Tricotomania and more

I may have mentioned that Tigger took a science class this term. Loosely based on the Grade 9 curriculum, it was 8 sessions of microscopy with a group of 8 kids. She loved it.

We have a microscope that my mom picked up somewhere (free or cheap) and she checked it out. Although not as good as the ones she used in her class, it is useable. But she didn’t get it out much, saving science for her class.

So, inspired by Theresa’s centres, I decided to set up a biology lab where she could just go in and do some work without having to get everything out and put it away afterwards.

It is in my laundry room. That photo is taken from the doorway, the washer (a front loader) and dryer are on the opposite wall (with a sink between them). There are clothes lines strung above the counter you see there though we plan to replace them with that nice metal rack you can see leaning against the end cabinet. The cat litter is in the space under the counter but it doesn’t get used unless we have indoor cats visiting (we provide respite care for a friend’s cat when they go away) or when mine or forced to stay inside for several days. I’ve put a stool there to sit on while she works.

On the counter is a corn stalk with a cob saved from when we cleaned out the annex garden in the fall. It has all the parts. I’m not sure what difference it makes that it is dried out but I guess we’ll see. Also a binder of science notes from the class and a couple of books that I got for her: The World of the Microscope and The Complete Book of the Microscope, both from Usborne. The World of the Microscope has actual experiments and activities using the microscope whereas the Complete Book is mostly information with great illustrations. You can also see that I bought a supply of microscope slides and cover slips which are sitting in boxes at the back of the counter. The wooden box is the case for the microscope.

Tigger has added a book from the shelf to that set, another book of science experiments that was hanging around. I’m not sure that it is directly relevant to microscopy but it does show some interest on her part.

I’m starting to get even more comfortable with her level. Although she’s bright and capable of doing some high school level work, I’m thinking that aiming for a sort of middle school review and introduction is a good way to go. I’m not worried about pushing her understanding too far as I think we will come back to lots of subjects and do them in more depth later. But I want to go beyond some of the material that is clearly aimed at younger children and skimps on the science a bit. These books seem to hit the right spot. And this microscope is probably fine for that level though we’ll need a better one when we get to more advanced work in a couple of year’s time.

Tigger is currently doing a cell biology/microscopy course. That prompted her to get out the microscope her grandmother had picked up for her free or cheap somewhere. She checked it out and thinks it is good for her purposes but we need some slides and cover slips and things. So I suggested that she ask her science teacher where he gets his stuff.

She came home with a borrowed copy of his catalogue from ProlabScientific and advice that it is better to phone them than order online. I note that slides and coverslips are in their back-to-school sale flyer. Hurray. (I also noted that they have a battery operated acceleration timer in the $40 range which is much cheaper than what I’d seen before, when we get back to thinking about physics.) There offices are right here in Ottawa. I’m not sure if that will make a difference on shipping (or mean I have a pick-up option).

For all you people teaching biology: any recommendations on which prepared slides we should order? Tigger would like some.  I don’t want to spend lots and lots of money but I’m happy to get some if they will be of ongoing use. Any ideas?

I’m reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage and came across this today (page 125 of the edition I have).

There are many times when the idea that there is indeed a pattern seems absurd wishful thinking. Random events abound. There is much in life that seems meaningless. And then, when I can see no evidence of meaning, some glimpse is given which reveals the strange weaving of purposefulness and beauty.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Not that many of us think much about particles and waves but since I read that cloud book…

One thing I love about blogging is how much I learn. I hope none of you were under the impression that I have everything figured out. I am a extrovert decision maker, which means that I need to talk about things with others in order to figure them out. And sometimes, just the word someone uses makes a whole bunch of stuff click.

“Probabilistic thinking” is a phrase Sarah used in her comment on my last post. (She also provided a link to a cool simulation so you might want to check that out.) I had been talking about how my general goal for math is to develop the skills needed to spend time working on tough problems and at least move towards a solution. But because the stuff we’ve been working on recently has been probability her response made me recognize a reasonable objective for the probability stuff: shifting to probabilistic thinking instead of “one right answer” thinking.

This ties in really well with the physics stuff I’d been reading because so much of physics relies on this way of looking at the world. As does so much of life, as I have also pointed out.

So now I have a clearer sense of what we’re doing and why. For now, anyway.

I started First You Build a Cloud quite a while ago and it got put down with a couple of chapters to go during all the kitchen reno. I also switched to the history book because I knew I wouldn’t be able to renew it at the library. This was one of those impulse buys after someone on the Living Math yahoo group posted a list (with links) of good books that they’d found at a good price at Book Closeouts. I thought I’d give it a try. And am I ever glad I did.

K.C. Cole is a science journalist and writes very engagingly about physics. Some of this material is pretty hard to understand but she takes you through a lot of that difficult stuff slowly and carefully, explaining in an engaging way some very complicated concepts. Of course, the most complicated issues in physics (as in a lot of science) are epistemological (how we know what we know). She tackles those issues head on with 5 chapters in part 1 “The Art of Knowing”. And the final chapters return to some of those big questions about order and disorder, cause and effect, and the importance of (some) small differences. As she states in the introduction, “The idea that science is inseparable from philosophy is a theme that pervades this book.” (p. 4)

This is reading that I’m doing for myself to get more comfortable with the big picture of science and mathematics so I can help guide Tigger through some of this territory in interesting ways. As I’ve said before, I’m not happy with the way a lot of science textbooks are organized, but I need more knowledge of the subject to be able to go text-book free (or to work out what we can use and what we can ignore and where to supplement).

