Senor Parrot's Perch

Albert Einstein
by Kathleen Krull
Illustrations by Boris Kulikov

Reading books about great scientists can be both fun and inspirational and Kathleen Krull has written a very engaging biography of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was one of the greatest scientists of all time. Einstein’s greatness lay in his revolutionary ideas that sprung from his unique way of seeing the world, and from his confidence that he was right. Revolutionary ideas always face resistance. Confidence is important if you are to keep pressing on to prove your ideas.

Kathleen Krull’s book is perfect for kids in the middle grades, but even older kids would find this clearly written book a good starting point to learn more about Einstein. In fact, I think that many adults would also appreciate her short biography of Albert Einstein, as well.

Albert Einstein’s work is not easy to understand. After all, due to the complexities of his work and the pure genius that lay behind it, the name Einstein has become synonymous with brilliance and the highest level of scientific braininess. But in this neat little biography, Kathleen Krull clearly explains the most extraordinary implications of Einstein’s theories, and his thought processes in developing these. She emphasizes his personal struggles as a student and young scientist, originating in part from his poor social skills and his unwitting actions that  alienated the scientists who might have extended him some crucial support early in his career.

I liked this book a lot and I recommend it. Biographies of scientists are some of my favorite reads. I’m always fascinated by how they think and proceed with their work. Scientists just rock! I’m clearly biased, though. I married a scientist. In no small part her own fascinating research was an important aspect of her life that drew me to her and I can see how her personality is reflected in the topics that interested her and her choices of research.

Kathleen Krull, the author of Albert Einstein, has written a boatload of other biographies for kids, many of them about scientists. On the strength of this book, I want to read more of her books and I’ll probably review them too. You can read more about Kathleen Krull at her website. Also, I’d love to hear of any other favorite science writers and their books that you have.

It’s science fair time at my daughters’ school. Science rules. Science Rocks. Science fairs are the quintessential science education experience. When I heard this yesterday evening, I was pumped, ready to spring into action and make…whoops, I mean, guide, my third-grader in her science fair project. I had it already picked and designed in my head. We talked it over and agreed to make several demonstrations on electricity, creating our own electric dynamo and powering it in various ways. As a side project or maybe, after a bit of research, we’d do a solar power project and maybe something fun like a potato battery. In two minutes I had about twenty books held on reserve for her to read and glean from. Then the stunning news.

My wife burst both our bubbles when she told us that parents had complained about all the work they’d gone through in previous science fairs. It seemed that parents do all the work on these projects while their kids plug into TV. Can you believe that? So, now, it’s a group project where the kids get placed in groups, select a project from a pre-qualified list and then work together. Ugh! How am I supposed to engineer some high tech learning and bonding time with my girl that will dazzle the judges and get her a scholarship to UW-Madison? I got dem science fair blues.

Personally, I work in a fantastic team at my place of employment, for the present. It isn’t always that way. I’ve been on teams with total slackers and been stuck with all the work. In my classes, I’ve seen student teams nearly torpedoed by one or two slackers. Without controls and penalties, along with the rewards, I’ve never seem teams work well. Even families are failing as teams in these science fairs, unable to get their kids to do their share of the work and learning. Epic failure.

Well, our science books will be waiting for me at the library by Saturday morning. Me and my third-grader will just have to learn how to power the future by ourselves. Our science fair demo will be for just us, with maybe a video posted on youtube for the family. My daughter will be as pumped as I am about exploring the world of nature and science power, and we’ll have a really good time.

Increasing core knowledge is critical to reading comprehension and learning. Vicki Cobb has written a thought provoking post titled An Outside-The-Box Proposal.  She writes about bolstering students’ core knowledge by  including writing by award winning children’s non-fiction authors in the classroom curriculum. In her article she asks several questions:

• What would happen if teachers and authors worked together to share knowledge and skills?
• Can an author’s love of the subject infect students with the love of learning?
• What would happen to learning if non-fiction books replaced textbooks, moving from enrichment to the core knowledge component in the classroom?
• How would students be affected if they got to meet and talk with the authors?
• And (this of course appeals to the economist in me), how can we do this within a school’s budget?
• What would happen to the learning environment of your school if your teachers and award-winning children’s nonfiction authors collaborated in a large-scale project where everyone was involved in sharing knowledge and skills?

