Monday, April 4, 2011

Interesting New Science Site

A tweet by Scienceman Joe Martha led me to Science Girl's Scientific Explorer blog yesterday. Science Girl states on the site, "My goal is to bring you the most up-to-date ideas in science in an understandable format. I start big with my first series: The Universe. Have fun exploring!"

Yesterday's posting, The Northern Lights, was chock full of gorgeous photos and illustrations of auroras. Many of the other postings are pretty much text only, such as part of Very Hot, Very Cold - Superfluids Demonstrate the Strangeness of Atoms shown at right, but it appears Science Girl is learning to use more graphics and video as she warms to her task. I just had time to scratch the surface of the site and skim parts of several postings, but it looks like it's going to be another good science site for teachers, parents, and students.

Autism Curriculum

A CEC SmartBrief last Friday had a link to a T.H.E. Journal article, CARD Launches Grant Program To Develop Autism Curriculum. The report points readers to The Center for Autism and Related Disorders' Skills 4 America and Card Skills pages. According to T.H.E. Journal, the organization "is offering one-year scholarships to Skills, a Web-based tool for parents and educators to develop lesson plans and track students' progress in eight sectors of child development."

That's not a lot of information about the site or program, but frankly, it's as far as I wanted to go late on a Sunday afternoon after tilling up a good bit of our garden today.

Odds 'n' Ends

Valerie Strauss's The illogic of paying teachers based on test scores is a good read. She also hosts Peggy Robertson's open letter to "President Obama, Mr. Duncan and The Billionaires’ Club," A teacher explains why she is offended, about standardized testing and the effects of poverty on student learning. While Robertson covers a lot of good ground in her letter, I especially appreciated one paragraph:

I can tell you my students’ strengths, their needs and their attempts without looking at the results of a standardized test. I evaluate my students during the school day, at home and in my sleep. I assess them as they read, write, talk, move and breathe. Educator Stephen Krashen states, “The repeated judgments of professionals who are with children every day is more valid than a test created by distant strangers.”

Peggy blogs at Peg with a Pen.

Winnie Hu's Paterson Teacher Suspended Over a Post on Facebook on The New York Times reminds us to be careful of what we post online. What the suspended teacher apparently wrote on Facebook pales in comparison with Mr. Teachbad's recent Pure Rant. Of course, there's an exception to every rule, as is hilariously illustrated by Mr. Teachbad's Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement. Parts of many of Mr. Teachbad's posting are unquotable here, as they include words we sometimes think or utter when we hit our thumb with a hammer, but here's a G-rated sample of his latest (fictitious) effort, Teacher Loses It.

Circle time was followed by the Morning Reading Block. As high stakes state tests approach, the Morning Reading Block has gradually been extended to 800 minutes per day. The Afternoon Math Block now stands at 650 minutes. (Lunch, recess, music, art, and history are held every fifth Wednesday from 11:19 until 11:27am.)

The story will probably go viral in email forwards sent out by conservatives offended by Teachbad's humor and too dimwitted to figure out it was fiction. But it sure illustrates what we face in the classroom sometimes.

Locally, the Terre Haute Tribune-Star had a good column and editorial about education yesterday. After reading Mike Lunsford's A Lesson Plan for Public Schools, you'd think he's a teacher. And he is, so probably no one in the majority party in Indianapolis will take much notice of his sound, common sense proposals for improving education in Indiana.

The Tribune-Star didn't pull any punches in chastising Governor Daniels and the rest of the school "reform" crowd in Indy for pushing for the largest school voucher program in the nation. Editor Max Jones points out in Poor Strategy for Reform that the proposed bill is probably unconstitutional, as it allows public funds to support religious schools. He winds up by pointing out that "with state resources dwindling, the diversion of taxpayer money to coffers of private schools is not only misguided, it’s irresponsible."

This is a short post for a Monday, but as I said, I've been gardening instead of writing. And of course, I'm also resting up before watching tonight's NCAA championship game. Go Bulldogs!

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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

NSF Video Lessons

I hadn't looked in at the National Science Foundation's Science Nation site since they began a new season in January. They've already added eleven new "issues" that each include a short video, text of the video presented in an attractive format, and related materials and sites. Their most recent offering, Lord of the Tree Rings, runs a bit less than three minutes, but packs a lot of interesting information into that time. All videos are also available for download in high quality Quicktime format, so teachers may project them if desired. I can see teachers using these videos in the classroom for introductions to lessons or simply as fillers for odd moments when things wind up early.

