(Note: I’m cross-posting this post from my sabbatical blog, A Year in Norway, since I think some of my regular physics teacher readers might find it of interest).

During our week in Paris, we had the chance to check out two science-related museums, the Musée Curie, and the Cité des Sciences et de Industrie.

I decided to write up this visit in the form of a letter to the curators of the Cité des Sciences et de Industrie that I will be mailing soon. Read on, and you will understand why.

Dear Curators,

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting your museum with my wife and two daughters. My eldest Daughter, Maddie (age 7), has developed a passion for all things science, and physics in particular, so our first stop was the exhibit on the Great Story of Our Universe. As a high school physics teacher, I was eager to explore this exhibit with my daughter.

At first, I was struck by just how beautiful the exhibit was—your designers did a marvelous job of creating a inviting space that wonderfully used lighting and texture to evoke a flow through the origin of our universe, with great hands-on experiments that allowed you to touch and view meteorite samples, or see a live infrared photo of oneself to understand how we are able to classify stars based on the light they emit.

Maddie looking at some meteorite samples.

I was particularly impressed by so many of the simple but engaging experiments—a parallax experiment that explained how we measure the distance to stars, by demoing how to make a measurement of a “star” on the wall across the room. My favorite demo of all was the side by side model solar system and galaxy, and the text that invited the patient to see how these two models behave very differently. Maddie and I watched it for at least 5 minutes, and she made so many observations about the differences she saw. What a wonderful introduction to Dark Matter.

After getting through the first floor of the exhibit, I was pleasantly surprised to see it went to a second floor that explains the strange physical laws that “enable us to describe and understand the evolution of the Universe.” Here again, I was impressed with all the interactive exhibits and even more impressed with your efforts to explain not just some of the oldest physical laws like gravity and electromagnetism, but also to fully cover discoveries in quantum mechanics (we loved Schrodinger’s Cat in a Box), and even some very recent discoveries in cosmology.

As I walked around this exhibit, I began to notice something strange—every column in the exhibit featured the name and biography of a famous physicist or mathematician, and every single one of them was a male. I’m also pretty sure that they were all white European men—Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Schrödinger, Lorentz, and on and on—more than 20 names in total. I looked hard, and I didn’t see a single woman or person of color in the entire collection.

In another part of the exhibit on the second floor, there was an exhibit presenting nine quotes about the nature of the universe from scientists and philosophers throughout history, and every one of them came from a white man, as best as I can recall.

It’s easy to come away from this exhibit thinking that our entire understanding of the universe, and the field of physics, is the result of the work of a bunch of dead white dudes with gray hair and more often than not, a mustache, leaving out so many important stories of women who have contributed to this understanding and what the field of physics looks like today.

There are so many incredible women scientists who have made deep and profound contributions to this story, that I find it hard to understand how they could all be left out of this exhibit. Adding a description of Vera Rubin and her groundbreaking work on galactic rotation curves would have have been an informative and powerful addition to the first-floor exhibit about the rotation speeds of galaxies and our solar system. Marie Lavoisier, Marie Curie, Joycelin Bell, Henrietta Leavitt—each of these women made major contributions to experiments and discoveries that were already mentioned or alluded to in your second-floor exhibit, and they have inspiring and important stories that are worth sharing with visitors to the exhibit.

With the exhibit’s vast amount of space and focus on highlighting recent discoveries in physics, I can imagine a wonderful addition that highlights very recent discoveries in physics—like the discovery of gravitational waves, showing photos of the hundred-person plus team that made this discovery. A wall featuring photos and descriptions of scientists today could very well inspire many of your youngest visitors to see themselves as scientists and imagine how they might contribute to understanding the universe when they grow up.

This exhibit also raises the opportunity to talk about why the field of physics has been historically dominated by men—specifically pointing out the ways in which women have been excluded from educational opportunities and research organizations since practically the beginning of science. At the same time, you could point out the hidden and unrecognized ways in which women have made vast contributions to the field of physics—from serving as the “human computers” to painstakingly type the dissertations of their husbands. Perhaps this conversation looking at the nature of who does physics could be a web resource, similar the great ones I saw on the ground floor in Cite des Enfants, where the signage encourages parents to visit a website for more ideas about how to engage children in the experiences they had in the museum.

