Many years ago, I got into the good habit of keeping a journal while my kids were growing up. Here's one of my favorite entries. My daughter, who is in the first grade, went to an art museum with her class today. She told her Mom that lots of statues were showing their private parts.... Continue Reading →
Pure water's pH is only 7.00 at a specific temperature of 25.0 °C. Students (and teachers too) hear that number so often that they forget where it comes from. And forgetting its origins makes one forget that if the temperature deviates significantly from 25.0 °C, you will get unfamiliar numbers for the pH of pure... Continue Reading →
Most readers are familiar with the term greenwashing in which certain companies use the jargon from the environmental movement on their label to boost sales. But meanwhile, with regards to packaging and/or manufacturing, they do not implement the ecological practices required to significantly cut waste and pollution. The worst form of science outreach is actually... Continue Reading →
Between 13 and 20 years ago, I made a combination of humorous and pretentious predictions. Typically, these ventures reveal one's biases more than they reveal the future. But I reprint them here because I hope you will find some of the writing full of, if nothing else, zest. 1. In the last five decades of... Continue Reading →
There are thousands of different periodic tables in existence. Aside from the usual ones that offer atomic masses and numbers, for a long time we have had those that revealed various periodic trends. In more recent years, some have focused on their time or place of discovery, on cosmic origins of the elements, and even... Continue Reading →
When I was in elementary school, my Mom would drag me to to church on most Sunday mornings for the 8 o'clock mass. Invariably, I would try to listen to what the priest said for the first five minutes. But he spoke Italian too quickly, and it was different enough from the dialect that we... Continue Reading →
For at least one year, our school did not offer a separate course-section in human sexuality for adolescents. We were told to integrate it into whatever we were teaching. Not surprisingly, this got people's backs up. Some courses and sex ed simply do not mix, it seemed. How, for example, can you integrate sexuality and... Continue Reading →
This meme appeared on a teachers' Facebook group called TeacherGoals. Predictably, within 11 hours, it gained 900 likes among its 159 000 followers . The saying is something I've heard often throughout my teaching career. Variation of approaches is at the disposal of every experienced teacher, who will use them successfully. But as is the... Continue Reading →
Ground #helium balloons with a bunch of grapes. Then remove 1 grape at a time until the buoyant & gravitational forces balance out. The balloons will be suspended in the air. Children quickly catch on and have injected a little #science into an otherwise dull wedding reception. Add copper to HCl & watch nothing happen.... Continue Reading →