From Lord of the Tree Rings:

Tree rings may also help solve some of history's mysteries. For example, Stahle believes drought may have played a part in the New World's "Lost Colony" of Roanoke. "This is the drought of 1587, '88, and '89. That was the most severe drought of 800 years in this part of the United States, and 1587 was a particularly significant year because Virginia Dare, the first English baby born in the New World, and the other colonists at the Roanoke colony in North Carolina, were last seen in the summer of 1587," says Stahle, pointing to some extremely skinny rings on a piece of bald cypress from Blackwater River, Virginia.

Rhee the Reformer

Sabrina Stevens Shupe didn't have many words to add to what "a ton of smart people have already written...about testing 'irregularities' in the DC Public Schools under then-chancellor Michelle Rhee." She did, however, create the biting video at left and included it in her Rhee the Reformer: A Cautionary Tale posting on her Failing Schools blog. On her YouTube page, she describes the video as "A Seuss-style interpretation of Michelle Rhee's 'Erase to the Top' scandal."

Endeavour Launch Pushed Back to April 29

A potential traffic jam at the International Space Station has forced NASA to push the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour back to April 29. Originally targeted for an April 19 launch, Mission STS-134 would have conflicted with a Russian Progress supply vehicle that was scheduled to launch April 27 and arrive at the station April 29.

• NASA: NASA Retargets Space Shuttle Endeavour's Launch For April 29
• Space.com: NASA Delays Final Launch of Shuttle Endeavour to Avoid Space Traffic Jam

Quote of the Day

Diane Ravitch, writing in The Texas Miracle Revisited on her Bridging Differences blog on Education Week, wrote:

The singular feature of education reform in the 21st century is a willing suspension of disbelief.

Prince George's County Schools Ordered to Pay $5.9 Million to Foreign Recruited Teachers

Already facing a $155 million budget shortfall, the Prince George’s County Schools were ordered by the Labor Department to pay "more than 1,000 teachers recruited from foreign countries...$5.9 million in back wages and penalties." Robert Samuels relates in Federal investigation: Prince George’s owes foreign teachers millions:

School officials recruited the foreign instructors for classes such as math and science that were hard to fill but then required that the teachers cover thousands of dollars in expenses related to getting temporary work visas — expenses that, Labor Department officials said, should have been covered by the system. That violated laws requiring that U.S. and foreign teachers be compensated equally.

Prince George’s Superintendent William R. Hite, Jr. said that he plans to appeal the findings.

Tips for Potential Online Instructors

eSchoolNews Managing Editor Laura Devaney shares some good tips from the 2011 Online Teacher of the Year, Kristin Kipp, for those who may be venturing into teaching an online course for the first time. In "Teacher cheerleaders" make online learning successful, Devaney notes that Kipp's school, the 21st Century Virtual Academy in Jefferson County, Colorado, enrolls many students who are also taking some classes at their local high school and "are still in "school mode" for their online courses. The Academy also requires new students to "take a course introducing them to the principles of online learning, including time management and how to use virtual calendars and a course management system."

Kipp emphasizes communication and positive reinforcement (She didn't call it that.) with her online students. Devaney writes that Kipp "uses a handful of key strategies to remain in communication with her online students and to ensure that they are engaged and successful in their online courses, including requiring students to use message boards and participate in group discussions with a set number of required postings. Kipp's list of key strategies includes:

• Establish a relationship
• Stay in contact
• Offer consistent praise
• Set a schedule
• Become a teacher cheerleader
• Pay attention to student-to-teacher ratio
• Interaction, interaction, interaction

I really like this article as it focuses on communication and reinforcement of online students. I got to design and teach an online course for teachers who wanted to learn how to use the Moodle Course Management System a few years ago. I found that my "teacher-students" really appreciated my personalized comments on their Moodle course creations.

I'll also add that it takes a lot of time to create such a course. I had a good text (print and online) to use, in addition to a lot of "How-to's" I'd written over about a year to help construct the class. It really helps if you can beta test a course with a small group to shake out any bugs in your planned lessons and task analysis. I also had a giant advantage in having an experienced online instructor at Ivy Tech in Terre Haute go over my course before we even beta tested it. But, while constructing and teaching the online course, I was regularly working 80 hour weeks to stay up with three sections of the class!

The images at left and right (click on image for larger view) are the final versions of the front page and the "sandbox" for a course I called Basic Moodle for Teachers. The front page organized the course lessons and provided links to materials, while the sandbox was a play area for the students to try out their new skills. I erased and restored the sandbox to its original version periodically.

