My other passion...

  • Aside from Ruby (and the Captain, o' course!), my other passion is teaching science. I gave up teaching science about 7 years ago to take up training teachers - because, as a nation, we STINK at teaching science. Science is an activity - not a collection of facts. You can't teach science by watching YouTube videos or reading a text and then taking a quiz, and yet that's how most of my young teachers-to-be have been taught. What kind of things to I train teachers to do? Look at the photo of the planet models below. Instead of an $800 plastic model of the planets (no kidding!), I train 'em to have the students make planetary models from ping pong balls and markers for about $0.75 per child.



    I holler all the time about how horrible Standards-based education is.... I guess someone was listening. I've been asked to be part of a panel discussion on the need for Hands-On science education in schools. I'm going to be on with a JPL scientist and NASA veteran, Dr. Stephen Edberg this Wednesday at 9 am pacific time, 11 am central, noon eastern. The Explore Scientific website has links to lots of social media where the program will be streamed live, and the program will be recorded and available later if you're interested but cannot join us. You can even chat with us and ask questions. (PS: in the poster below, I'm the smiling bald guy! ^^ )


    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.

  • Teachers rock. They are, generally speaking, awesome people who really care. Examples?


    Painter was a teacher


    EjFord was a teacher


    My younger daughter (older one is a RN)


    You get the drift...

    Slingshots: making children out of adults since 2014

  • Doc&Ruby - more ammo:


    A Higgs boson walks into a Catholic church. The priest says, “Hey, your kind is not welcome here.” The Higgs boson replies, “Without me, how can you have mass?”


    A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender sets him up & the neutron asks, “What do I owe you?” The bartender says, “For you, there’s no charge.”


    Two atoms are shooting the breeze when one suddenly says, “Hey! I just lost an electron!” His buddy says, “Are you sure?” The other atom replies, “Yes, I’m positive!”

    Slingshots: making children out of adults since 2014

  • If memory serves me correctly, EjFord taught math. He may have given it up due to incidents like this:


    Weapons of Math Instruction

    At New York’s Kennedy airport today, a person later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a drafting triangle, a compass, and a calculator.

    During a press conference the Attorney General said he believed the man was a member of the notorious al-Gebra movement and the FBI intends to charge him with transporting weapons of math instruction.

    “Al-Gebra is a fearsum, transverse cult,” the Attorney General said. “As a group they seek means of average solutions by extremes, and sometimes randomly go off on tangents in search of absolute values. A member of al-Gebra may use acute alias such as ‘x’ or ‘y’ and refer to himself as an unknown identity, but we have determined that he is likely to belong to a common denominator — the axis of medieval that coordinates in every country.” The Attorney General continued, “Al-Gebra functions as a bunch of standard deviations that have been tribal since the time of Noah’s arc,” a remark that struck a chord with the media. “They are inordinate in terrorism, of that I’m abscissaly sure.

    They use degrees of irrational subtrahend to create differences and conditional inequalities among friendly, discriminant nations, leading to arguments and making us less functional and coefficient in attaining our goals. And they have the international mobility of a swarm of loci. Give them an air matrix to inflate and a plot to set it on, and they can live anywhere. If necessary, we will pursue them to the corners of this Earthly sphere.”

    He complemented this with the supplementary remark, “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles once said, ‘Never forget that there are three sides to every triangle, and sometimes two of them are normal.’ ” The Attorney General added, “As you can tell, I am not diagonally opposed to that prime concept.”

    When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush obtusely said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. Next to bisectual marriages and those polygonists in Utah, I’m concerned about the significant places of such weapons. Tomorrow I intend to go to the hill and address Congruence about this situation. I have a volume of suggestions and a finite series of common solutions for them to consider.”

    The President also warned, “These weapons of math instruction are without parallel and have the potential to decimal everything on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of an infinity Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of kindness. If we enter a phase in which all nations are integrated in all degrees of purpose, that steady state will give us slope for a better tomorrow, and we will all be infinitely better off. In such a case we could have our pi and eat it too.”

    The President further declared, “I am gratified that we have been given a sine that al-Gebra is protracting this situation with calculusing disregard. Their murky statisticians plan to inflict plane of new dimensions on every sphere of influence,” he added. “Under these circumferences, we must differentiate their roots, make our points, draw our lines, and proportionally intersect these people throughout whatever area of the domain they range. And, above all, we must make sure that they can’t get their hands on radii active materials. That is one thing you can secant you? What we need is a higher quotient of linguists embedded with our troops so that they can interpolate the gibberish that al-Gebra uses to communicate. If we had that capability, we could periodically reach new limits of success as easily as falling off a natural log. Anything short of that could lead to some real, not imaginary, complex circumstances.”

    The Secretary of Homeland Security added, “As our Great Leader would say, ‘Read my ellipse.’ The one angle that I am uncertainty of is that although al-Gebra will probability try to continuously multiply in theorem, their days are numbered as we draw the hypotenuse ever tighter around their necks.”

    Slingshots: making children out of adults since 2014

  • Gave up teaching Jr High Math and now I can afford a Slingshot and the gas to go lots of miles.