I know that museums are incredibly powerful places—they are some of the most important places for inspiring young people and opening their minds to possible careers and ideas they would not have otherwise considered. This was made most clear to me in the case of my own daughter, who developed a love for Marie Curie after reading a short story describing her life in “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.” After reading that story, Maddie decided she wanted to be a scientist just like Marie Curie and wanted to know all she could about the Nobel Prize. When Maddie read in the story that Marie Curie lived in Paris, she asked us if we could visit her house, and through that, we discovered the wonderful Museé Curie, a tiny three-room museum dedicated to the life of Marie and Pierre Curie. Maddie pushed this museum to the top of our Paris agenda, and watching my daughter in this space was magical. Maddie was thrilled to see Marie Curie’s office just as it existed, but she spent the most amount of time scrolling through images of Dr. Curie and her family on a large video screen, occasionally fixating on a picture of Marie Curie on her wedding day. Maddie has been super fascinated with weddings recently too, and when we talked about it leaving the museum, she told me how awesome it was that her hero, Marie Curie, was also able to get married. To me, this visit scored the trifecta of science museums—it helped my daughter to not only understand an important discovery in science, it helped her to relate to the story of the human that made that discovery—emphasizing her humanity and helping my daughter to see that she too can be a scientist.

I wish we had more time to explore your museum. I’m sure I missed many exhibits that did celebrate the work done by women in science, and help students of all backgrounds seem themselves as scientists. I appreciate your consideration of these suggestions and look forward to visiting the museum again in the not too distant future.

Sincerely,

John Burk

Physics Teacher and Dad of wonderfully curious 7-year-old girl who wants to be a physicist

Every year, I seem to go through some variant of an introduce yourself to your teacher activity, from asking students to fill out some sort of template I’ve created or to answer a Google survey. All of them have been fine—I often find myself learning some useful things from every response, and in the best cases, they do set up a basis for a building a strong relationship between me and the student.

This past year, I wanted to do something a bit different. I expressly wanted to start a dialogue with students, and I wanted to open up the format so that they could share with me the things that were important to them, rather than filling in answers to the questions I had. I also got the idea that we don’t really write letters anymore, and in the past, some students have gone the entire year without ever emailing their teacher.

So to change things, I invited students to spend 30 minutes writing me an introductory letter to me. I gave them some of the questions I’d asked in previous questionnaires (mostly cribbed from Moses Rifkin). Here’s the assignment (also as a Google doc):

## Introduce yourself

I’d like for you to introduce yourself to your teachers by writing a letter. The purpose of this letter is to help your teacher to get to know you better as a student, especially when it comes to knowing how I can help you to see success in physics and achieving your personal goals. We ask that you write this letter by writing continuously for 30 minutes—don’t stop to think about what you should say, and don’t spend time proofreading or trying to find the perfect word. You will find that writing continuously is often the key to discovery—of a solution to a problem, of a thesis for a paper, or in this case, insights into who you are and why you are taking physics.

Here are some questions you can consider answering in your letter (don’t feel obligated to answer all or even any of these).

• Is there anything you’re thinking after today’s class that you’d like to share?
• What motivates you?
• What are your goals for this semester?
• If you are struggling in this class, what can I do to help you?
• If you are struggling in this class, what will you do to help yourself?
• What languages do you speak at home?
• What do you like most about yourself?
• Tell me about something you’re good at UNRELATED to science.
• What do you think of when you hear the word science?
• How do you think physics might be useful for your future goals?
• What’s the last idea that fascinated you?
• Who is your favorite teacher and why?

### Why a letter?

It turns out that writing a letter is often the key unlocking incredible opportunities in your life. It might be an interview, internship or just a cup of coffee, but the simple act of writing a letter to someone can change your life. Sadly, we don’t write many letters anymore, and sometimes, students don’t even know how. So consider this practice for the letter you will write sometime in the future that will change your life.

The responses to this assignment turned out to be incredible. Students wrote thoughtful letters that gave me real insights into their personality, motivation, interests and more. In general, I would say students had the hardest time responding to the “if you are struggling” questions, and I often didn’t get much more than “you should be available for extra help” and “I should work harder and come to you for help.” Both of these responses are a good start, but make me thing there’s a way I could ask this question to get students to be a bit more specific and also to see all the possibilities for help that exist beyond just setting up a meeting with your teacher (which many students seem to see as a very drastic step they are reluctant to take). To that end, I really like this much more specific survey Brian Frank (@brianwfrank) shared on Twitter earlier in the year.