If you're interested in playing around with Moodle on your own, I'd recommend going to the Moodle Download page and getting one of the free MAMP or XAMP packages. Setup and installation on your own computer is really easy.

The NPR Radio by Livio

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Debate on Online K-12 Classes

Trip Gabriel has an excellent article on The New York Times about whether online classes, mainly for high school students, are a good idea or a sneaky way to boost graduation rates or funnel public money to for-profit virtual schools. In More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality , Gabriel focuses on in Memphis where all high school students are required to take one online class to graduate. He winds up his piece with some eye-popping information about the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Idaho accepting "$50,000 in contributions from online education companies," one of which "received $12.8 million from Idaho last year."

Speaking of Idaho, Republican lawmakers there are poised to push through "emergency clauses onto bills that already cleared the 2011 Idaho Legislature" that would "prevent a planned referendum campaign from delaying implementation of the laws until after the November 2012 election." The laws in question are the creation of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the state, Tom Luna. They would "phase out tenure for teachers; restrict collective bargaining; introduce merit pay; and shift money in the public schools' budget to fund classroom technology upgrades and the pay-for-performance plan."

Jessie L. Bonner writes in Idaho Lawmakers Move Bills to Prevent Ed "Reform" Delay [my quotes around reform] that:

A group of parents and representatives from the statewide teachers union have taken steps to launch a referendum on the contentious new laws, which have dominated the 2011 session and triggered student and teacher protests at the Idaho Capitol. The group, which would need to collect 47,432 signatures from Idaho voters within 60 days after the end of the legislative session, is expected to decide in April whether to proceed with the repeal campaign.

And if a referendum petition is filed, Idaho statute says the laws targeted would not take effect until after a public vote.

Night Sky

Some pretty clouds illuminated by a waxing crescent moon caught my attention last evening. It was impressive enough to make me grab my tripod and camera and try to capture the view. I didn't do it justice, but I still got it recorded digitally.

For photography buffs, I messed around with some fairly high f/stops before fully opening up the lens to f/5.6 (one of the drawbacks of my favorite lens, a Canon EF-S 17-85mm). The exposure time was ten seconds.

Having tried my best to record the lovely evening sky, I turned my camera up at about a 70^o angle to try and get an image of the constellation Orion. The lens was still wide open, and I tried exposure times of ten to twenty-five seconds. Interestingly, the longest exposures recorded too many faint stars, making it hard to pick out the main stars of the constellation (or the main part of it). I ended up going with the fifteen second exposure shown at left. While a larger image (Click on the image to open a larger version in a new window or tab.) clearly shows Orion, I had to enhance the small image at left in Photoshop a bit to get the four corners and the sword of the constellation to show.

It's interesting to note the red tinge to Betelgeuse, the upper left star in Orion. Betelgeuse is a variable red giant "whose apparent magnitude varies between 0.2 and 1.2, the widest range of any first magnitude star" according to Wikipedia. While Rigel (lower right corner) is termed a "blue supergiant," it actually has only a slight bluish tinge in the photo.

Orion is a great constellation to get kids interested in astronomy. It has two of the brightest stars in the winter and spring sky, along with the Orion Nebula. On warm spring nights such as last night, Orion is easy to pick out in the night sky. Stories of how far away Betelgeuse is (about 640 light-years is the current estimate), and whether it might have already exploded in a supernova, but the light telling the tale hasn't reached us yet, tend to grab students' interest.

My Camera Gear

Two years ago I finally got back to an SLR camera. After some bad experiences with Nikon "service," I "went home" to Canon for my digital SLR. I still have a 30+ year-old Canon AE-1 SLR in good working order that I bought new when I got out of professional photography. As a wedding photographer in the 70's, I lugged around a Mamiya RB-67 and various backup cameras, so the bulk of today's SLRs doesn't bother me much.

Canon Digital Rebel XSi 12MP Digital SLR Camera	Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 Image Stabilized USM SLR Lens for EOS Digital SLR's	SLIK PRO 700DX Professional Tripod with Panhead (615-315)

Like most folks, I made the mistake of purchasing my XSi with the standard 18-55mm lens. From that experience, I would recommend folks buy a camera body and a better lens separately than the disappointing kit lens supplied by Canon. I use my 17-85 lens as my standard, walking around lens. It's a good bit heavier than the kit lens, but has better range and image quality. It's not a professional quality lens, but is definitely a step up from the standard zoom lens.

