that are made, but this is generally the official budgetary analysis that is provided to the Congress for bills that are being considered.
While I am singling out the GOP on this one, as I and most people I know are so completely frustrated by the circus that is called the Congress, let me make it clear that both sides show this type of hypocrisy in the name of partisanship battles. It just depends who happens to have majority power during a particular political cycle. It is part of the game called politics, and it is at least beneficial to be aware of the game. We will see what happens.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Health Care Reform on the Way?
Despite unanimous disapproval from the GOP, the Senate has passed its version of Health Care reform. Now, the House and Senate begin the task of taking those two bills to conference committee to try and strike a final deal on a final bill, to be ultimately signed into law by the President.
It is a long, messy process to say the least, with obvious bitter feelings on many sides of the issues facing our health care system. And although whatever happens in conference committee, you can be sure there will still be universal votes against it from Republicans. There were numerous attempts to try and get portions of the bill to hook in some small number of those on the right, ranging from abortion language to dropping the public option to better language and policy favoring small business, but it really doesn't matter in the end because it had become and is clear nothing would gain any support on the right. I like to think this is not true, but there is something to the first set of comments from Rush Limbaugh immediately after Pres. Obama was sworn into office, where many on the right simply want to see the Obama agenda fail at all costs, period.
I try to listen to the arguments and complaints by the Republican leadership, who are out there every day stating why health care reform will destroy the economy and our childrens' futures, but evidence does not support their claims. Just the fact that some 30 million presently uninsured Americans will be able to obtain some level of health insurance, so one severe injury or illness does not bankrupt them, is a good thing. Can we agree on that? We haven't heard the right bring out CBO numbers lately because the 10-year projection is that it does pay for itself and trims $130 billion from the national debt. There are benefits and incentives for small businesses, which will drive the eventual job creation in the country, which is why some allies of small business have endorsed the plan. We'll keep hearing complaints about how seniors are going to start dying off early from non-existent 'death panels' that some on the right still throw out there for fear-raising purposes, or that Medicare is being raped - this despite the fact that the AARP endorses the plans. If there was any significant detrimental effect on seniors, this endorsement never happens...the language cannot be all that bad, apparently. And most importantly, if there were serious threats to the quality and extent of health care in the country, the AMA never endorses the plans - but they have, so this suggests it can't be all that bad. In fact, many doctors I know still think the best thing that could happen to control costs is some sort of public option, or at least what many other nations do, which is make insurance companies be not-for-profit organizations.
It is only a good thing that insurance companies will no longer be able to have entire divisions devoted to searching for needles in the haystack for their customers pasts so they can have an excuse to deny coverage when the customer needs it the most. It is only a good thing when insurance companies can no longer drop coverage without warning when a necessary procedure is too expensive. And it is only a good thing when it becomes illegal for someone with a 'pre-existing condition' to finally be able to get coverage that will not bankrupt them. If these were the only changes in the end, it would be worth the effort.
Change is not easy. Hell, small change at the local level is never easy, let alone big change at the national level. There is no such thing as a perfect bill in any policy area at any level. There are too many interests and too many emotions that arise to make much more that 50% of the country happy in anything nowadays. So I hope the Democrats push on and pass this, since it is now pointless to hope for any support from Republicans. There are some good things in the bill that will help millions of Americans. If the projections are at all accurate, not only is this going to be cost neutral, but actually lead to some savings. Does more need to be done in the near future to further reduce health care costs and the rates at which those costs are going up? Absolutely. Could the process have been handled better on both sides of the aisle? Absolutely. Are there still going to be critics and those on the far right demanding the Democrats be burned at the stake? Absolutely. But this could be an enormous first step in a multi-step process. Nearly a century after Pres. Teddy Roosevelt called for health care reform, we might get some necessary, very much overdue changes within the next month or two, depending how long the bills are debated in committee. It is time to get it done.
It is a long, messy process to say the least, with obvious bitter feelings on many sides of the issues facing our health care system. And although whatever happens in conference committee, you can be sure there will still be universal votes against it from Republicans. There were numerous attempts to try and get portions of the bill to hook in some small number of those on the right, ranging from abortion language to dropping the public option to better language and policy favoring small business, but it really doesn't matter in the end because it had become and is clear nothing would gain any support on the right. I like to think this is not true, but there is something to the first set of comments from Rush Limbaugh immediately after Pres. Obama was sworn into office, where many on the right simply want to see the Obama agenda fail at all costs, period.
