Saturday Nov 8
- I went with Mr Freeman on a field trip (21 kids) to Huntsville to
the Space Center. It was a great trip and I learned a lot. I had never
been close to any of the rockets so I gained some serious perspective on
their size. Also, Bryan was great at helping me understand the sequence
of events, so that I could see how each mission built on the previous one.
The kids were wonderful. It was a joy to be out with them and feel so comfortable
and at ease.
Stephen got a picture of Mr.
Freeman and Michaela (a student) on the Space Shot. Later I rode with
them and it was a trip!
The highlight was the trip home, however. There was a lunar
eclipse which began about the time we passed through Chattanooga and started
north on I-75. For over an hour the kids turned off the lights and bus
video players (on their own) and watched the eclipse and asked Bryan questions
from time to time. I felt like it was a "dessert" for him. He was surrounded
by a joyous learning and openess in the kids that he never asked a question
- simply quietly responded. It was easy to tell it was a treat for him
- it certainly was for me. It was what I imagine most young teachers think
education will be like as they begin their career. It does happen - I've
witnessed it. I feel so good for Bryan and his Astronomy students. It's
something they will all remember.
What a delightful day!
Mon Nov 10 - Ellen read to me an excerpt
from the book she is reading, Calling the Circle by Christina Baldwin.
The story has great siginificance, although it is certainly not something
anyone would do. If you put a frog in very hot water it will jump out.
However, if you put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the heat to
the same temperature as before, the frog will stay in the water and die.
Why? It will try to adjust it's body temperature, but unable to adapt effectively,
it will become lethargic and then unable to jump out when it has to. Once
again, this is not something to be tested; however, it illustrates that
slow change can sometimes be detrimental to life. This might be what is
happening on earth now to the human species as we are experiencing extreme
global environmental, political and cultural change, yet as a species we
are failing to adapt or worse, are oblivious to the change around us.
Got an e-mail from Ila Hatter yesterday. She says that she
thought ALL air potatoes were inedible - the ones she tried in Florida
were horrible. She is going to check with
Dr. Jim Duke, the expert of medical botany. He maintains a phytochemical
data base. I found
air potato on it.
I showed the kids the 15 minute video of St Andrews-Sewanee
School - where I attended my junior and senior years. I do it so that they
will understand a little more of my philosophy of teaching and why I value
what I do in education.
We observed turd farms and stirred/adjusted compost.
The compost projects are doing great. Most of them look and smell very
good. The turd farms are approaching climax stage with all of them having
a good crop of small Coprinus mushroom. The
taller Coprinus should come along in a few days.
We skimmed our first scum from the pickle vats.
In todyas paper was an article on the whooping crane migration.
I put a link on the Ecology home page and here
it is again. Maybe they will get to Blythe Ferry in East Tennessee
by Saturday. If so, I think I'm going to take the spotting scope and drive
down and see if I can see one.
Tues Nov 11 - "Letters Home From Vietnam.
An HBO special from a number of years ago. I show it every Veterans Day.
Today I hope the kids can understand what is meant by "another Vietnam"
when speaking of Iraq.
Yesterday, I looked in on the dermestid beetles. The colony
os growing and they've done a great job on the
rabbit and possum. Today I plan to put another
squirrel and also clean the cage up a little. It may be time for a
small aquarium since I'll be changing out.
Wed Nov 12 - Today waas a shortened
day without my Ecology class. I checked the dermestids, however, and they
had cleaned the squirrel in one day. Also, John David brought another (yesterday
was #1) chicken his dog had killed. J.D> cut the head off and tomorrow
we'll pick the feathers off and also move the colonu of dermestids to a
new home in an aquarium.
Yesterday a staff member brought in a picture of a
frog from her pond that had choked to death
on a chipmunk. She has the frog/chipmunk in the freezer and is going
to save it until Thanksgiving to show it to visiting family. After that
she'll bring it in to me. I'll get better pix then.
The beetles have completely cleaned the squirrel skull
in ONE day!
Thurs Nov 13 -
6:00 a.m. Today I'll continue the Populations
work started last Friday with the videos. First I read an excerpt from
Cockroach Papers on the street kids and squalor of Managua, Nicaragua.
I showed the Haiti slides and then had the kids play "The Population Game"
where they use cards in a game to simulate the effects of immigrantion
and resource availabilty/use to change the conditions in a country. They
are to use the lab handout questions as "prompts" to make reflections in
their journal on the activity.
Also, I moved the dermestid culture into a small aquarium
in preparation for larger skulls. I bought some Aspen shaving yesterday
which should do well as their new home. We'll take the rabbit, squirrel
and possum skulls out and begin to clean them.
