What’s the Rush?

I have never seen students in such a rush to do math.  Before they have even finished writing the number used for a calculation they are punching the calculator to get to the answer as quick as they can.  But they get lost in what the number represents and don’t know where to go next.  Slow Down and be Neat!  Its a concept that never really occurred to me until I’d spent a decent amount of time tutoring chemistry, in particular empirical formula calculations, basic stoichiomestry, limiting reactant, etc. and have been forcing my students to not only obey the golden rule chemistry math (i.e. “every number needs a unit guys!!), but also to neatly right on their equations and conversions.  Boy what a difference it makes.  You can literally see what to do next fall into place when they take the painstaking time to neatly write things out.  In fact, what has been really sinking in has been that if they carefully right out units “all the way” (i.e. not just “mg”, but “mg Na”) the math just kind of falls into place.  There is a natural tendency to rush to do the math.  It is a trend we have been bucking and working to do the math last.  For folks who like to rush (something in the past I have been guilty of myself), it is a hard habit to create but in the end it turns dividends!

Mastering Vocab and the 3F Rule

A large contingent of the students I tutor are those competing for entry into the nursing program, which means they are all taking A&P and stressed to the max.  Now it’s true that a lot of anatomy can be rote memorization.  But there are 2 major concepts I have been trying to hammer home:

1) Learn Your Roots

The amount of vocab in A&P (and science in general) can be very intimidating.  But if you can learn root words, you can quickly master more than you think you can.  Learn that lysis means “to break” and you can quickly master glycolysis, hydrolysis, lysosome, etc.  Just to name a few.  Learn “gly” or “glyco” hints at sugar and you are well on your way to glycolysis, glycogen, etc.  Learn that most enzymes end with the suffix “ase” and you can quickly identify them on site.  It is a simple concept, but it is shocking the eureka moments I see whenever I explain it to students.  It can really help give them a running start at what they think a new word means…

2) The 3F Rule…”Form follows function”

Again in a effort to simplify things, I have been working a lot on getting students to understand the “flow” of A&P and how amazingly efficient physiological designs are (for the most part; human knees notwithstanding).  A few examples of note from recent sessions:

• The Sarcoplasmic Reticulum is perfectly designed to swath the muscular fiber bundles in a muscle to get uniform contraction across a broad area.
• The spindle fiber machinery of mitosis is really the only logical way you would separate DNA material in a cell.  In a terrific moment, I asked a student “How would you design the process?” as a poor man’s initiation and by golly his design was pretty close!
• The neuron, both its gross morphology as a receiver/transmitter of information, and it’s function as a simple transistor, combined in a web of neurons, is almost exactly how a computer works!
• How could you design a muscle fiber contraction apparatus better than the ratchet-effect of the sliding filament?
• Why is the left ventricle of the human heart so muscular?  Because it has to force blood through the whole body, while he right simply has to get it to the heart of course!
• Plumbers every day install check valves almost identical in design to the tri-cuspid and mitral valves!
• Does not the design of a capillary bed make perfect sense when you realize you want to increase surface area to promote gas exchange?

Another Analogy…But A Work in Progress

I’ve mentioned a number of times the huge power I find in analogies and how key they are to making complex material digestable.  I implemented another useful one the other day.  It was all about diagosing reaction types for intro chemistry students I was helping.  As always, they were getting lost in the weeds on the terminology, and I was loking for a simple way to explain them…

1) Combination Reaction –> A Marriage

2) Decomposition Reaction –> A Divorce

3) A Single Replacement Reaction –> Cheating on your spouse

4) Double Replacement Reaction –> Well…(I need a better way to explain this!…a little too risque I worry)

For better or worse, this turning chemical reactions into interpersonal relationships is REALLY working!

Metal Activity Series…all about the next guy.

I think I’ve said before on here that analogies are to me the BEST way of getting material across.  It is just so easy to boil difficult complex to to easy to understand by bringing them into everyday life.  It’s particularly true I think for high school kids, who quite frankly have a lot on their mind besides Chemistry.

Case in point the other day, I had a girl that was completely overwhelmed by the Metal Activity Series…just the name itself brought blank stares.  She had a homework assignment of reactants in potential single replacement reactions and was to use the series to determine products (if any).  Again blank stares.

Simple analogy.  Metals in the series are a popularity list of boys in school.  On the reactants side, you are already paired up with your guy.  But here comes another guy that wants to take you out..

Now if the guy you are with is more popular than the new guy, no way you change and you stick with the guy you are with.  But

if the new guy is MORE popular on our handy series, then why not upgrade to the new beau.

Voila…within minutes we were flying through the homework.  Now on some level is it terrible that I’ve brought The Hills (for the record never seen the show; don’t even know if it still is a show!) into chemistry class and perpetuated the terrible social stratification of high school kids…Yes…and having been lower on my own high school’s “activity series”, shame on me.  But it worked great…take away the intimidating words (metal activity series, replacement reaction, etc.) and there is little difference in the concepts.

