Monday, March 30, 2015

Video fodder -- NASA edition

If I get a chance, I may put together some short edits of these for Monday videos. In the meantime, serious space buffs can have some fun with these in their full-length glory.

TOWARD THE UNEXPLORED




HISTORY OF THE AIR FORCE 1954 - 1964 -- FROM MISSILE DEVELOPMENT TO SPACE




SPRINGBOARD TO SPACE -- THE ARNOLD CENTER STORY



Apollo Soyuz






Time of Apollo


Moonwalk One, ca. 1970







Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Monday, March 16, 2015

Monday Video -- Hero's steam engine

[Every Monday for the next few months, we'll be posting a short video clip here at You Do the Math. All will have at least a tenuous connection to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Teachers can use these as writing prompts or as starting points for larger lesson plans (I'll try to include some hints now and then), but the main purpose is simply to have a little fun.]


We will definitely need to revisit Hero of Alexandria.


Hero's steam engine




Monday, March 9, 2015

Monday Video -- trebuchet

[Every Monday for the next few months, we'll be posting a short video clip here at You Do the Math. All will have at least a tenuous connection to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Teachers can use these as writing prompts or as starting points for larger lesson plans (I'll try to include some hints now and then), but the main purpose is simply to have a little fun.]

Not crazy about the video but I love the technology and I can imagine a number of excellent lessons and class projects could use this as a starting point.

World record trebuchet at Warwick Castle.




Saturday, March 7, 2015

Still very much in the rough-draft stage...

...but I'm starting on a video series targeted at students who are trying to study for the SAT but are too far behind to get much out of the standard prep materials. You can check out the early efforts here.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Standardized test prep -- A circle and rhombus problem

[This is a repost but it seems to be a good fit with the test series we've been running.]

In an earlier post, we talked about "step-back problems." The idea is that, wherever possible, each problem should be associated with at least one problem that uses similar format and relies on similar concepts but which "steps up" (is more difficult) or "steps down" (is easier).

In that previous post we talked about problems where you had to find the shaded area of a circle. This problem covers similar territory but takes things up a notch.

Circle 1 and Circle 2 both have radius 2. Each passes through the center of the other. Find the area of the rhombus formed by the two points of intersection (A and B) and the centers of each circle (C1 and C2).







Solution after the break.


Monday, March 2, 2015

When discipline crosses the line

I've been meaning to write this up for a while now, but recent news about attrition (see here and here for the conversation up to now) has brought the issue back to the forefront.

When you take a close at the increasingly dominant charter model (the "no-excuses" school) and some of the highly touted success stories (such as the KIPP schools), you will soon notice how extreme some of the discipline can be.
A tiny padded room at KIPP Star Washington Heights Elementary School was a real-life nightmare for two young boys who were repeatedly detained in the tot cells, the Daily News has learned.

The students, who were enrolled in kindergarten and first grade at the highly regarded charter school, were both removed by their parents in the past two weeks after they suffered anxiety attacks as a result of their confinement.

“He was crying hysterically,” said Teneka Hall, 28, a full-time Washington Heights mom whose son, Xavier, was rushed to the hospital after he panicked and wet himself while he was holed up in the padded room. “It’s no way to treat a child.”

The school’s so-called “calm-down” room is small, about the size of a walk-in closet, said Hall, who visited it with her son at the start of the school year. It’s empty, but for a soft mat lining the floor and a single light on the ceiling.

The room’s only window is an approximately 2-foot by 3-foot panel in the single door. It’s partially covered so staffers can look inside, but children cannot. Students were placed in the room, alone, for 15 to 20 minutes at a stretch, their parents said.State law requires that children placed in a time-out setting be in a space where they can be seen and heard “continuously,” but it does not require adults to be in the room where children are stashed.

When 5-year-old Xavier was confined to the room on Dec. 3, he suffered an anxiety attack so severe that staffers called for emergency workers to take him to the hospital.

“I was scared,” said Xavier, who was taken to New York Presbyterian and released to his mom, who pulled him from the charter and enrolled him in another school immediately.
There are two points that cannot be overemphasized here.

The first is how rough, even traumatic, this and other policies of the get-tough, "no excuses" schools can be. There are kids who thrive in highly structured and disciplined environments, but there are many others who respond with varying degrees of anxiety, depression and/or anger. Then, to add injury to injury, this psychological toll is matched with an educational one. These kids are denied instruction through suspensions then forced out and sent to other generally underfunded schools, often in the middle of the year, a practice which maximizes the disruption and minimizes the chance to learn.

The second is the way the incentive system of the reform movement encourages these often brutal policies. They are an extraordinarily effective way of getting rid of kids whom you can't handle or who put a drain on you resources. The result is that the very thing that traumatizes these children produces promotions for administrators and funding increases for their schools.

Monday Video -- Max Maven predicts the future

[Every Monday for the next few months, we'll be posting a short video clip here at You Do the Math. All will have at least a tenuous connection to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Teachers can use these as writing prompts or as starting points for larger lesson plans (I'll try to include some hints now and then), but the main purpose is simply to have a little fun.]

In 1987, an otherwise forgettable Dick Clark production featured a number of tricks from mentalist Max Maven. This piece of interactive magic from the show makes for an interesting classroom exercise (though I might skip the first fifteen second -- somethings don't age well). I would print out copies so that the kids could each follow along at their desks. After running the video and having all of the kids play along, I would diagram out all the permutations and show how each path leads to the red circle.