Monday, October 27, 2008

A Day Off & A New Camera

Since my old Coolpix 4300 made a quick trip down our stairs, I needed a new, reliable digital camera. Rather than move up the Nikon line, I chose a relatively inexpensive point and shoot model, the Nikon Coolpix P60. I took a day off last Wednesday and drove around the countryside snapping pictures of farmers combining fields (and other stuff) to get better acquainted with the new camera. Over the weekend I got busy and wrote up my impressions of the P60 in A Day Off & A New Camera.

Asteroid Belts in Nearby Solar System

"New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope indicate that the nearest planetary system to our own has two asteroid belts," is the lead of a JPL press release today. Whitney Clavin reports of the new find by the Spitzer Space Telescope in Closest Planetary System Hosts Two Asteroid Belts. "Previously, astronomers had uncovered evidence for two possible planets in the system, and for a broad, outer ring of icy comets similar to our own Kuiper Belt. Now, Spitzer has discovered that the system also has dual asteroid belts." The star at the center of the nearby system is Epsilon Eridani.

NASA diagram comparing the Epsilon Eridani system to our own solar system.

Another View on American Math & Science Scores

There are a lot of times that I disagree with columnist Jay Mathews, but I think he's pretty accurate about our schools in America in a column that appeared in the Sunday Boston Globe, Grade change: Students abroad, it turns out, are not outperforming Americans.

For those who look carefully at the performance of our schools, the real problem is not that the United States is falling behind, or that the entire system is failing. It is the sorry shape of the bottom 30 percent of US schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that these children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children. But most low-income schools in the United States are simply bad.

Mathews usually writes for The Washington Post, but the excerpt above in the Globe "adapted from an article in the Spring 2008 issue of the Wilson Quarterly."

Palin on Special Ed

One of the problems with education is that everyone is an expert on schools because everyone has gone to school. This week, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin jumped in on education with one of those sound bites that sounds good in a thirty second newscast, but is educationally bankrupt. Palin advocated school choice (vouchers?) for all special education students. While private settings are critical for the success of some highly impacted students with special needs, Palin ignores her party's persistent intransigence at fully funding the federal special education law. Palin and McCain need to stop trying to weaken public schools with voucher programs and first give special educators in public schools a fair chance by fully funding special education at the federal level.

In Palin Promises Choice for Disabled Students, writer Kate Zernike reminds readers:

The federal special-education law required districts to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to all students with disabilities, who at the time the law was enacted were often declared “ineducable” or were essentially warehoused. The federal government was eventually to pay 40 percent of the cost, but its share hovered in the single digits for years and is now at about 17 percent, with the bulk assumed by state and local governments.

If you think I'm being a little hard on Palin, take a look at Matt Taibbi's rant, Mad Dog Palin, in the October 2, 2008, issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. He writes in part, "Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove." He goes on, and I'd love to quote the whole paragraph, but Mad Dog Matt slips into some vocabulary that I've chosen not to ever use on Educators' News.

More Electives in Some Schools

New York Times writer Winnie Hu reports a resurgence of interesting, new elective courses in some affluent school districts. In High Schools Add Electives to Cultivate Interests, Hu tells about elective jewelry, metalsmithing, history of rock 'n roll, cardio fitness, advanced Java programming, Mandarin, global economics, 3-D animation, and more in some New York high schools. Hu tells of one parent who saw a 10-minute overview at an open house of the rock ’n’ roll class her daughter is taking. The parent remarked that she and her husband “were both panting to stay” for the class.

First Frost

We almost certainly will get a killing frost this week. It was supposed to frost this morning, but we appear to have gotten a one day reprieve. The current weather prediction is for freezing temperatures for the next two or three mornings. One of my jobs yesterday was to cover our cold frame and haul it to the garden to protect some lettuce we're hoping to have on Thanksgiving!

If you're interested in some rough plans for such a cold frame, they're posted for download on the mathdittos2.com Freebies page.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Election Day (for me)

Since I had to go into town today anyway, I stopped by the Sullivan County Courthouse to check out early voting. Our courthouse (and early voting site) is in the town square in the county seat of Sullivan, Indiana. Like many other small towns, the Sullivan County Courthouse is a gracefully aging beauty with marble floors and stairs and a stained glass window at the top of the atrium.

The hardest part of the early voting procedure was climbing the stairs to the third floor. I simply had to display my driver's license, sign a couple of forms swearing under penalty of law that I was me, and step into the voting booth. Here in Indiana, early voting runs through November 3, the day before the general election. If your state has early voting, you can find the early voting site(s) here.

On my way home, I stopped for gas. I was reminded of how gas prices dropped four years ago before the election. It's curious how the price always seems to drop a bit just before a presidential election.

While we're sorta talking politics again today, Karen Meyer of WLS, Chicago, takes a look a the candidates positions and records on special education in Candidates' positions on disability issues.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Halloween Sky Show

Dr. Tony Phillip reminds us to take a look at the night sky while out with our kids Trick or Treating in Halloween Sky Show. He writes, "On October 31^st, the crescent Moon will sneak up on Venus for a close encounter of startling beauty...best seen just after sunset..." The Halloween display, according to Dr. Phillips, begins a month of fabulous night displays of the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter in close proximity.

While Dr. Phillips provides some excellent sky maps with his Science@NASA postings, let me again remind readers that the free Stellarium application is a great tool for planning where and when to look for things in the night sky.

From ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily has a couple of somewhat related space postings in NASA's Phoenix Mission Faces Survival Challenges and NASA Orbiter Reveals Details Of A Wetter Mars. The first tells of the measures the Phoenix mission is taking to extend the usefulness of the Phoenix Mars Lander. The second tells of a discovery that "extends the time range for liquid water on Mars, and the places where it might have supported life."

K-12 Distance Ed Report

Laura Devaney has a good, detailed overview in eSchool News of a recent report on K-12 distance and virtual learning in Report assesses K-12 online learning.

College Tuition and the Election

Amid all the stories about possible increases in college tuition, the New York Times' Patrick Healy has a related story, Candidates’ Positions on Student Loans Reflect Experience and Market Views. Healy quotes Thomas G. Mortenson, a longtime independent analyst of student financial aid programs, with what will probably be the true reality of the issue, “Whoever wins will not have any money to do anything new.”

A Lesson from Antarctica

AP writer, Karen Matthews, has a great story about kids having a distance ed lesson from a teacher in Antarctica in Shivering teacher tells class about climate change. Students asked science teacher Shakira Petit questions, such as, "What causes shapes and colors in an iceberg?" "How do you judge the age of the ice?" and "How thick is the ice you're standing on?" Petit is spending two months in Antarctica to conduct research with The Offshore New Harbor Project in Antarctica.

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