The show must go on...

Today I referred to my class as the "audience".  I made a lame joke and then said "tough crowd".  Later I said "I'm feeling under-appreciated by the audience today".  Then, as they were almost allowing themselves to be amused, I said "It's so much better for my self esteem to tell myself in the morning to get ready for the show rather than to say 'Oh, yeah - I'm a high school teacher'.

Why did this take me so long?

Better late than never!

Falling into Winter

Out for a walk with my kids, enjoying the fall colors. 

This year those fall changes cause me to reflect on my own ‘fall’: worsening eyesight, a pudgy middle section, and ever whitening, slowly thinning hair. 

My kids are still young enough to enjoy all the seasons.  But the fall means winter soon and winter is only enjoyable if there is a spring at the end of it, right? 

What if there’s no spring coming – won’t winter be sad and depressing?  I check with my kids “Would you still love winter if you didn’t have spring to look forward to?”  They look perplexed and say “Won’t we still have family game night huddled around the wood stove and dig out the driveway together and have family snowball fights?”

The wisdom of youth! Relieved, I go back to enjoying the fall colors.

The Message or the Messenger?

Everyone knows the sound of a violin is not the actual violin itself, right? I'm not so sure...

"North is that way"
"That car is red"
"This object is cold"

All of these statements are examples of us projecting an input into our senses as being a property of the object out there.  In essence, we humans seem to confuse the message with the messenger all the time.

The north pole of the compass in my hand points a certain direction, so I call that direction north, but really it is a magnetic south pole 'up' there somewhere that is attracting my magnet. So is North 'up there' in the direction your compass points?

Most objects (ones that are not glowing) are not a "color" - they re-emit certain colors being thrown at them and absorb others.  The ones that are re-emitted are what we see.  Look at a red car under a green light or in the nighttime and it will not be red.  So is it red?

An object feels cold because you are transferring heat to it.  If you had a lower temperature, it would feel hot to you!  So is it the object by itself that is cold?

If we do this all the time, what about when we see someone doing something bad?  Is that a bad person?

A person engaged in an act of kindness must be a kind person, right?

Someone acting in a warm way towards me must actually like me, right?

I should connect those happy feelings from advertisements to the product on the screen, right?

Wait a sec, I think I hear a violin...

How to know you are doing a beach vacation right

If you are leaving the beach in the morning when everyone else is arriving and then returning in the afternoon when they are leaving - then, you are doing it right!

The Power of Fusion

We're on our way to being an energy producer as well as consumer: Solar Power!

Two days of work by a team of four guys.  The work needs to be inspected and the power company needs to change out our meter and we'll be good to go.  We'll be generating at a max rate of 7.42 kW!

New electrical box, meter, internet connection, and switch in the basement:








Microinverters (DC to AC) under each panel:

28 Solar Panels to top it off (photo taken from the South of the house, looking Northward around 3pm).  We took out two trees that shaded the front left of the house even more than it is currently:



There's also a switch outside the house so the electric company can shut off our solar if they need to work on the power lines in the neighborhood!

Prom 2016

Got 90 percent of one of my classes in one shot!

For Tonight's Coffeehouse

The wonder of it all is that we can wonder at it all

I'm learning to teach,
But really, I teach to learn.

On my desk - a Feynman quote:
"I, a universe of atoms - an atom in the universe."
We're big, complex, and miraculous
And yet..
small, insignificant, and pedestrian

In class, we start with mass and abstract to energy
"What is mass?"
"Well, it's really energy.."
So energy is mass and mass is energy -
What are we made of, really?

In class, we talk about space; we talk about time
"But we can't measure space without time
and there's no time without space"
So if time is space and space is time
Where and When is the Here and Now?

Light speed is the limit- nothing faster!
But the universe is so big and expanding so fast -
there are galaxies that we can never know;
Moving away from us faster than light.

Perhaps a physics teacher there is teaching to learn and learning to teach?
Miraculous and Pedestrian
All at once in the Here and Now?

Outhouse?

As our old-school gallon guzzling toilets need repair, I have been replacing them with low flush toilets. The latest toilet to be replaced is destined for the transfer station so I stuck it on the side of the house to make it easy to load into the van on my next run to the town "dump".

Later that same day, Sebastien went outside to enjoy the nice weather and was looking for a place to sit and enjoy his snack. I old him that I had just put a nice "chair" over on the side of the house that he could use. He looked and just rolled his eyes and went to sit on the steps. Wonder what the neighbors are thinking ("We heard he was from Alabama, but really...").

Hmmm.... Looking for a spot to read the Sunday paper this afternoon...

Canned Goods, Breakfast, and Imports

Isabelle: "Why can't we get any more of the fish-with-beans for the shi-fan?"

Irene: "The Chinese store doesn't seem to carry it anymore"

Me: "Is that the can that you buy that doesn't have any english on it at all?"

Irene: "No, it does have some english on it - it says "Not for sale outside of China"

Me: "Oh, and the store doesn't carry it anymore - huh..."

Hot Peppers-N-Anchovies

We were having pizza night and I was adding some anchovies to one of my slices.  The kids were fascinated/disgusted by this when I remembered we had a jar of hot peppers in the fridge.  Suddenly, I was back in Squirrel Hill, eating at that cheap pizzeria with PK where all we would ever order was hot peppers and anchovies.  Those were good times.  I told the kids about that and they asked "why did you always order that?"

I thought on it and said "Contrariness - none of our other friends liked either of those toppings so we never got to eat them on pizza unless we ordered it for ourselves so we ordered just those toppings as a statement to the world."

Don't be intimidated

Often, I will mock my own (lack of) drawing abilities by telling my students "Don't worry  - I will not expect you to be able to draw such a nice picture as I did on the test.  I understand that you all can not have the same artistic sensibilities as I!"

The other day, after making the joke for fourth or fifth time in the same class, I then interjected some of the metacognitive stuff that goes through my head when I have these moments and I admitted to the class "You know, I get a special thrill when I say these crazy things and I can identify that one student who has a doubt and is asking him- or her-self "I wonder if he actually thinks he is good at drawing?"  That moment of confusion gives me great joy.

By the way - that's a picture of  car demonstrating conservation of angular momentum as you take off from a stop.