So this year, I'm getting the magnetic/cermaic surface Eno Board in my classroom... I'm no Miss Bailey, but I wonder how well this will work for my 8th Grade Physical Science group...especially since we study magnetism :) I've honestly never been a huge fan of the "smart board" movement (unlike smart phones). I miss my chalkboards at Hammond every day. However, I hope to use the board for more than just a projector screen. Since we do a good deal of chemical balancing, compound drawings, force vectors, etc I'm sure I'll put it to good use. Plus, when I saw the bit on electrical circuits in the demo, that made my day. We spend a good amount of time on circuit diagrams and programming breadboards. Of course it is better to actually have to install capacitors and insulators, but this should be a good aid in approaching such material. Should be fun to find out!

Read the whole thing, it's worth the 4 minutes...

The Smart Set: The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass - August 5, 2010: "Perhaps I yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives. And certainly I understand that students are with me only for 50 minutes three times a week, and that the results of instruction oftentimes reveal their value only in the fullness of time. Still, I find it troubling when, over the course of a semester, I see no palpable impact; I begin to doubt myself, feel vaguely fraudulent. Thus the satisfaction I find in cutting grass: When I’ve finished, I can see, clearly see, a genuine accomplishment, a consequence of my contact, a change in the physical, ‘out there,’ external reality wrought by my expended effort."

Selfishly, I'll say exactly.

I love Apple and I agree with Steve Jobs when he says his devices (like the iPad) are revolutionary. However, this thing could be really revolutionary in schools for a number of reasons. Of course it's just a tool, but it's a tool that solves a couple of problems that we've been hashing over in our little bubble of education for a while.

Introducing The NEW Sharpie LIQUID PENCIL | Sharpie Markers Official Blog

The end of pencil sharpeners?? I for one welcome our new liquid graphite tools.

Socrates famously rejected the supposed importance of the written word(1) in the Phaedrus. I wonder what he would have had to say about blogs and twitter? David Weinberger has a post on a book which I've just put on my Wish List, The Coming of the Book. Looks fascinating from the quotes he's published:

Joho the Blog » [2b2k] Books: The early years: "I’m reading The Coming of the Book, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958), who explain arrival of printed books with an impressive attention to fact-based detail. Amazing scholarship."

Maybe Socrates was right, after all. In any case, one of the main reasons I'm not using a textbook this year is because of the "institutionalization" of science-as-a-method that results from a rigidly composed amalgamation of information (2). Instead, I want my students to realize that science is not institutionalized or something done by professionals with post-docs. Instead, it's sometimes messy and often times can be done in our garages or backyards or bedrooms. I only have a few months of proper class-time with these 13 and 14 year olds(3). I don't want to spend precious moments of 43 minute class times having them memorize bold words in the name of standards. As Socrates observed in the Phaedrus: "And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” Regardless, I still love my books (even the digital ones). -- 1 via Plato, of course 2 especially since I teach the wide ranging topic of physical science... basic chemistry and physics wrapped in one course like yin-yang. 3 Yet another reason I love the availability factor of email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc as I've actually done more quality "teaching" via text messages and FB wall posts compared to class lectures!

We Can Haz YouTube:

YouTube - SpartanburgDaySchool's Channel

These are all my tweets. I stand by them:

Science teacher: Twitter is creepy: "We wield phenomenal power over students. We forget this at our (and our students') peril."

Caring is creepy. So is teaching, really. Life is pretty creepy if you think about it. Maybe I should stop being offended when Michael calls me creepy. Or maybe "...this is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending." Rock on.

My first summer camp at Spartanburg Day School starts on Monday and I've lovingly titled it "Griffin Mythbusters." The setup goes something like this. The ~20 5-9th Graders that have signed up and I will start Monday by hammering out a good urban myth to examine. It might be something covered on the TV show or it might be something completely local (which is what I hope). I'm giving them the choice, though. Then we'll split up into a couple of build teams, a research team, and a supplies team. They'll rotate through the teams throughout the week as we work on models to explore the myth. By Friday, I'm hoping that we'll have successfully nailed down the best way to do a major demonstration to either confirm or bust the myth in question. We'll be live blogging (and reflective blogging) the whole thing here:

Griffin Mythbusters - Spartanburg Day School Summer 2010: "We're busting (or confirming) urban myths using science at Spartanburg Day School."

I chose to use Posterous as the platform for our site since it allows for easy collaboration, team members can post quickly via their mobiles on the go and they can send things out to their Facebook or Twitter profiles if they'd like to share what they're up to with their friends. Of course the main reason to do all of this is to plant the seed of scientific method into their heads without making them memorize a chart. And to blow things up. I'm excited. Grab the Griffin Mythbusters feed if you'd like to follow along and see how things go on our one week adventure.

Jeffrey Rosen writes in the NYTimes a well researched piece (provocatively titled) "The Web Means the End of Forgetting" on the premise that the web is contributing to our continual evolution of social norms such as forgiveness, exposure, voyeurism and discretion. Although Rosen doesn't address middle schoolers directly, I couldn't help but consider my own students. This current generation of middle and primary school students will help bake the standards for their world as we enter a new cultural experience shaped, in great part, by the web for the first time. In my opinion, the most significant part of the post comes at the end when Rosen opines about the need for a new conception of empathy:

In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.

Expressed and genuine empathy is the one quality I admire the most in young people and I hope my daughters themselves have a strong sense of empathy (I'm an INFP after all). As we enter this brave new digital-tinged world, I wonder out loud what will become of empathy? The evening news and magazine articles targeting late 30's suburban mothers typically point to a future of zero empathy because of these evolving digital norms. However, I don't think that will be the case. Instead, perhaps these new tools are helping us realize more about ourselves as creatures than we realize.

I wish this was my classroom. I taught my daughter more about rock geology today than I could ever have taught her under the glare of noble gas light in a square (or rectangle) room. We even touched on biology in a discussion of bivalves (her new necklace) and dead dragonfly's. Then as the summer afternoon thunder came, we discussed barometric pressure, the speed of sound waves, mediums and atmospheric science. As a wise science teacher once said, we can't teach science under fluorescent lights. Heartstrings pull.

Not bad at all... Can't wait to show this at our first teacher's meeting this Fall :)