And of course, my XSi is now a bit behind the times. When I bought it, the Canon EOS Rebel T1i was already available, but I saved a hundred bucks by buying a bit behind the bleeding edge. The latest and greatest in the series now is the T2i. And Canon has come out with a similar lens to mine, albeit an f/stop faster (and $300 more) in the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM UD Wide Angle Zoom Lens for Canon Digital SLR Cameras. Of course, if you really want to jump in with a professional grade SLR, there's always the Canon D series, such as the 7D.

If you're camera shopping, be sure to check out whatever brand and model you're interested in on both Buy.com and Amazon. Both have some incredible camera deals. Also, be aware that their prices fluctuate almost daily!

Odds 'n' Ends

You'll have to excuse my getting so far off the education track today. You see, I can find lots of education related columns and articles, but after a while, they all read the same. Just down the road a bit at the Northeast Sullivan Schools, they plan to lay off five or six elementary teachers and raise elementary class sizes to 30 or more. Whether it's six at Northeast or hundreds in Indianapolis Public Schools and Cleveland, or thousands in Detroit and Los Angeles, the story is the same. Federal stimulus funds are running out. States are taking in less money and cutting schools along with lots of other essential services.

Then enter the "reformer" state supers like Idaho's Tom Luna or our own resident non-listener, Tony Bennett, and the radical school "reforms" touted by Republican governors, all the while making snide remarks about experienced teachers who've dedicated their lives to improving the lives of the children they teach. It isn't pretty. So...sometimes I just stage my own little personal revolt and write about the evening sky or my favorite constellation.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Teachers' Domain

The Teachers' Domain April Newsletter surprised me with its diversity of postings. It featured Frozen Frogs, "a video adapted from NOVA scienceNOW that shows how the common wood frog survives cold winters." But the first link on their Poetry Everywhere section, Selected Haiku by Issa, had "former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass reading a translation of haiku by the 18th century Japanese poet, Kubayashi Issa" and me laughing.

Other items of interest highlighted in the newsletter include:

• The documentary film, Freedom Riders, tells the powerful story of a courageous band of civil rights activists called "Freedom Riders" which took brave and decided actions to dismantle the structures of discrimination through nonviolence.
• Anatomy of a Tsunami examines how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was triggered, how its waves traveled and what happened on impact.  
• Nuclear Reaction: Meltdown (Frontline) describes the events that led to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.
• I'm Watching You 24/7 studies the characteristics of totalitarianism, using contemporary North Korea as a focal point.

While I've mentioned Teachers' Domain on Educators' News a number of times, it's one of those excellent, free, teacher resource sites that bears repeating.

PBS Teachers

Since I'm apparently shilling for resource sites today, let me add a few words about an upcoming PBS Special I read about in the weekly PBS Teachers newsletter. The newsletter comes as a part of the free package, I think, when one becomes a member of PBS Teachers. It's chock full of links to engaging resources across quite a few subject areas.

EARTH: The Operators' Manual will premiere on PBS on Sunday, April 10, 2011. From the promo page and the embedded trailer there (also captured the great shot at left from the trailer):

Host Richard Alley takes viewers to locations around our planet to see the evidence for themselves. For proof of climate change, we explore massive glaciers in New Zealand whose advances and retreats during the Ice Ages are tied to changing levels of carbon dioxide. We go to the National Ice Core Lab in Denver, Colorado, where records of past temperatures and atmospheric composition are unlocked from 400,000 year old ice. To put numbers on sustainable energy options, locations include the sunniest place in the world, the dunes near Yuma, AZ where solar power could offer 80% of Earth's current use, and the hot springs and geysers of New Zealand, sacred to the native Maori but which now power geothermal generating stations. "Of course, we share the best climate science, but we know today's audiences want to see solutions, not just restatements of the problems..." says writer/director Geoff Haines-Stiles (Carl Sagan's Emmy-winning COSMOS series, Creation of the Universe.)

The host, Richard Alley, points out at the end of the trailer, "And by the way, it's operators', plural. We're all in this together."

For a Quick Grin (for "Linux and Mac gurus")

Roy Grimes, a tech specialist for the Orleans Community School Corporation in Indiana, posted the following funny message this morning on the HECC listserv:

(This one is for all you Linux and Apple gurus)

One of Microsoft's finest technicians was drafted and sent to boot camp. At the rifle range, he was given some instruction, a rifle, and bullets. He fired several shots at the target. The report came from the target area that all attempts had completely missed the target.

The technician looked at his rifle, and then at the target. He looked at the rifle again, and then at the target again. He put his finger over the end of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger with his other hand. The end of his finger was blown off, whereupon he yelled toward the target area, "It's leaving here just fine, the trouble must be at your end!"

