| The Forces Playlist of Phyz | ||
| SONG | ARTIST | YEAR |
| Carry That Weight | The Beatles | 1969 |
| First Push | DeVotcKa | 2005 |
| Force of Nature (Bonus Track) | Lenka | 2008 |
| Force Ten | Rush | 1987 |
| Forces ... Darling (Featuring Earl Zinger) | Koop | 2006 |
| Friction | Imagine Dragons | 2014 |
| Friction | Morcheeba | 1998 |
| Friction | Shame | 2018 |
| Friction | Tauk | 2014 |
| Friction | Television | 1977 |
| The Girl With the Weight of the World in Her Hands | Indigo Girls | 1990 |
| Grace In Gravity | The Story | 1991 |
| Gravity | Against The Current | 2015 |
| Gravity | Daughtry | 2018 |
| Gravity | Jesse Cook | 2005 |
| Gravity | John Mayer | 2006 |
| Gravity | A Perfect Circle | 2003 |
| Gravity | Sara Bareilles | 2008 |
| Gravity | With Confidence | 2017 |
| Gravity (feat. JMR) | Jai Wolf | 2016 |
| Gravity (Stripped) | Wage War | 2017 |
| Please Push No More | Gary Numan | 1980 |
| Pull | Blind Melon | 1996 |
| Pull | Microwave | 2019 |
| Pull Shapes | The Pipettes | 2007 |
| Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) | Squeeze | 1980 |
| Push | Matchbox Twenty | 1996 |
| Push | Sarah McLachlan | 2003 |
| Push on for the Dawn | Corinne Bailey Rae | 2016 |
| Stop Draggin' My Heart Around | Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers | 1981 |
| Tension Is A Passing Note | Sixpence None The Richer | 2002 |
| Weightless | Adam French | 2017 |
| Weightless | Blondfire | 2004 |
| Weightless | Brina Eno and Daniel Lanois | 1989 |
| Weightless | Chris Burkich | 2016 |
| Weightless | City And Colour | 2011 |
| Weightless | Third Eye Blind | 2016 |
| Weightless | Washed Out | 2013 |
| Weightless | 311 | 2011 |
| Weightless (feat. Shungudzo) | Hayden James | 2019 |
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Where we are with phones in the classroom
Students being distracted by phones at school began registering in the early 2010s. By the late 2010s, the problem was full-blown.
There is no research that I'm aware of that touts the benefits of student phone use in class. Research to the contrary doesn't seem hard to find. For example:
France has banned phones from classrooms. I don't foresee this happening anywhere in the US. Because
1. many parents delight in having immediate access to their children throughout the school day.
2. classroom teachers, many of whom have all but surrendered on the phone issue, strive to find positive uses for the phones they know will be up and running during class.
3. administrators fall behind in assigning phone-violation discipline as it is. That only stands to get worse with an all-out ban
I will continue to be a No Phone Zone jerk in my own classroom, allowing phone-friendly colleagues to appear "chill" in comparison. Some will argue that students won't be able to concentrate, anxious from having been separated from their phones.
I plan to retire in 2023.
Teachers and administrators were somewhat flat-footed in their response. They didn't understand the depth of the phone addiction epidemic because they hadn't ever suffered from it. That was a mistake.
Amid the generational gap in understanding, teachers were overrun. Many wearied of pleading and admonishing and bribing and punishing students to keep them from using their phones in class.
As in any profession, teachers populate a spectrum of professionalism. And at one end of the spectrum, some teachers were delighted to discover that they could produce a silent classroom of happy students by letting them "phone out" (zone out on their phones). Teacher effort required: zero. A perfect pacifier.
There were also the "treat-em-like-adults" optimists who felt that given free anytime access, 14 year-olds in class would exercise only use their phones if they truly needed to. They were shocked by the ubiquity of that need.
There were also jerks like me. I never harbored any patience for unauthorized phone use in class. And my authorizations were few and far between. Very few. The "No Phone Zone" policy is displayed and repeatedly announced. But there were always students who were undeterred.