In trying to build a conversation, I responded to each letter at length, asking follow up questions, trying to answer their questions and foreshadow what’s ahead. Though I had no expectations busy students with lots of homework to complete would follow up or even read my feedback on this non-graded assignment, a number did reply, leading to some great conversations and deepening connections.

If I were to do this again, I think I would add one thing—I would require all of my students to set up a 5 or 10 minute meeting with me after I’ve responded to their letter. This is something I definitely couldn’t do if I had a 100 student course load, but even with the small teaching loads, I’m lucky to have, some students still go all year without ever meeting with me outside of class. I think setting this requirement would go a long way toward building trust and giving students the comfort of having already met with me if they find they need to seek out extra help in the future.

For the 2018-19 school year, I’m going to be on sabbatical. I’ll be living in Oslo, Norway with my family, and working with some amazing researchers at the University of Oslo to add computational modeling to the Norwegian Physics Curriculum. Hopefully, this sabbatical will allow me to get back in the habit of blogging—there are a ton of things I would like to share, especially some physics related projects that I plan to work on this year.

But in the meantime, you might be interested in following our family blog about our adventures in Norway: A year in Norway.

Note: Thanks to some wonderful responses to this post, all of this equipment has now been re-homed.

As part of the preparation for a renovation of our building, we are inventorying and packing all of the physics equipment at my school. One thing we are trying to also do is purge a bunch of the equipment we no longer use, and as much as possible, avoid sending discarding this stuff to fill a landfill somewhere. We’ve acquired a bunch of unusual equipment over the years, including a giant slide rule and giant micrometer, and thanks to the wonderful people of Twitter, I was able to find homes for both of these items.

Now I have a small cache of PASCO Datalogging equipment—750 Interfaces and a bunch of probeware. I also have a bunch of old PASCO dynamics carts, all of which I would like to donate or sell. A word of warning about the PASCO equipment—this equipment does not work with the newer wireless sensors, or even the SPARKVue sensors, as I rudely discovered when I tried to setup a old style force probe with one of the new wireless smart carts. Though I haven’t tested every single item, I believe all of this equipment is in good working order.

I think the ideal use of these would be a university or school that is already deeply invested in PASCO equipment, and really comfortable with the PASCO capstone software, which can be difficult to use. If you are new to using probeware, and just want to outfit your lab, I’d strongly encourage you to consider going with Vernier and avoiding the headaches of working with this equipment—you’ll be much happier with that equipment—I know we are.

Finally, with the exception of the carts, I’d love to sell/donate this equipment as a lot, ideally to a school with a real need, or if that can’t be found, a school that is willing to pay a reasonable price for it.

Here’s the list of equipment we have available.

If you’re interested in this, please complete this form: PASCO Equipment Interest Form.

One of the the things I did at the beginning of this year that has saved me a ton of time is build a simple static webpage in Google Sites with links to all of the things I most frequently use—the specific page for my class in canvas, the page in our SIS that lets me write quick special comments, our electronic grade book and more. Here’s what my page looks like:

Here are a few quick suggestions of things I’ve found super useful to include:

• A simple Google spreadsheet listing all of the students in my class and their emails. This is something I started doing a couple of years ago, and it’s turned out to be insanely useful for times when I need to quickly sort my students, keep track of who’s turned in some one off assignment or anytime I quickly need to generate a class list to paste into something.
• A custom Random Team Generator for each class: We all know the power of visible random grouping, but too often, I find myself pasting in a class last at the last minute to create groups. The awesome Random Team Generator allows me to paste in a list ahead of time, and then gives me a url that I can put in my links page and revisit any time I need to generate new groups.
• Direct links to your class in your SIS and LMS: It usually takes me 3 or 4 clicks to get to my course page in canvas. I can save myself a decent amount of time just by copying the course link from the LMS and including it here on my links page.
• A mailto link for my class, or direct link to the new announcement page in my LMS: I haven’t implemented this yet, but having one click access from my default page to be able to send a message to my whole class seems like a big timesaver.
• A link to my electronic gradebook: It seems silly, but having a direct link to the gradebook page for each class has made it much easier for me to stay on top of grade entry.
• Links to course materials in Google Drive: It’s truly wonderful not to have to click through folder after folder to get to that assessment or packet I’d like to see.