Thanks, Roy.

Oregon Workshop

An email yesterday from Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Executive Director Chris Stephenson told of a November tech conference with an emphasis on women in technology. Rather than try to do my own summary, let me just share Chris's message with appropriate links.

Applications Open for CSTA/ABI Equity Conference Scholarships

Applications are now being accepted for the 2011 K-12 Computing Teachers Workshop. The workshop will be held at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) in Portland, Oregon on November 11-12, 2011. The K-12 workshop is hosted in Partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) and will be the third K-12 teachers workshop held at the GHC. We hope that this year’s theme “Extending Our Reach: New Tools for Engaging all Students” will provide for a fun and engaging workshop.

Workshop agenda: http://gracehopper.org/2011/k-12-computing-teachers-workshop/agenda/.

Space is limited for the workshop. Teachers who wish to participate in the workshop and apply for a scholarship to support their travel costs must submit an application. The deadline to apply is May 1, 2011. All applicants will be notified on June 15, 2011.

Registration for the workshop is $40 and includes Grace Hopper Conference activities. Registration costs will be waived for teachers who are awarded a scholarship to help support their travel costs. Scholarship awards (to be reimbursed after the conference) include shared hotel for 2 nights, airfare, ground transportation, mileage or gas up to the amount of the travel award. Participants who live less than 1 hour from the conference hotel will not receive hotel accommodations as part of their scholarship and are not eligible to be reimbursed for hotel expenses.

Submit your application: http://www.gracehopper.org/2011/forms/K12/index.php

About Those Property Tax Caps

David A. Lieb and Hasan Dudar begin Tax caps creating new hurdles for towns, schools:

First, the state of Indiana put a limit on how much money Mark Burkhart and his colleagues in the state's school districts could raise with local taxes. Then the state informed them all they'd be getting a smaller check from the state.

Now the chief financial officer for the Muncie schools, with more than a dozen buildings and 8,000 students, has less money to spend and a limited ability to raise more.

Lieb and Dudar show the quandary Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' property tax cap program (and now, part of the state constitution) has caused communities in Indiana and its public schools. Sadly, the writers let Daniels off the hook for his fiscally conservative road map that is wrecking the state, but may get him noticed for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. They do, however, go on to show how tax caps, primarily engineered by Republican governors around the country, are causing all sorts of problems.

I realize that Mitch Daniels hates teachers and public schools, but his tax caps have made it so our poor county can't even fix the roads!

Other Interesting Stuff

Mr. Teachbad gives Roxanna Elden's new book, See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, high marks in his review, Roxanna Elden: Your Friend and Mine. He writes:

There is no edu-babble, TFA talking points, debates about the latest research on word walls, or any other crap like that. It is smart, funny, plain-spoken advice about how to make you saner and more effective at your job by somebody who has been thinking and working on this for a long time. How to deal with parents, kids, administrators…it’s all there.

eSchoolNews editor Dennis Pierce has an excellent editorial today, Frenemy of the people. He relates that the "Education Department’s first-ever conference on strengthening school labor-management relations in February" got him thinking about the current relationship between the Obama/Duncan Administration and school leaders and teachers' unions. He writes about "the seemingly schizophrenic nature of Obama administration policy" that has produced " an undercurrent of distrust in Obama administration officials who have been guilty of practicing the 'ABCs' [accuse, blame, criticize] themselves" among school board members, administrators, and teachers. A gems from the piece:

Teachers’ unions and district administrators both are feeling the heat from parents who want to see better results from their schools. They’re also under siege from a new army of education reformers—people such as filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates—who have never worked in a school system before but are convinced they know what’s wrong with U.S. public education.

As educators and administrators band together in the face of opposition, it isn’t just vocal school reformers they need to worry about … but policies that undermine the administration’s own stated objectives as well.

More in his field, Pierce notes that "ed-tech advocates...are deeply disappointed with the administration’s plan to eliminate the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program," as "this plan would take away the only federal program dedicated to investing in technology and training for K-12 educators."

Walt Gardner takes a look at the legalities of current voucher programs in Back-Door Approach to Funding Religious Schools. If you're hoping your state will rule school vouchers an unconstitutional blurring of the line between church and state, Walt explores the legal reasons why that may not happen.

Deborah Meier wonders in today's People vs. Dollars on the Bridging Differences blog, "Maybe Madison, Wisconsin, is the beginning of a new cycle." She also asks some hard questions about who is driving education "reform" today and what their end purpose is.