Those students were accustomed to teachers begging and pleading. They'd often make an attempt at discretion by hiding their phone behind books or a backpack on the desk. They were in complete disbelief when I assigned them Saturday school upon their very first phone infraction. But that tended to keep subsequent infractions in check to some extent.
Two years ago I cleared out part of my room to make space for a backpack cubbies. Thirty-two: one for each seating location in the classroom. And I authored an accompanying limerick:
The phone goes into the pack
The pack goes into the rack
Kindly observe
That the parking's reserved
In an hour you'll get it all back
The backpack rack is reasonably effective. But phone addiction is strong among teenagers. And getting stronger. Some keep their phone in a pocket rather than surrendering it to the pack which will lie feet away from them for the duration of the period. And, as mentioned previously, my zero tolerance casts me as an intolerant jerk who just doesn't "get it". Some colleagues would suggest I'm not meeting the students where they are.
In 2019, we have sporadic tales of schoolwide attempts to minimize phone distraction in class. My own school flirted with Pocket Points. It required no expenditure and was simple to defeat. Other schools are trying magnetically locked phone bags. The logistics seem cumbersome and, again, teenagers know how to defeat these measures. The addiction is strong.
There is no research that I'm aware of that touts the benefits of student phone use in class. Research to the contrary doesn't seem hard to find. For example:
France has banned phones from classrooms. I don't foresee this happening anywhere in the US. Because
1. many parents delight in having immediate access to their children throughout the school day.
2. classroom teachers, many of whom have all but surrendered on the phone issue, strive to find positive uses for the phones they know will be up and running during class.
3. administrators fall behind in assigning phone-violation discipline as it is. That only stands to get worse with an all-out ban
I will continue to be a No Phone Zone jerk in my own classroom, allowing phone-friendly colleagues to appear "chill" in comparison. Some will argue that students won't be able to concentrate, anxious from having been separated from their phones.
I plan to retire in 2023.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
The threat of gun violence at schools
When I began teaching in 1986, all the doors on my school's sprawling 64-acre campus opened via doorknobs. And those doorknobs locked from the outside. All classrooms open to the great outdoors. We had emergency procedures for fires and earthquakes.
Since Columbine, the doors were retrofitted with exterior pull handles and interior crash bars. The doors can be locked from the inside. Emergency procedures of lockdown and shelter-in-place were added.
In recent years, a predictable pattern has emerged. Whenever an unscheduled lockdown or shelter-in-place occurs (and they are rare), the principal will get messages from concerned parents worried that the school had not taken the threat seriously enough. The verdict of disappointment will be shared, and further drills are scheduled.
We were recently placed on lockdown during our half-hour lunch period. I hustled nearby students (none of whom I knew) into my classroom and locked the room down. I was impressed how quickly the bustling outdoor lunch crowd of 1900+ students cleared into classrooms. The lockdown was eventually downgraded to a shelter in place. An administrator checked my classroom to provide an update.
(We later learned that a proximate shooting threat to a nearby school was made on social media. Nothing came of it other than that the recently expelled student from that school who made the threat was taken into custody in another part of town.)
As far as I could tell, the whole episode went to plan. My room of strangers behaved well and emerged unscathed.
But dissatisfaction was phoned in in the aftermath, so staff underwent additional training, and a followup drill was scheduled.
There is an assumption and expectation that schools (including open-air, indefensible campuses) stand ready to protect students from any attack at any time. No such expectation existed in 1986.
In any case, one thing faculty were warned against was any discussion that would do anything to diminish the fear of a potential mass shooting at the school. Stating the real statistics on mass shootings at school was cast as a no-no.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that the unfettered access to military-grade assault weaponry designed specifically to kill humans on the battlefield is a problem. Mass shootings at schools are a problem. But I'm not keen to put a spin on facts and reality. I listened to this just days after our emergency emergency training session.
On the Media: How to Report on Gun Violence in America
I'm fairly confident that every lockdown incident on campus, no matter how well executed by students and staff, will result in complaints of perceived shortcomings sent in by people who were not present during the incident. This will result in further emergency emergency training sessions and drills.
Since Columbine, the doors were retrofitted with exterior pull handles and interior crash bars. The doors can be locked from the inside. Emergency procedures of lockdown and shelter-in-place were added.