I try to listen to the arguments and complaints by the Republican leadership, who are out there every day stating why health care reform will destroy the economy and our childrens' futures, but evidence does not support their claims. Just the fact that some 30 million presently uninsured Americans will be able to obtain some level of health insurance, so one severe injury or illness does not bankrupt them, is a good thing. Can we agree on that? We haven't heard the right bring out CBO numbers lately because the 10-year projection is that it does pay for itself and trims $130 billion from the national debt. There are benefits and incentives for small businesses, which will drive the eventual job creation in the country, which is why some allies of small business have endorsed the plan. We'll keep hearing complaints about how seniors are going to start dying off early from non-existent 'death panels' that some on the right still throw out there for fear-raising purposes, or that Medicare is being raped - this despite the fact that the AARP endorses the plans. If there was any significant detrimental effect on seniors, this endorsement never happens...the language cannot be all that bad, apparently. And most importantly, if there were serious threats to the quality and extent of health care in the country, the AMA never endorses the plans - but they have, so this suggests it can't be all that bad. In fact, many doctors I know still think the best thing that could happen to control costs is some sort of public option, or at least what many other nations do, which is make insurance companies be not-for-profit organizations.
It is only a good thing that insurance companies will no longer be able to have entire divisions devoted to searching for needles in the haystack for their customers pasts so they can have an excuse to deny coverage when the customer needs it the most. It is only a good thing when insurance companies can no longer drop coverage without warning when a necessary procedure is too expensive. And it is only a good thing when it becomes illegal for someone with a 'pre-existing condition' to finally be able to get coverage that will not bankrupt them. If these were the only changes in the end, it would be worth the effort.
Change is not easy. Hell, small change at the local level is never easy, let alone big change at the national level. There is no such thing as a perfect bill in any policy area at any level. There are too many interests and too many emotions that arise to make much more that 50% of the country happy in anything nowadays. So I hope the Democrats push on and pass this, since it is now pointless to hope for any support from Republicans. There are some good things in the bill that will help millions of Americans. If the projections are at all accurate, not only is this going to be cost neutral, but actually lead to some savings. Does more need to be done in the near future to further reduce health care costs and the rates at which those costs are going up? Absolutely. Could the process have been handled better on both sides of the aisle? Absolutely. Are there still going to be critics and those on the far right demanding the Democrats be burned at the stake? Absolutely. But this could be an enormous first step in a multi-step process. Nearly a century after Pres. Teddy Roosevelt called for health care reform, we might get some necessary, very much overdue changes within the next month or two, depending how long the bills are debated in committee. It is time to get it done.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Scientific American Top 10 Science Stories for 2009
Check out the Scientific American Top 10 scientific stories of 2009. Always a good time debating top 10 lists. Perhaps the lead next year will be the discovery of the Higgs boson, either at Fermilab or CERN.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
A Map of the Whole of Science
My good friend Zenpundit sent me the link to the map of science below. It is a wonderful tool showing topical and paradigm links between the major disciplines of science. You can click on the map and zoom and move around the map to read the topics that make up the links. It is truly worth viewing up close to see all the various areas of science and research. Have fun!
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wasting Food - Something to Ponder After We Over-eat on Thanksgiving
I personally enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, for it is a good chance to be with family and reflect on how much they mean to me. There is also a side benefit, one where we are able to dine in the extreme with an overabundance of delicious homemade turkey dinner. As with any large meal, particularly with numerous children participating in the festivities, I cannot help but notice there is a good amount of food being thrown out, as stomachs fill more quickly than the original estimate one's eyes make just prior to eating. But until I read a story summarizing a new estimate of how much food Americans throw out, I had no idea of the true waste I have witnessed.
Americans throw out approximately 40% of the food produced in the U.S. This is a staggering number, but it is the result of a study done by researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. This translates into 1400 calories of food per day per person, or some 150 trillion calories per year of wasted food and nutrition. This is happening in a time where, with the economic crisis that has unfolded since 2007, an additional 2 million Americans have been added to the rolls of those who do not have enough to eat every day, going from 4.7 million to 6.7 million people just in two years. This is an estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Worldwide, about one billion people go without adequate amounts of food.