Google sites is super easy to use and even if you’ve never made a webpage, you’ll probably be able to create a basic quick links page in under 5 minutes with their excellent documentation.

I’ve also started using Practice Logs this year, an idea I adapted from Casey Rutherford and intend to blog about in the near future. One of the best things this page has allowed me to do is put a direct link to each student’s practice log on my links page, so now I’m a single click away from any student’s practice log, which makes it much easier for me to give regular feedback to my students and check to see how their practice is going.

If you do setup a links page like this, you’ll want to make it your default page, and somehow in 2017, my browser of choice, Google Chrome, doesn’t seem to let you change the window that new tabs open to, so I had to use the extension New Tab Redirect, which does the trick.

I’ve long been interested in the notion of teaching computational thinking—helping students to recognize the power of computers to help them to understand data, gain insights and solve problems in fields outside of the traditional realm of computer science. You can read https://quantumprogress.wordpress.com/computational-modeling/, when I was working to introduce computational modeling to my freshman physics classes.

Ten years later, there are even more examples and evidence that students need to be learning to see the computer as a powerful thinking tool that can allow them to ask new questions, and open up entirely new fields of study. Here are just a few projects that have caught my eye recently

• What is a Computational Essay? by Stephen Wolfram. This is a pretty amazing essay from the inventor of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and now the Wolfram One Computational Platform. Wolfram shows how students can use this platform to easily analyze differences between languages, the color range used by Van Gough, the history of the English Civil war and more. Still, every time I read Wolfram’s essays, I get super excited about the possibility, but when I start playing with the actual Wolfram Language I find myself struggling to find the right command to know what I need to do. I guess this shows how awesome it would be if I’d written my very own programming language, or maybe it just shows I really am getting old.

• Gender roles with Text Mining and N-Grams by Julia Silge. In this post, Dr. Silge describes how she was able to use text mining to find all of the verbs following the pronouns he and she in Jane Austen’s works. From that, she was able to graph the words that show the largest differences in appearing after “she” compared to “he”, and the results showed thinking words like “remembered”, “read” “felt” and “resolved” are far more likely to follow “she”, while action words like “stopped”, “takes”, “replied” and “comes” are more likely to follow “he.” I think this could be a seed of a great collaboration with an English teacher.

I’ve been thinking about this last project on and off for a few years now, and have discovered a number of similar efforts by historians to create and study archives of fugitive slave ads, including Freedom on the Move, and this small collection of ads from Brandywine, Maryland, a small town in Prince George’s County, Maryland. All of this got me thinking that there must be a way to teach a small version of this lesson to students in our 9th grade US History class that would help them to see the ways in which historians make use of computational tools to gain new and important insights into their work, the utility of big data as a primary source, and the ways in which it can be used to add context to the typical narratives students already encounter.

This fall, a new US History teacher, Giselle Furlong, and I began to plan how we might teach a two day lesson using the Brandywine archive of fugitive slave ads, and I’d like to share what we came up with here as an example of how we tried to integrate computational thinking into a history class to give students a richer understanding of slavery and slave narratives.

Students in the class use a fantastic collection of primary sources as their textbook, which has been thoughtfully assembled over many years by our history department. In this course, they learn to do the work of historians, closely reading primary sources, carefully annotating each one, putting sources into conversation with each other in Harkness style discussions. Before our unit, students had completed reading significant excerpts from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas.

We began our lesson by asking students to simply look at the website Brandywine Slave Ads, after orienting them to the location of Prince George’s county, very close to the Eastern Shore of Maryland described in Douglass’s narrative, and barely a two hour drive from our school. Even though the web table isn’t a very useful data structure, I was impressed by the insights students were quickly able to find just by doing simple searches within the webpage with command + F, and looking for terms like “Gender : F” to discover that there were only 15 females in the dataset.