In recent years, a predictable pattern has emerged. Whenever an unscheduled lockdown or shelter-in-place occurs (and they are rare), the principal will get messages from concerned parents worried that the school had not taken the threat seriously enough. The verdict of disappointment will be shared, and further drills are scheduled.
We were recently placed on lockdown during our half-hour lunch period. I hustled nearby students (none of whom I knew) into my classroom and locked the room down. I was impressed how quickly the bustling outdoor lunch crowd of 1900+ students cleared into classrooms. The lockdown was eventually downgraded to a shelter in place. An administrator checked my classroom to provide an update.
(We later learned that a proximate shooting threat to a nearby school was made on social media. Nothing came of it other than that the recently expelled student from that school who made the threat was taken into custody in another part of town.)
As far as I could tell, the whole episode went to plan. My room of strangers behaved well and emerged unscathed.
But dissatisfaction was phoned in in the aftermath, so staff underwent additional training, and a followup drill was scheduled.
There is an assumption and expectation that schools (including open-air, indefensible campuses) stand ready to protect students from any attack at any time. No such expectation existed in 1986.
In any case, one thing faculty were warned against was any discussion that would do anything to diminish the fear of a potential mass shooting at the school. Stating the real statistics on mass shootings at school was cast as a no-no.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that the unfettered access to military-grade assault weaponry designed specifically to kill humans on the battlefield is a problem. Mass shootings at schools are a problem. But I'm not keen to put a spin on facts and reality. I listened to this just days after our emergency emergency training session.
On the Media: How to Report on Gun Violence in America
I'm fairly confident that every lockdown incident on campus, no matter how well executed by students and staff, will result in complaints of perceived shortcomings sent in by people who were not present during the incident. This will result in further emergency emergency training sessions and drills.
Sunday, September 01, 2019
Mechanical Universe all episode access page
If you want a single page with easy-to-find links to every episode of The Mechanical Universe, we have something in common.
I made such a page and posted it to my phyz.org domain.
College (half-hour) episode links are on the top table, High School Adaptations are listed on the bottom table. I arranged the episodes into groups that make sense to me. I hope they make sense to you, too.
I use the high school version with question sets in my classes. Links to the question sets on my Teachers Pay Teachers site, The Lessons of Phyz, can also be found on the page.
With all episodes of The Mechanical Universe (college and high school) streaming for free, I'm moving these video presentations away from class time to "YouTube homework."
Since I couldn't find anyone selling or streaming the high school adaptations of The Mechanical Universe, I posted them, myself. I wrote about that in a previous post.
Here's the page: The Mechanical Universe of Phyz.
I made such a page and posted it to my phyz.org domain.
College (half-hour) episode links are on the top table, High School Adaptations are listed on the bottom table. I arranged the episodes into groups that make sense to me. I hope they make sense to you, too.
I use the high school version with question sets in my classes. Links to the question sets on my Teachers Pay Teachers site, The Lessons of Phyz, can also be found on the page.
With all episodes of The Mechanical Universe (college and high school) streaming for free, I'm moving these video presentations away from class time to "YouTube homework."
Since I couldn't find anyone selling or streaming the high school adaptations of The Mechanical Universe, I posted them, myself. I wrote about that in a previous post.
Here's the page: The Mechanical Universe of Phyz.
The Motion Playlist of Phyz
The long-awaited Motion Playlist of Phyz is now here. Enjoy!
This playlist is long. You might want to break it up into two smaller playlists for better results. Or you could pare it down. You could also add to it; I'm sure I missed a few gems. Please let me know in the comments.
Click the "playlist" label in the column to the right to see the playlists for Waves, Electricity, Magnetism, and Light.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Syllabus alternatives
In the last few years I've tried to reflect more on why I do certain things and what the students get out of each. Starting my 14th year I now have way more resources than I can fit in a year and can pick and choose what I want. I am making myself justify each activity, and "because we always have," doesn't cut it. At the start of the year one year I thought about my class syllabus and what I expected students to get out of it versus what my students actually did. I saw it as an important resource of information, a contract between us about how the class would be run with each of us holding up our part of it. My students, and arguably the adults in their lives, saw it as a box to check by signing it without reading it. Students would ask me all year questions that could be answered by reading the syllabus, I would find the copies they were supposed to keep all year on the floor in the first few weeks. So my syllabus was not being read, so it was not working as it was. So I changed it, two different ways for two different classes.