There is an oversupply of food in the U.S., and it has led to some noteworthy health problems such as widespread obesity, increased amounts of heart disease and diabetes, and I would hypothesize our poor diets with food excess play some role in the shorter life spans Americans see when compared to other wealthy nations, where diet selection and choice is healthier than what many Americans choose.
As a citizen in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, I am thankful for the opportunity to walk into countless stores and be able to select as much food for myself and my family as we can stand. Our grocery stores are considered in many countries around the world to be centers of unimaginable volume of food that will not ever be realized in those countries. Perhaps it is time to recognize this overabundance and figure out how to better distribute food in order to use the waste we now produce to actually be put to use and feed some of those billion hungry world citizens, many of whom are children. Many experts argue there is enough food being produced worldwide to feed the global population, but the way it is distributed and managed and taken for granted in certain regions of the world leads to vast waste. We can and must do better, in order to allow as many individuals to have the opportunity to enjoy the life given to them, rather than going hungry and having no hope of pursuing their dreams. Let's try to become more thoughtful of how much food we waste, and begin to trim the volume of food we take each meal. Let's purchase what we will actually consume, and let's encourage restaurants to actually serve smaller portions than the mountain of food a typical meal includes, and which so few costumers can actually finish without being bloated.
Americans throw out approximately 40% of the food produced in the U.S. This is a staggering number, but it is the result of a study done by researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. This translates into 1400 calories of food per day per person, or some 150 trillion calories per year of wasted food and nutrition. This is happening in a time where, with the economic crisis that has unfolded since 2007, an additional 2 million Americans have been added to the rolls of those who do not have enough to eat every day, going from 4.7 million to 6.7 million people just in two years. This is an estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Worldwide, about one billion people go without adequate amounts of food.
There is an oversupply of food in the U.S., and it has led to some noteworthy health problems such as widespread obesity, increased amounts of heart disease and diabetes, and I would hypothesize our poor diets with food excess play some role in the shorter life spans Americans see when compared to other wealthy nations, where diet selection and choice is healthier than what many Americans choose.
As a citizen in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, I am thankful for the opportunity to walk into countless stores and be able to select as much food for myself and my family as we can stand. Our grocery stores are considered in many countries around the world to be centers of unimaginable volume of food that will not ever be realized in those countries. Perhaps it is time to recognize this overabundance and figure out how to better distribute food in order to use the waste we now produce to actually be put to use and feed some of those billion hungry world citizens, many of whom are children. Many experts argue there is enough food being produced worldwide to feed the global population, but the way it is distributed and managed and taken for granted in certain regions of the world leads to vast waste. We can and must do better, in order to allow as many individuals to have the opportunity to enjoy the life given to them, rather than going hungry and having no hope of pursuing their dreams. Let's try to become more thoughtful of how much food we waste, and begin to trim the volume of food we take each meal. Let's purchase what we will actually consume, and let's encourage restaurants to actually serve smaller portions than the mountain of food a typical meal includes, and which so few costumers can actually finish without being bloated.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Farthest Object Ever Observed
At some 13 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS from Earth, this gamma ray burst is now the most distant object ever observed. At roughly 600 million years after the Big Bang, we are seeing the remnant of one of the first generation stars that formed after the universe was created. Gamma ray bursts are among the most energetic events known to scientists. Truly remarkable!
Saturday, October 17, 2009
My Class Blog
At the start of the school year, I started a separate blog specifically for my physics classes. It will be a work in progress, of course, with one aspect being a variety of 'how to' videos for numerous physics problems and topics. The latest, for example, is 'how to do multi-body systems with tension,' which can be confusing to students who are first exposed to such problems. The videos are actually screencasts with voice, made with ScreenToaster, which I recommend to all teachers. This online tool, along with a tablet computer, is truly a powerful combination for producing useful presentations that can be embedded online. I have already used such screencasts for students who miss a couple days due to illness or college visits, where examples done in class and then put online have allowed them to catch up immediately. I plan on making an online library with all sorts of examples, notes, and demonstrations so students can review at their leisure, whether it is just to remind themselves of what went on during class, or reviewing for a quizzam, or catching up when absent. It is also a good tool for parents to check out if they are interested in what happens in their child's class.
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