Making Quicksand

Well today we made quicksand using the tried and true home experiment of cornstarch mixed with water and (for effect) food coloring.  We victimized, largely for effect again, one of The Crew’s lego men, who seemed none-too-happy about being dunked in quicksand.  They had a great time exploring all the physical properties of it, how if they moved the lego man quickly through, he get “stuck”, but if they slowly dragged him through he could flow gently through the “liquid”.  Their favorite part (and mine as well) was that if they took a glop of our blue goo and quickly balled it around in their hand, it would make a stiff ball, but as soon as they stopped forming the ball, it would revert back to liquid and ooze through their fingers.

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So what is quicksand anyway, well in short, it is a mixture of a solid and a liquid in a colloidal suspension.  In our case it is starch molecules evenly interspersed among water molecules; in the old western movies, it is the same concept but sand molecules amongst water.  The reason we could “ball” our goo into a solid is that with quick force and constant movement, the relatively larger starch molecules bump into each other, trap the much smaller water molecules and create the characteristics of a solid.  When the movement stops, the starch molecules are allowed to once again flow through the liquid, and the suspension retakes the characteristics of a liquid.  This is a little different than quicksand in nature, where the ratio tends to be more solid (sand) and it is the rapid movement of someone trapped in quicksand that cause the sand to flow more and bring on characteristics of liquid.

Reaching the Sweet Spot

When I worked for a real estate developer for 10+ years, we used to have a term called “reaching the sweet spot”.  It was the point in time where sales and construction started to hum in unison and everything was coordinated nicely.  I reached that point this week at tutoring.  I’ve developed a small following of students, know them on a first name basis and can sort of keep tabs on their test scores, assignments, labs and general overall performance.  It is a nice place to be and makes it an absolute joy to come to work every day.

The Point of It All!

One thing that is great about tutoring is that students have the opportunity the drop survey with comments on how a tutor did in ACE’s “suggestion box”.  I was lucky enough to have one handed to me from my supervisor just the other day from a group of students studying for a mitosis/meiosis quiz.  They wrote how they could not have passed the quiz without me and how they really wished that I taught the class.  It was an amazing feeling and I am comfortable enough with my own masculinity to admit it brought a tear to my eye.

It was nice to it came on the heels of a student the day before that was very frustrated with me that I wouldn’t just give her the answers to her homework and annoyed that I (politely I think) suggested she come back when she had her book, notebook and showed some attempt at trying it on her own.  It can be hard at times to try to show someone how to use a rod and reel when they really just want to be given a fish.

Geocaching, Roses, Sparks, and Green Screens!

The Crew and I took another adventure the other day.  First, we went to the Children’s Museum in West Hartford.  The kids had a great time, got to pet a skink, fell in love with turtles, and had to be dragged out of the place after almost 3 hours.  A few pics…

Here is The Crew listening to the Skink demonstration. Crew is in lower part of picture. Hard to keep Little Buddy involved as he was obsessed with a "bunny rabbit" display that was close by.

A terrible picture of Little Buddy playing mad scientist with his own "Jacob's Ladder". I tried to get him to give a maniacal laugh but to no avail.

The Crew in the live weather studio set up warning us of a coming blizzard. The director (Little Buddy) had a bit of trouble keeping out of the shot. Please notice The Actress fully into character while The Analyst is far busier trying to figure out how all this works.

And of course when asked later what the best part of the museum was, I got "Lunch!"...typical.

After the museum we headed over to a local geocache at Elizabeth Park in Hartford.  What a beautiful place.  I had stopped by there one morning back in the winter before ARC class and had made a mental note to come back in the summer.  I was psyched that we had the chance and could do a bit of geocaching in the process.  Apparently the park is the former property of a well to do industrialist and statesman Charles Pond who left the park to the City of Hartford.  It was named after his wife Elizabeth (history of Elizabeth Park).

The centerpiece of a park is a huge rose garden with roses climbing trellises and arbors all around.  On this day it was incredible – you could smell the roses from about 50 yards away.  It was one of those things that every once in awhile makes you wish you lived in (or close to) a city – cities so often have such wonderful public places that you just don’t get in suburbia.  There is something to be said for TND! But I digress…

We scored the geocache, wonderful cache too with a nice story about how it was the spot where the cacher(?) proposed to his wife, etc.  A few pics…

The Crew running into the rose garden. Little Buddy trying to keep up. Beautiful place!

A rose. I forgot to write down what kind!

Running underneath the arbors towards the house in the middle of the garden!

Takin' a break in the middle. Chance to catch breath and for Little Buddy to do his patented "suck thumb and curl hair" move.