I like this idea. In the upper level college classes we start to read sources instead of textbooks and that’s when the real fun in learning takes place. It’s OK when we have them together, but reading the original and talking about it is much more stimulating and it gives everyone more confidence, ending up in more advanced and more agile learning.

My own daughters are drawn to reading science  books, probably in large part because their mother is a microbiologist and I just love the stuff, and we both enthusiastically encourage it. But if they weren’t well written, telling a rich story, I don’t think they’d have anywhere near the interest that they do. On trips to the library they will grab an armful of books about the ocean or physics to take home to read just for pleasure reading.

My kids like to learn. But something about their textbooks doesn’t grab their interest the same way a good, short, well-written science book does. One of the aspects of these kind of books is that they teach in a narrative, story-telling style, that puts the information into a more accessible context. Also, these books are usually teeming with fantastic illustrations and photographs -who doesn’t love any book by Nic Bishop? When written this way, the books hold kids’ interest so much better and they retain a lot more of what they have read. After finishing a good book they want to go back to the library to find another. When we’re in the  bookstore, they pull them from the shelves and ask to buy them.

So, go out and get smart. Get an armload of good science books today and start reading. I’m sure you would like Pelican’s Catch by Janet Halfmann. There’s many more out there that everyone in the family will enjoy.

I saw this singing robot at Wired magazine. Watch the video and read the subtitles closely, since much of it is in Japanese. This is Cool Science! A robot diva programmed to mimic a human singer’s facial movements breathing patterns.

Japanese engineers have taken a different tack in their robotic development, working to make more lifelike robots that will integrate well into human society. To do this, they’ve followed some interesting learning curves. I liked how they use maps of mouth movement and even integrating breathing patterns into the robot’s speech.

Did you catch the reference to using hidden Markov technology to train the robot when to breath? What they are referring to is (more…)

Here’s some Cool Science News: Google has developed a self-driving robot car and has been testing it out. Right now, it requires a human in the driver seat to take control in an emergency, but think of the possibilities!

Parents, have a teen tethered to texting? Here you go! Have an idiot driver who takes the same commute you do every day who swerves around across three lanes, only in their lane on the average? (I’ve got one on my commute – honking has never changed his behavior.) This is just the think for them, too.

Here’s the story from SmartPlanet and the video:

Those amazing little bees appear to learn how to navigate from their hive to pollen sources and then back again. In today’s Cool Science News we repeat a little article from the New York Times, Training Flights for Bees, science writer C. Claiborne Ray reports that scientists have monitored the flying patterns of young bees and determined that they appear to learn how to navigate between food sources and the hive.

Each flight is a little longer in distance, taking the 3-week old bees on more complicated trips into the wild. These result in the bees learning to navigate their environment and become fledgling food finders for the whole hive.

It’s interesting what careful observation teaches us. Using radar techniques, the scientists were able to track the bees as they learned to navigate the environment around their hive. This shows that bees have the capacity to learn complex behaviors that (more…)

I’m a sucker for books like this. Loving science, married to a scientist, I’m drawn to the lives of these wonderfully fascinating people. Whaling Season: A Year in the Life of an Arctic Whale Scientist by Peter Lourie details the life of John Craighead George, a field biolgist studying bowhead whales, and living with the Inupiaq Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska. Known as “Craig” to everyone around him, he has been studying the whales for most of his adult life, taking careful measurements of every harvested whale, and collecting lore from the Inupiaq over the many years he has lived among them, all the while he keeps his eye out for hungry polar bears as he travels the ice-packed landscape.

Author Peter Lourie has done an excellent job with this book. He portrays the day-to-day life of the scientist, showing how his work is done, the enjoyment and satisfaction he gains, the relationships he builds with the Inupiaq, and the valuable results of all his hard work.