We then showed them how to copy and paste this web table to a Google sheet, which then allowed you to more easily process and sort the data by column. Still, however, the important data of gender, age, and date of escape were merged into fields with other data that made it difficult to answer many of our most typical questions, so I showed them how you can use the Regular Expressions and the REGEXTRACT function. For example, using the function REGEXTRACT(B3,” [MF] “) would pull out the occurrence of M or F when surrounded by spaces from the text block that describes gender, date of birth, and age. The key lesson I wanted students to see appreciate is when they should recognize a task that should be automated, and then how to go about figuring out how to automate it.

At this point, we divided the class into five groups and gave them the lesson we’d written in Canvas that gave each group a specific topic to focus on. (I’ve pasted the actual lesson below for those who are curious. Each group had to take our spreadsheet of structured data, and focus on one specific aspect, gender, reward offered, age, date of escape or location.

We gave the students 30 minutes to look at this data, and I was deeply impressed by both the questions they were asking and some of the things they were able to do. One student realized that numbers pulled out of the text by REGEXTRACT were still treated by Google sheets as strings, but this could be remedied by adding a 0 to each number, allowing you to then calculate averages and other statistics from numerical data.

At the same time, most students were completely unfamiliar with spreadsheets, not knowing how cells are addressed, how to do even simple calculations, enter formulas or how to copy formulas from cell to cell by dragging, or make graphs. And it’s infinitely harder to make a graph of data when you have a big pile of data and aren’t quite sure of what to graph. None of this really surprised me—I know spreadsheets have fallen out of favor in my own physics classes, but at the same time, I think they are a very powerful tool used across nearly every industry and subject that is a gateway toward seeing the utility of computational thinking, and this is the kind of work students are going to need to do in the “real world” regardless of what job they end up having.

Within about 30 minutes, each group was able to put together a small paper describing their finds, and we still had enough time left over for a short discussion where groups shared their most interesting finding or remaining question.

On the following day, we asked students to again split into small groups and answer the following questions based on their work with the fugitive slave ads:

• What do we know?
• What don’t we know?
• What surprises you?
• What is the connection between slave narratives and the fugitive ads?
• What structures are in place to limit escape

You can see some of the responses that came up in our discussion on this whiteboard.

Overall, it felt like we could have continued this discussion for at least another class or two. Students seemed to enjoy collaborating in small teams, uncovering insights about data and trying to find connections between this work and the previous work they had done researching slave narratives.

Here are a few takeaways I had about how students understood the value of computational thinking in this work:

• Students aren’t digital natives, but they do know some handy tricks that make them seem that way. I was impressed with how quickly they could find details simply by searching a webpage with Command+F, but beyond these tricks, students were challenged to find ways to use the computer to discern more meaning from the data
• Students are mostly befuddled by spreadsheets. No student recognized how putting data in a spreadsheet would make it easier to search, sort and organize, and all were befuddled by the arcane ways in which you address cells, manipulate data and make charts, but they were able to make progress with clear instructions, some guidance, and Google. While it doesn’t fit within the confines of a history class, I do think students would benefit from seeing the power of spreadsheets as a fundamental computing tool and would love to see this incorporated into a math curriculum that spent some time working with large sets of data.

It was also clear that this project added some context to students’ understanding of the institution of slavery. By researching these advertisements, students were better able to understand some of the institutions that were in place to prevent enslaved people from escaping, and also the large monetary enslaved people held for slave owners. Together, these narratives and fugitive ad data paint a more complete and complex picture of slavery, one that highlights the the many ways in which enslaved peoples struggled against the institution, but also shows the ways in which so much of society was built upon slavery, well beyond just evil slave owners, keeping slaves in bondage was written into laws, customs and contracts innumerable ways, and so it isn’t surprising we have so few stories of escape.

IN-CLASS PROJECT – Maryland Fugitive Slave Ads

In this mini-project we will explore primary source evidence in the form of Fugitive Slave Ads from 1781-1861 from Prince George’s County, MD. Here is a link to the website with all source material: http://brandywinemd.com/history/runaway-slave-ads/

Here is a link to the spreadsheet whose data you will be manipulating

We will break into 5 groups, each with a different task of exploring the data. Questions to consider:

• What does this evidence tell us about fugitive slave ads in this region?
• What does this evidence tell us about rates of escape among enslaved men and women in this region?
• What does this evidence tell us about the geography of this region and the proximity to freedom for enslaved people?

