Senor Parrot's Perch

Rexburg Geeks has a nice post on math education in schools these days.� Actually its not so nice because it’s a bit scarry if your a parent and and you’re concerned with whether your kid is going to grow up to be the head and not the tail in tomorrow’s economy.

Their post is around a video from Youtube entitled “Math Education: An Inconvient Truth”. I’ve inserted the video here, too.

ZDNet Education blogger Christopher Dawson has a related post entitled Is it too late to turn around math/science ed in the US? Dawson’s comments were precipitated upon reading The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman, which calls into question the US’ ability to compete in the future against nations like China and India which emphasize engineering and technology education much more than US school systems.

Dawson goes on to consider the usual suspects: low pay for qualified math and science educators and teaching to tests that emphasize skillsets that are a mile wide and an inch deep, keeping school kids form acheiving mastery in an area of learning.

I’m inclined to think that its more the first cause than the last, and another: we don’t track students. We teach to all levels in a classroom, slowing down the swift and leaving the slow behind. I’ve never been a fan of tracking students by ability, but it seems like we need to address it as a possible solution. Perhaps we can experiment in a school district somewhere and see what happens. I’m curious what others are thinking.

My robotic future is our kids robotic today. One of my Google feeds delivered a blog link to this video of robots building cars at a BMW plant. It’s amazing to watch – like a mechanical ballet. It was maybe 20+ years ago I sat on a plane next to a newly minted grad who was headed to his new job at General Motors plant where he would program robots for their assembly line.

This plant is far more complex than the line he would start work on. In his day, there were still people working side by side with the robots. Look for people in the video. Maybe they’re on coffee break.

Thanks to Computer Finance and Dark Roasted Blend for the links.

When I was still teaching at the community college where I work, every semester I had a few students who were changing their careers, either because their jobs were obsolete, like many printing industry jobs, or that their former manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. I bet some lost jobs to robots like these.

The question for me is, what do we want to teach our kids, or even to learn for ourselves, that will prepare us for the increasing rate of change we’re facing. I’m falling on the side of emphasizing science and technology to my kids, though that isn’t all that the future holds. Nevertheless, I want my kids left with more than just a toe-hold on a future. I’d rather see them as the ones that carve it out.

Digging for Bird Dinosaurs: An Expedition to Madagascar by Nic Bishop. ISBN-10: 0395960568.

Dinosaurs, a great fascination to younger kids, can frequently become old news by the time they’re in middle school. Colorful monsters chasing one another, eating and being eaten, after a while, gets to be the same old same old. What can we do to keep the early joy of science alive?

Nic Bishop has the cure. In his Digging for Bird Dinosaurs: An Expedition to Madagascar (Scientists in the Field Series) he trails real paleontologist Cathy Forster from her university lab at the State University of New York at Stony Brook to the arid island of Madagascar, a virtual treasure island of prehistoric fossils, where she is part of a dinosaur digging expedition, and back again to New York. Her return, laden with bones and fossils that she and her teammates have found buried in the sandstone hills of Madagascar, brings more hard work and more discoveries and even more questions.

What Bishop has produced is a fine portrait of science that is accessible to kids. He captures the intensity and excitement of both the search and the methodical investigation that the scientists undertake to retrieve knowledge from their finds. He also, by following a real scientist, places the life of a scientist in real perspective as someone working with others and living a life that involves both the lab and research and life within the community, as well.

This book, illustrated with photographs taken by Bishop, is an outstanding work, depicting the life of a scientist accurately: lots of hard work, sometimes tedious and exacting, sometimes exotic and adventurous, and always driven by a thirst for insight that fuels the passion to push on for answers. Science is great fun. Learning and discovery are intensely rewarding. Creating new knowledge from pieces of facts and observations is exciting. Books such as this help kids learn this lesson early, before they let adults who’ve let themselves be intimidated by science and learning get to squelch its joys.

Ever been burned by some junky, cheap telescope or microscope? I have. There it was, in the store, a great price, and you could see the excitement in your kid’s face as he or she pulled it out of the box and set it up outside. Then after you brought it home, and you watched with anticipaiton as your kid tore open the box and set it up, it turned out to be so poorly made or the optics were so awful it was unusable?�

So how can I find something that isn’t junk that really does open a window into the universe? Now, help is here, at least for telescopes. Telescopes 101,��over at Spaceref.com,�is a great place to start learning about choosing a telescope. I stumbled on it in an add on a news site I was reading this morning.

The first thing they point out is that magnifaction is not the most important feature. Apparently this is where �newbies like myself are usually fooled.

So what is is important? It’s�Aperture (or objective). This is the fancy name for width of the lense. It can be measured in inches or centimeters and generally, the wider, the better.

Why is aperture so important? The wider the lense, the more light that the telescope gathers, and the more light it gathers, the clearer and more detailed the image you can see.

The article goes on to clearly show the differences between three types of telescopes, in diagrams and in their relative advantages and disadvantages. The diagrams are excellent.

So, with summer coming soon, get ready to read the skies. If your community is anything like mine (Madison, WI), then you’ll also have plenty of opportunities to connect with groups of amatuer astronomers, and maybe even a few pros, to get acquainted with our neighbors in the galaxy.

Last summer my family joined a group led by some graduate students from the University of Wisconsin. Out in a park, on the edge of town, armed with a telescope, they had us looking at passing satallites, planets and constellations. They even told us the stories and myths of these constellations from various cultures. The favorites were the from the North American Indians, which were often quite funny.

A few other good links:

• I bought my telescope. Now what?
• So you want to buy a telescope … �Advice for Beginners
  
• Telescopes for Beginners in Astronomy