First, I changed my Physics syllabus from two pages of text into a visual syllabus (like an infographic). I loved the one page result that I made using Adobe Photoshop, even printed in black and white students found it much easier to digest.
A few friends wanted their own versions (above left) but I had to edit it for them because they didn't have the software. This year I rebuilt it in powerpoint (above right) for my Conceptual Physics which makes it much easier to share. It's available here as a pdf so you can see how it turns out and a powerpoint file so you can edit it if you want.
For creating your own I have a few suggestions:
- Use pictures to represent what you can like the book cover and the calculator near the top.
- If you can represent it in a graph, do it!
- Be brief! Try highlighting the important words in your syllabus and see what little is left.
This version is still a paper, that requires a signature and should be kept all year. I retained this part of the traditional approach for my Conceptual Physics students because they will have a notebook in which they keep all their class materials and it will be glued in. For regular physics, as they are older, I will probably not do a printed version again.
When I began teaching AP Physics C and had to draft a new syllabus I again focused on what I needed and why. I wanted my students to read my syllabus as their was important information about the outline of the course. I wanted them to have access to the syllabus to read later but they did not have to necessarily keep the paper. So I decided to make a Google form that had paragraphs from my syllabus interspersed with comprehension questions for my students to answer. I made a similar version for parents with fewer questions and aligned more to things that might concern them more (like the A-/B+ border). The full text version of the syllabus is also posted on Google classroom so my students can access it anytime.
This will be my third year using the digital syllabus in AP and I love it. The students complete it sooner (I can even email it to them the weekend before school starts) and it takes care of a lot of questions because they actually ready it. When our school is completely one-to-one I will probably do a digital syllabus for all my classes but will probably use images like the visual syllabus instead of paragraphs in between.
First, I changed my Physics syllabus from two pages of text into a visual syllabus (like an infographic). I loved the one page result that I made using Adobe Photoshop, even printed in black and white students found it much easier to digest.
A few friends wanted their own versions (above left) but I had to edit it for them because they didn't have the software. This year I rebuilt it in powerpoint (above right) for my Conceptual Physics which makes it much easier to share. It's available here as a pdf so you can see how it turns out and a powerpoint file so you can edit it if you want.
For creating your own I have a few suggestions:
- Use pictures to represent what you can like the book cover and the calculator near the top.
- If you can represent it in a graph, do it!
- Be brief! Try highlighting the important words in your syllabus and see what little is left.
This version is still a paper, that requires a signature and should be kept all year. I retained this part of the traditional approach for my Conceptual Physics students because they will have a notebook in which they keep all their class materials and it will be glued in. For regular physics, as they are older, I will probably not do a printed version again.
When I began teaching AP Physics C and had to draft a new syllabus I again focused on what I needed and why. I wanted my students to read my syllabus as their was important information about the outline of the course. I wanted them to have access to the syllabus to read later but they did not have to necessarily keep the paper. So I decided to make a Google form that had paragraphs from my syllabus interspersed with comprehension questions for my students to answer. I made a similar version for parents with fewer questions and aligned more to things that might concern them more (like the A-/B+ border). The full text version of the syllabus is also posted on Google classroom so my students can access it anytime.
This will be my third year using the digital syllabus in AP and I love it. The students complete it sooner (I can even email it to them the weekend before school starts) and it takes care of a lot of questions because they actually ready it. When our school is completely one-to-one I will probably do a digital syllabus for all my classes but will probably use images like the visual syllabus instead of paragraphs in between.
Friday, August 09, 2019
The evolution of color vision in tetrachromats
Many of us have a sense of color-mixing among trichromats. There's this classic image of the primary and secondary colors of light achieved by overlapping monochromatic circles of primary colors.
We overlap the red, green, and blue in a triangle to produce magenta (red + blue), cyan (blue + green), yellow (green + red), and white (red + blue + green). We have three distinct cone receptors in our retinas, sensitive to red, green, and blue. So this all makes good sense.