For food? They'lll get John David's two chicken heads.
I'm about 2/3 the way through The
Cockroach Papers by Richard Schweid, a Spaniard. It's a combination
of natural history, social history and literature treatment. It's a good
book. Stephen wants to do some research with roaches, so this is a good
place to get some background. In addition I have a video for him from the
Discovery Channel. Next Thursday, I'll be at UT and can do a little library
acquisition work also. The book has a great bibliography.
Added salt to pickles. Need to skim tomorrow. Interestingly
enough, the crock has good scum forming, but the plastic bucket fermenter
is producing very little activity. I'm not sure why, we it bears observation.
Fri Nov 14 - Found a couple of web-published
student papers from a college course. They deal somewhat with cockroach
respiration and have a reference or two to followup at UT. More to come
as I am getting quite interested myself in Stephen's topic. The big question
is: "How appropriate is the roach as a model for predation response'. Our
first finding is the they breath cyclically, so CO2 will rise and fall
in a pattern. Disruption of the pattern may in itself indicate stress as
opposed to absolute levels of CO2 production - a pattern recognition problem.
Went over population pyramids with the kids and we analyzed
Anderson and the surrounding counties, compared to Tennessee as a whole
and the nation. The data is based on 2000 census data and is available
on the web. It lends itsels to interactive work. The class were intigued
with the anomalies in the 20-24 age group, hypothesizing it was due to
leaving for college. Cumberland county showed an older distribution which
validates their hypotheses re:retirement villages.(t)
We examined data indicating the staus of children
welfare in Anderson County. I think they were a little surprised at the
poverty levels, high school dropout rates, and the 25% of children
in single family homes.
I showed them compound interest formulas and how the
ideas of population growth and money growth were related. Again, I
used the web to provide them with a site they could use for mortgages,
car payment, savings, etc. I was surprised that only 4 people (10% of the
class) out of 40 knew the difference between simple and compound interest.
Mon Nov 17 - I showed the kids some
video footage of past "compost presentations" and animal kingdom days.
We praticed the animal kingdom song, and set next Tuesday as performance
day.
Made final observations of turd farms and disposed
of them. They are still in a fine coprinus climax "forest"!
Stirred and made last additions to the indoor compost. From
now until the last week of the semester we will only be stirring.
Took a picture of a member of the growing
dermestid colony: "Colonel Meathead"!
Tues Nov 18 - Today and tommorow is the cladogram exercise. I use the activitiy from the American Biology Teacher Vol 62, 570-576., The Classification & Evolution of Caminacules by Robert P. Gendron. We started out by grouping 14 "Caminacules" into logical groups (lumping). See Robert Gendron's site. Most of them ended up with four or five groups. Then I asked them to become "splitters" and divided into six groups. These are genera. Then we lumped into families and again into orders. Along the way, I asked them to consider what characteristics they were using. I was trying to get them to focus on what they will see in the "fossils". I showed them the correct order to put the 14 living caminacules and then I did the first six fossils. They copied my work and then tomorrow they will put the rest of the fossils on their chart and develop a cladogram. Today's pedagogy was: I do, We do, You do.
Wed Nov 19 - We worked on completing
the cladograms. The primary idea I want this population of students to
understand is that science does not say that humans come from monkeys,
but that they have a common ancestor. The humans from monkeys idea is so
threatening to many of my population that I personally see it as the crux
in teaching. For that reason, I like the caminicules because they present
a novel situation for learning concepts. This is an idea I bring
from Craig Wrisberg at UT and the arena of motor behavior testing. Using
novel manipulatives can eliminate learning blocks due to bias. Once they
understand the nature of cladograms and how they indicate evolutionary
relationships, then we can discuss some implications of cladogram, or phylogenetic
trees, based on real fossil evidence.
I try to teach that theories (1) explain what we see (2)
explain the data (fossils in this case) and help us predict or hypothesize
about
the future (extinction possibilities and speciation for example).
Thurs Nov 20 - I left the class in a
sub's hands. The class was to watch a video on the ecology of Puget Sound
and write paragraph discussion answers to the general
questions listed on this web site for that video. After that, they
were to finish the cladograms if they still needed time.
I spent the day at UT. I was sitting on the admissions
board for the Science Education teachers program. In the morning I stopped
at the pet store to pick up Madagascar roaches for Stephen, but they had
ordered a dozen tiny nymphs - no adults. I didn't buy them. Then I went
on to the UT library and read through the book on roaches we had found
out about. Photocopied some pages about breathing cycles. Also, I found
that old Science article about aggression/dominance in crayfish and how
it affects serotonin and the tail flip reflex. Pretty interesting, and
is often the case, a little different then I remembered it. "Always go
to the primary source"!