What will serve as a balancing force in the days and years ahead? What prevents the richest 1 percent from spending half their money on politics, while still having more left than the other 99 percent together?

And what will stop them from using the newly privatized school chains they are busily packaging to their self-interest, not that of the families of their students? What is unique about such schools is that they are not, by law, required to be public in nature. They're not in any way governed by either their own public (parents, students, teachers, or neighbors)...They are accountable more or less only for test scores and graduation rates...

She adds:

Had all the current crowd of billionaire de-formers really wanted a more innovative and flexible school system, they'd have jumped on board long ago. But they didn't. They were either too impatient or too eager for direct power and abandoned these early efforts to democratize schooling in favor of privatizing it.

Trip Gabriel's Bloggers Challenge President on Standardized Testing is a rehash of last week's Presidential gaff on standardized testing and some postings on Education Week. I guess the piece keeps the subject somewhat in the public eye, but there's nothing new in it.

Hey! I planted broccoli yesterday!

Okay, you say, "But where's the educational relevance to this section?"

Ah, but there is something slightly related to teaching here: If you can tough it out to retirement, there is life after teaching!

I wrote on Senior Gardening yesterday:

With the sun sinking in the west this evening, the wind finally calmed a bit. We've had 20-40 MPH winds for days that have made outdoor work unpleasant at best, despite some really warm temperatures.

With the lull in the wind, I got out and transplanted some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage plants into the narrow raised bed I built last summer. I didn't till the bed this spring, as it had been thoroughly tilled last fall. A light raking a few days ago had it planting ready.

If you've visited Senior Gardening, you know that I'm still teaching in a way. While the site contains a blog and feature stories about many of my gardening activities around the year, I also try to impart some of what I've learned from a lifetime of gardening. And while researching postings to my blog or feature articles, or answering gardening questions, I'm staying sharp as a lifelong learner.

Transplanting broccoli and other brassicas (cole crops) in Indiana on April 6 really isn't all that amazing. I planted our brassicas on April 7 the previous two years with excellent results. Lots of folks in our hardiness zone (5) are already getting their gardens in. Broccoli can handle a little frost. But I do need to get out tomorrow and get some blood meal around it. Several years ago I didn't, and the deer ate it off to the ground! I learned something from that experience (beyond remembering to apply blood meal), as most of the plants came back from the roots and still produced heads of broccoli, although much later and smaller than usual.

And while I do get questions and comments from readers, they never have to ask to go to the restroom, get in fights in the hall, forget their lunch money...

Friday, April 8, 2011

Black Out as NYC Schools Chancellor

Cathleen Black Is Out as City Schools Chancellor by Elissa Gootman and Michael Barbaro relates that after just three months on the job, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has asked Cathie Black to step down as schools chancellor. Jacob Bernstein adds a bit of commentary to the story in The Education of Cathie Black, as does Valerie Strauss in What Cathie Black’s resignation means for school reform.

A Huge Star Detonation in Deep Space

NASA is marshalling its resources "to study one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts yet observed." On March 28, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope discovered the source of an explosion in the constellation Draco. It appears that a star was sucked into the black hole at the center of its galaxy, releasing incredible radiation in the process. Andrew Fruchter at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore commented, "We know of objects in our own galaxy that can produce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing. This is truly extraordinary."

Dozens of telescopes, including NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, have turned to study the source of the explosion. Designated GRB 110328A, the source has repeatedly flared - more than five times since April 3. While astronomers have previously detected stars disrupted by supermassive black holes, "none have shown the X-ray brightness and variability seen in GRB 110328A."

• NASA: NASA Telescopes Join Forces To Observe Unprecedented Explosion
• Space.com: Powerful Space Explosion May Herald Star's Death By Black Hole

Odds 'n' Ends

I'd really planned to take today off, but Mayor Bloomberg booted Cathie Black yesterday, so I had to get something up. So you don't feel cheated for your visit, here are a couple of articles that may be of interest. Erik W. Robelen tells of families from two high-poverty public schools getting into some hands-on science in Science-Rich Institutions Provide Venues for Exploration. Sean Cavanagh's New Ohio, Wisconsin, Labor Laws Besieged (requires paid subscription) should cheer those who've had enough of the radical Republican governors' school "reform" plans.

With a forecast and current conditions nothing short of glorious for the next ten days, I'm going to be busy getting some of our hardier transplants into the ground over the next week. I hope your start to the weekend is as nice as ours.

Have a great weekend!

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