But birds have four cones and can seen into the ultraviolet. Researchers say this gives them an additional dimension of color vision. Imagine red + ultraviolet. You can't: we don't have a name for that mixture, nor can we visualize it. A color mix square would be called for. Actually, that wouldn't work.
Seems the number of possible color-mixing outcomes is 2^n – 1, where n is the number of primary colors. Three primary colors yields 2^3 – 1 = 7 outcomes (R, G, B, M, C, Y, W). Then four primary colors produces 15 outcomes. But the color mixing square can only accommodate 13. How unfortunate. Downright unlucky!
Here's what I got when I tried to populate the cells of a color mixing square. D-oh! Now I'm getting why an extra dimension of color is called for here.
For many more details and implications, check out the Science Friday segment below.
When I say I'm a big fan of SciFri and appreciate the science communication work that host Ira Flatow does, you might suspect a "but" is sure to follow. Who am I to disappoint?
Listen again to the minute from 13:15 to 14:15. I cringed when I heard this over the air the first time through. Ladies, has this ever happened to you? Maybe it was the result of multitasking on Ira's part, but I'm reticent to make excuses for him here. In any case: awkward. The guests maintained composure, so good for them. Still though... I hope I'm never that guy (but I probably have been).
But birds have four cones and can seen into the ultraviolet. Researchers say this gives them an additional dimension of color vision. Imagine red + ultraviolet. You can't: we don't have a name for that mixture, nor can we visualize it. A color mix square would be called for. Actually, that wouldn't work.
Seems the number of possible color-mixing outcomes is 2^n – 1, where n is the number of primary colors. Three primary colors yields 2^3 – 1 = 7 outcomes (R, G, B, M, C, Y, W). Then four primary colors produces 15 outcomes. But the color mixing square can only accommodate 13. How unfortunate. Downright unlucky!Here's what I got when I tried to populate the cells of a color mixing square. D-oh! Now I'm getting why an extra dimension of color is called for here.
For many more details and implications, check out the Science Friday segment below.
When I say I'm a big fan of SciFri and appreciate the science communication work that host Ira Flatow does, you might suspect a "but" is sure to follow. Who am I to disappoint?
Listen again to the minute from 13:15 to 14:15. I cringed when I heard this over the air the first time through. Ladies, has this ever happened to you? Maybe it was the result of multitasking on Ira's part, but I'm reticent to make excuses for him here. In any case: awkward. The guests maintained composure, so good for them. Still though... I hope I'm never that guy (but I probably have been).
Thursday, July 25, 2019
The Mechanical Universe High School Adaptations
The original episodes of The Mechanical Universe once streamed from the Annenberg Learner website and were available for purchase there. That changed and it seemed like they would be lost forever. But then CalTech posted them, so it seems all is well.
But the High School Adaptations followed a different path. They were available for purchase for years (VHS and then DVD) from Intelecom. But any and all distribution ceased years ago, and these pared down and reworked videos seem to have been lost to the mists of history. You cannot buy them and you cannot stream them.
So I decided to post them as "unlisted" videos on my YouTube channel. Two copyright claims popped up when I uploaded them. In "Introduction to Waves," someone owns the license to The Marriage of Figaro music that plays in the episode, so that episode is subject to ads that would benefit the license holder. In "Navigating in Space," a minute or so of Voyager Grand Tour animation is owned by the BBC. Inclusion of that minute would block the video from running, so I removed the offending content and tried again. No block; no strike!
Links to all 28 High School Adaptation episodes can be found at the bottom of this page:
The Mechanical Universe of Phyz
And now that they stream, they make for nice YouTube homework assignments! This frees up classroom time for other activities.
I feel awkward posting these videos since they don't really belong to me. I have not been asked by any license-holding stakeholder to cease or desist. At this point, they may be covered by Fair Use. I honestly don't know. It is certainly not my intent to infringe on anyone's copyright.