We may catch our own good old wood roaches with a trap.
Fri Nov 21 - The kids are working at
differents speeds, so some still needed time to work on their cladograms.
For some of the others, I got out the soil/gravel mix I bought at the ruby/gold
mine in North Carolina this summer. A few of the kids began to sift and
look at the rocks. They found some stuff too. I'm not good at IDing them
but Bryan Freeman is. We'll keep anything that looks interesting , then
have in come in one day since 2nd block is his planning period.
Out the chicken and the brown thrasher skulls in peroxide.
They look good.
Sat Nov 22 - Went to Willimasburg, KY with Les and Claudia for a planning meeting on an AMSPsummer biology institute in June. During the return trip I talked with Les about the way he uses c-Fern and Jewel Wasps as inquiry instruments in his biology class at UT. I decided to order a kit of each from Carolina and begin to experiment with them. I'll start the kids with open inquiry and then add direction as they need it, utlimately ending at two weeks out an understanding of how to use them in my classroom next time I teach Ecology.
Mon Nov 24 - Ordered wasps and
c-Ferns to arrive Wednesday.
Today was Ethnobotany project day. They had to
present their work. We got some jewelweed soap, pictures of jewelweed treatment,
assorted teas (sassafrass, bee balm, chamomile, dandelion), henna tattoos,
thyme pita snacks, carved and cedar butteflies to hang in the closet.
I set up a web
site on the school server for the kids to use. I hope a few will begin
to post their work on it. Sort of experimental for now, but I'm going to
be learning Front Page which they will use. SOme are learning that software
in another class on web page design.
Skinned and took some flesh off the coyote skull. Then we
put it in the beetle culture. The culture didn't look too robust this morning,
but I hope they'll be all over it in the morning.
Practiced the
Animal Kingdom Song. Tomorrow is A.K. Day and the kids are supposed
to dress up as their favorite animal.
The whooping cranes are in Cumberland County. Maybe we'll get to
see them over Thanksgiving.
Tues Nov 25 - Animal Kingdom Day! The kids did a great job of dressing up, with several putting in quite a bit of energy. We video taped it for the "highlight film" I keep. In addition I got some of the kids to put their pictures up on the internet. My strategy is to use their pictures, stories, and projects as the incentive to get them involved. Building web pages and folders seems a good way to teach hierarchy of structure & function- a major science standard.
Wed Nov 26 - Pickle Day! We packed and processed our brine pickles today. There was about 30% absenteeism today, so everybody that was in class got their own jar of pickles.
Thanksgiving Weekend -
Picked and strained 1/2-gallon of persimmon pulp. Ellen
made persimmon ice cream from a recipe she found. Ecellent!
Dev and I drove down to the Hiwassee Refuge to see
the whooping cranes on Saturday. Got there about noon. We didn't get to
see them, and there wasn't anyone "official" around to tell what was going
on. A coupleof other people were at the viewing gazebo, and one person
said that as of 9:00 the birds would not be flying that day (he had talked
to an official person who was there at that time). We went on back, and
as it turns out, according to the web site, the birds left the viewing
area at 7:46 a.m. the next day. Oh well, the day wasn't a total loss -
we saw a low circling bald eagle and a number of nice song birds, as well
as waterfowl. The sand hill cranes were in abundance also. It was important
to try. The whooping crane is my first memory of the idea of "endangered
species". A postage
stamp was produced in 1957 and we talked about in my 6th grade class.
I thought there would be good mushrooming this weekend,
but it was blah! I really expected oysters, but there were no eadiblles
to be found.
I wove material this weekend to make a purse/bag for
Ellen. I just added colors of my natural dyed yarn as I went and the result
is beautiful. I was struck by the contrast to a painting project I'm also
doing using acrylic paints. The acrylic make striking contrasts of colors
which are pretty and bright in their own way on wood, but the natural pigments
blend together in a much more harmonious whole in the fabric. The components
of nature fit without "clashing" - you can't go wrong like you can with
artificial colors which have the capacity to offend the senses. Nature
never offends.
I read "I Heard the Owl Call Name" this weekend. Life, death,
lonliess and the loss of the old ways. The transforming power of love,
and just what love is. An true acceptance of people and who they are. Death
as another stage in life, for the departed and those who remain. I neat
book set on the coast of British Columbia.