Found the cache! Wonderful story inside. Cool hiding spot in a sea of rhododendrons. Avoided all "Muggles" on the way...

 A Bit About Jacob’s Ladder…

It wasn’t until writing this post I ever knew the electrical arc b/w two rod device you always see in campy sci-fi pics was called a “Jacob’s Ladder”.  Now this isn’t to be confused with the Biblical Jacob’s Ladder from the book of Genesis where Jacob sees a vision of angels going up and down stairs to heaven and foretelling the expansion of the Jewish tribe.  Nor should it be confused with the most excellent Huey Lewis song.  Nor should it be confused with another rather disturbing definition I found online that we won’t talk about in a family friendly blog (jeez the internet is weird sometimes).

Cool time lapse photo of a Jacob's Ladder from Wikipedia

This Jacob’s Ladder is created by the electrical current run through two rods that are close together at the base and slowly diverge as the rise.  Essentially, the two rods hold a voltage difference that exceeds the “breakdown voltage” of the air between them (for air around 30kV/cm).  The atoms in the air between the rods ionize (the voltage difference provides enough energy for electrons to “break free” and move between the molecules in air to create ions), their electrical resistance drops accordingly and they for a moment become an electrical conductor…a wire made out of air if you will.  This creates heat, which causes the air to rise and the arc travels up between the two rods until the separation is too great to maintain this ionization.

It is the same way in which lightening works, just instead of the voltage differential occurring between the ground and a storm cloud, it is between the two rods.

It is worth noting too that Jacob’s Ladder indoors can actually pose some health risks, as the ionization of the air creates free radicals which can be damaging to the mucous membranes of folks nearby.  Little Buddy’s was safely in a glass case.

A Bit About Green Screens…

So in the museum The Crew got to play weatherman in a “studio” provided by NBC 30.  They got to stand in front of a green screen and watch themselves give a weather report on the monitors.  They thought it was great fun.  As I said The Actress loved being on TV…The Analyst though was more curious about how it all worked though.  I tried to give a “I’m a dad – I know everything” kind of answer, but I really didn’t know.  So I looked it up…

The “green screen”, or by the technical term Chromakey is accomplished by the process of filming a subject in front of a specific color (green or blue – usually chosen because they are far from the dominant colors for skin tone and the camera is very sensitive to them) and then replacing that specific color with the image or video you want.  In digital television, it is as simple as at each pixel point, if the color on the screen matches the specific color designated, that point is replaced with the appropriate point for the image you want to display instead.  Very cool!

A few fun facts learned along the way…

• Red is the dominant color in skin tone.  I wonder if someone who is sick or “green with envy” disappears in front of a green screen – haha!
• When the subject material is green dominant (e.g. plants, etc.), they use a blue screen instead of green.
• The most important factor is the spectrum (ROYGBIV) b/w the subject and the key color.  Clothes for weather folks are carefully chosen accordingly.
• You can find all kinds of fun stuff about Chroma Key here.

‘Til Later,

Backyard Biologist

Website Wednesday – Physics Classroom

Doing some research on something the other day, I happened across this website: The Physics Classroom.  It was a great site for an intermediary explanation of basic physics complete with tutorial, exercises, demonstrations and helpful graphs, examples, etc.  So I thought it was worth sharing.

• It had what I call “checking in” questions interspersed in the lectures (which I think are so key because there is nothing that cement a concept like doing a couple of problems in the moment).
• It has a complete Review section that has a series of MP questions and problems related to the different sections
• It has a lot of quick simple animations that help drive concepts home.
• Most of all, it is written largely in “layman’s terms”, which I find to be much more helpful and intuitive that what I will call “textbookease”.

A random screenshot...the Kinetic Energy tutorial

 

A New First Day

Today was my first day tutoring at the local community college. Given that it was the second day of classes and we had a hurricane yesterday it wasn’t terribly crowded, which was actually kind of nice to be able to sit for awhile with the few students who came in and try and connect with them early on.

The first student I had was working on simple conversions (e.g. how many mm in 3 cm, how may mL in 2 quarts, etc.). He was struggling a bit, partly because he was rushing and partly too because he was getting lost “in the weeds” as they say. He was going into each one somewhat anxiously and getting bogged down in the numbers without first stepping back and figuring out what he was trying to accomplish in a broader sense.

We did a decent number of conversions and I kept trying to get him to write the steps out explicitly, cross out units as he goes, make sure he labels the units with each number, etc. It was funny because skipping steps, not writing out steps, etc. are all the same bad habits I used to do when I was that age. It is just laziness and it is only with the benefit of hindsight now it is clear how much easier chemistry can be when you write out all the details.

It was a good first day. It is so incredibly rewarding, even on a small scale to be able to help someone do something they couldn’t do a few moments before and see that “Eureka!” moment when it clicks in their brain and they own it for the first time.