Here's an old favorite:
The Law of Inertia
But the High School Adaptations followed a different path. They were available for purchase for years (VHS and then DVD) from Intelecom. But any and all distribution ceased years ago, and these pared down and reworked videos seem to have been lost to the mists of history. You cannot buy them and you cannot stream them.
So I decided to post them as "unlisted" videos on my YouTube channel. Two copyright claims popped up when I uploaded them. In "Introduction to Waves," someone owns the license to The Marriage of Figaro music that plays in the episode, so that episode is subject to ads that would benefit the license holder. In "Navigating in Space," a minute or so of Voyager Grand Tour animation is owned by the BBC. Inclusion of that minute would block the video from running, so I removed the offending content and tried again. No block; no strike!
Links to all 28 High School Adaptation episodes can be found at the bottom of this page:
The Mechanical Universe of Phyz
And now that they stream, they make for nice YouTube homework assignments! This frees up classroom time for other activities.
I feel awkward posting these videos since they don't really belong to me. I have not been asked by any license-holding stakeholder to cease or desist. At this point, they may be covered by Fair Use. I honestly don't know. It is certainly not my intent to infringe on anyone's copyright.
Here's an old favorite:
The Law of Inertia
Monday, July 15, 2019
Today in "What not to buy"
This floated through my social media feed today...
The comments were appropriately brutal. And it wasn't the anthropomorphization that the commentariat was ruffled about. I suppose that's a risk inherent to advertising on social media. Your sponsored posts are subject to comments. At least they are for now. Facebook, Twitter, et al will no doubt figure out how to fix that so as to reap even greater profits. And why wouldn't they?
In any case, you could certainly acquire one just so that your students could rightly lambaste you during your lessons on circuits, if you're into that sort of thing. By the way, will we even be teaching circuits outside of AP and IB in the NGSS future? I don't see it in the high school physical science DCIs. But I could be wrong. Again, I digress.
Rather than supporting this electronic transgression with my hard-earned money, I downloaded an image or two of the offending item and will add it to the things we talk about when we talk about circuits in class.
But if you're keen to buy, here's the link: Science - You Complete Me
The Blog of Phyz is not responsible for short circuits, burns, or fires that may result from the use of this product.
The comments were appropriately brutal. And it wasn't the anthropomorphization that the commentariat was ruffled about. I suppose that's a risk inherent to advertising on social media. Your sponsored posts are subject to comments. At least they are for now. Facebook, Twitter, et al will no doubt figure out how to fix that so as to reap even greater profits. And why wouldn't they?
In any case, you could certainly acquire one just so that your students could rightly lambaste you during your lessons on circuits, if you're into that sort of thing. By the way, will we even be teaching circuits outside of AP and IB in the NGSS future? I don't see it in the high school physical science DCIs. But I could be wrong. Again, I digress.
Rather than supporting this electronic transgression with my hard-earned money, I downloaded an image or two of the offending item and will add it to the things we talk about when we talk about circuits in class.
But if you're keen to buy, here's the link: Science - You Complete Me
The Blog of Phyz is not responsible for short circuits, burns, or fires that may result from the use of this product.
Friday, July 12, 2019
Adhesion Cohesion Lens-hesion
The correct reaction here is "I saw that when she posted it" because you subscribed to Physics Girl's YouTube channel ages ago. If not, proceed.
This Weird Straw Effect | EVERYDAY MYSTERIES
This seems to beg for further investigation using different liquids. Cooking oil? Corn syrup? The interplay of adhesion and cohesion is central here.
It's fun to think about the extremes:
1. How would this have turned out if the liquid had maximum cohesion and minimal adhesion?
2. How would this have turned out if the liquid had minimal cohesion and maximum adhesion?
There are more questions that might be nice, too. If you think of a question (or a liquid), drop it into the comments.
This Weird Straw Effect | EVERYDAY MYSTERIES
This seems to beg for further investigation using different liquids. Cooking oil? Corn syrup? The interplay of adhesion and cohesion is central here.
It's fun to think about the extremes:
1. How would this have turned out if the liquid had maximum cohesion and minimal adhesion?
2. How would this have turned out if the liquid had minimal cohesion and maximum adhesion?
There are more questions that might be nice, too. If you think of a question (or a liquid), drop it into the comments.
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