From a family of scientists, it is really no surprise that John Craighead George would become one himself. From early on he loved the outdoors and spent many days in the wilderness. He spent some time when he was a young man working at a scientific station in Alaska, and after earning his Ph.D., he returned to work as a field scientist to study the bowhead whales that live year-round in the frigid arctic waters.

One facet of his work is to monitor the number of whales harvested by the Inupiaq. Each whale that is killed by the Inupiaq must be measured and samples of various parts are taken. Craig is careful to respect the Alaskan natives as they carry on their traditional livelihood. He has also carefully noted all their stories and descriptions of the bowhead whales, discovering the generations of knowledge that they have accumulated (more…)

 AstroPuppies in Space is an entertaining and very educational kid’s video about space exploration. After watching it, we watched it again. In fact, I wouldn’t mind popping it into the dvd player one more time if I still had it at home. I got the copy we watched from our local library. You can go here to see some trailers of the video and you’ll see what I mean.

The AstroPuppies are two intrepid sock puppets (sock puppies?) who lead you and your kids on a great journey aboard their space shuttle, beginning at Cape Canaveral and traveling on to the Moon. After that, the next stop is the Sun and then on through our solar system. Along the way the puppies ask questions and provide answers to lots of interesting questions. Actual footage of the dramatic 1969 moon landing is included, as well as NASA footage of life and work aboard a space station. 

The makers of the dvd have a nice website over at AstroPuppiesinSpace.com. They have video clips, fun activities and space links so kids can have fun learning more about space and space travel. I highly recommend heading over to AstroPuppiesinSpace.com to give your kid a head start in making fun and exciting associations with science. 

I love valuable resources like this. They stimulate our kids’ minds and make them receptive to new ideas and the wonders of our natural world. They are great ways to have conversations about what it’s like to be a scientist or an engineer, or to travel in space.  

Each spring My wife fills the deck with flowers. We enjoy their beauty until the fall frosts kill them off. But we’re not the only ones. Bees are everywhere, flying about from flower to flower in the hunt for more pollen. Hundreds of bees. We’ve never been bothered by them and they’ve never seemed bothered by us. It’s a happy coexistence.

Bees, specificly Honey Bees, are the subject of Jay Hosler’s graphic novel Clan Apis. Taking the graphic novel approach, author Jay Hosler encapsulated the life cycle of honey bees within a coming of age story and found an interesting and effective way to teach kids about the ecology of honey bees. Hosler’s approach is to imagine a hive, or clan, of honey bees endowed with human motivations, through them telling the amazing story of the Honey Bee. The illustration is excellent, lively, and entertaining. I’ve included a few panels from the book that I snagged from Hosler’s website for you to see.

It’s surprising how much actual detail and information Hosler conveys through this method, while keeping the interest in the story high. Beginning with a young larva and it’s older sister, Hosler details in clear and interesting detail the growth cycle and social lives of bees. As the young larva, Nyuki, grows into a young bee she absolutely buzzes with questions. Her older sister, Dvorah, is always there explaining to her the ways of bees and their jobs and duties.

Like a child eager to grow up, Nyuki is eager to find her own way, against the advice of her older sister, landing herself in the middle of dangerous straits. This opens the doorway (more…)

Here’s a sad commentary about our national teaching pool. KansasCity.com reports about the poor demand for teaching jobs in the Kansas City area. It’s common to see 100 applicants for each job. That’s an average though, and apparently there is quite a variation in the number of applicants depending upon the area of specialization.  Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects,  Special Education,and Foreign Languages get 10 to 50 applicants per opening. Half of the 190 open teaching positions are in those areas.

Still, isn’t that an adequate number of applicants to fill those positions with qualified teachers? Reading between the lines, you wonder just how qualified are the applicants for those STEM, special education and foreign languages positions, that the jobs should go unfilled. Yesterday I wrote about the task Don Mugan has taken on, up in North Dakota. His goal is to train the teachers that the school districts already have in how to teach the core STEM subjects. A good STEM project for our universities would be to clone Don and put a few of his clones in every school district in the country.