Group 1

Task: What is the average age of escaped men? escaped women?

Group 2

Task: What was the reward in 1850 (year Fugitive Slave Act was passed) what is the value of that reward in 2017 dollars? Who was the most “valuable”? Why? Choose three other years to calculate reward value.

You have find this information with this inflation calculator: http://www.in2013dollars.com/1860-dollars-in-2015?amount=1

Group 3

Task: What was the gender breakdown of escaped men and women?

Group 4

Task: Create a scatterplot plotting the number of escaped slaves and the year of escape. What patterns do you notice? What are the most significant dates/date range? X axis = year of escape; Y axis =  number of escaped enslaved peopleConsult this resource to help you make the scatter plot:

Group 5

– What is the distance to freedom?

– Compare the historic maps to current Google Earth/Maps.

Each group must write a brief summary of their findings – the SIGNIFICANCE (who, what, why, where). Submit your paragraph to this post. Put this data and your findings in conversation with what we have discussed about Douglass and Jacobs – What did resistance look like in Prince George’s County at this time? Are these numbers higher or lower than you might expect? Why?

Quora is one of my favorite time-waster websites, and somehow, I signed myself up to get a semi-weekly email from them that always seems to draw me into reading all the way down the email. Yesterday, I came across this question:

Since we’ve been studying energy in my send year Matter and Interactions course, and just finished studying centripetal forces in the previous chapter, this seemed like a wonderful problem for our last class of 2017.

We quickly went to estimating the things we knew to solve this. We’ve talked about the solar constant before and we knew that at the radius of the earth, every square meter receives 1400W of light energy on average. Knowing that it takes light 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun, we quickly calculated the total power of the earth to be around 10^26W, and so we knew that the sun was losing 10^26 J of mass energy every second.

We knew that this energy was coming from fusion and that the sun was losing rest energy. We found the energy using the idea

$\Delta E =\Delta m c^2$

$\Delta m = 1.1 \times 10^9 kg$

This was a pretty huge mass, but we weren’t as worried when we realized the mass of the sun is ~10^31 kg.

We then wondered how long the sun had been around, and figured a good estimate would be slightly longer than the earth, or about 4 billion years. Since we only care about the how the orbit of the earth might have changed, we wondered how much the mass of the sun changed while the earth was around. Googling 4 billion years in seconds gave us 10^17s, so the sun has lost about 10^26 kg of mass or around 100 Earths of mass.

Though this turns out to be only about 0.01% of the Sun’s mass, we still wondered if this would have a noticeable effect on the Earth’s orbit, and it was at this point that we realized computational modeling could give us an answer. We’ve already written a model of the earth-sun which includes code like this:

dt = 86400 #make time step 1 day while t < 4e9 * dt: #update forces Fg = (-Gm_sunm=_earth/r**2)*norm(r) #update momentum earth.p = earth.p+Fg*dt #update position earth.pos = earth.pos + earth.p/earth.m*dt 

And we realized that we could add a single line about the gravitational force calculation that read: m_sun = m_sun -1.1e9 *dt 

to account for the changing mass of the sun. We then thought we could write a program that plotted two earths—one feeling a force from a constant mass sun, and one feeling a force from a changing mass sun, and see how they departed.

All of this was great until we realized we’d set a timestep of a single day, and a wile loop that would need to run for 4billion years, and around this time, the class was almost over, but we thought of a few problems:

• We can’t increase the size of the time step by much because our approximation that the final momentum is equal to the average momentum is conditioned upon the idea that the net force is constant over the time interval
• Our errors from the time steps accumulate as time goes forward in in our program, so we weren’t even sure that a 1-day long time step would work for a 4 billion year long calculation

The beauty of this was we saw that this would be a nearly impossible problem to solve in closed form—integrating a force that depends on both position and changing mass seems daunting to me, but it’s totally do-able (in theory) computationally. We also all agreed that the answer is likely to be there is no discernable change in the orbit.

I’m sure there is some algorithm or method that would allow you to use a larger time step, or somehow quickly compute these trajectories, but I must admit I don’t know what it is off the top of my head, and would welcome ideas from my readers.