This book won’t tell you how to teach physics to your kids. Nor will it give you all the physics knowledge you need to do so. But it will give you a deeper appreciation for what science is, how scientists think, and what scientific questions look like. Along with Nathalie Angier’s The Canon (reviewed by Becky here) and a range of other books, it should help you build up some sort of confidence with the scientific enterprise that will enable you to have interesting discussions about important topics or at least feel like you can begin to take part in those.

It seems that the popularity of classical education of various sorts is related to its simple goal that education should enable us to take part in the Great Conversation. So much of that conversation in the 21st century is about science and yet so many of us feel utterly unprepared to engage in that part of the conversation. This book would be a good first step to building our own ability to engage in this broader conversation. The beauty of Cole’s approach is that she treats it as the same conversation, linked in with humanist concerns with metaphor, truth, and argument.

When I walked into the living room this morning, I saw some evidence of how unschooling works. As far as I can work it out, you acquire resources and leave them somewhere accessible. You make sure folks know they are there but you don’t make too much of a big deal about them. One day, they get taken off the shelf and used. Usually at really odd times.

In our house, it seems that even Blitzen is interested in learning some chemistry.

For those that are interested, that is The Periodic Table: elements with style. I suspect this means that, as tiring as Shakespeare camp is, Tigger (who is not a cat, just to be clear) was reading it at 8 a.m. this morning.

The quilt in the background is one I made for her when I was pregnant and that Tigger still uses as a lap blanket. The shawl Blitzen is lying on is Peacock Feathers knit in some fingering weight alpaca I got from Elann several years ago.

I realized a long time ago that I seem to be raising a historian. Tigger is fascinated by history. Luckily, I am not one of those people who thinks that knowledge of a subject is a necessary precursor to the ability to teach it. My own knowledge of history is what most people would describe as woeful. I recall very little of what I was taught in school and took only one history class in university. My historical knowledge is pretty limited to early Canadian history, which means it doesn’t even extend to much knowledge of the opening up of the West. Homeschooling is fixing that, believe me.

With Tigger, finding a history of whatever we are studying is a sure fire way to spark her interest. We have read some history of mathematics, some general history of the world, studied the American Dust Bowl, and the voyages of Captain Cook. She and her father have been studying botany this spring, using Thomas Elpel’s Botany in a Day as a spine. Her dad found The Great Naturalists in the library and they have started expanding their study with historical study.

So when I ran across this article in the Observer about Darwin and the history of how he developed his theory of natural selection and how he came to publish it when he did, I thought I should make a note. One of the nice things about including history in science studies is that it makes that process of doing science clearer. Although there are rigourous methods and fairly strict rules about how you report your findings, the process of doing science can be a bit messy. And science is always done in a particular social and cultural context at a particular historical moment. When a scientist publishes his or her findings and how they choose to publish them is often driven by these concerns.

Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 – 150 years ago last week – at Darwin’s estate in Downe, in Kent.

Darwin, in his own words, was ’smashed’. For two decades he had been working on the same idea and now someone else might get the credit for what was later to be described, by palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, as ‘the greatest ideological revolution in the history of science’ or in the words of Richard Dawkins, ‘the most important idea to occur to a human mind.’ In anguish Darwin wrote to his friends, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell. What followed has become the stuff of scientific legend.

Darwin had been working on his material for 20 years at this point. But like many of us, he was putting off writing and continuing to research. Unlike 21st century scientists he was under no pressure to publish early and often. But the fear of being scooped pushed him into publishing his findings.

‘Wallace’s letter gave Darwin a good kick up the backside,’ says the geneticist Steve Jones. ‘He had prevaricated for 20 years and would have done so for another 20 if he hadn’t realised someone else was on the trail.’ The summer of 1858 changed everything for Darwin. Although by no means an arrogant man, he knew his worth. He was already a Royal Society Gold Medal winner and was not going to be robbed by a whippersnapper specimen collector in Malaysia. So he sat down, with a board across his knee, on the only chair in his house that could accommodate his long legs, and wrote up the research he had been carrying out for the past 20 years.

The form of what he wrote was also interesting. He did not write for the small audience of his peers but rather for a larger educated public.

Remarkably, it is the only major scientific treatise to have been written, deliberately, as a piece of popular writing, a book whose interlacing story lines have been compared with those of George Eliot or Charles Dickens and which is peppered with richly inventive metaphor. ‘Darwin was creating a lasting work of art,’ as Darwin’s biographer Janet Browne puts it.

They style may not seem that accessible to the 21st century reader but it is no less so than other writers of his time.

The rest of the article is well worth reading. Weighing the evidence of whether “natural selection” is Wallace’s or Darwin’s intellectual property brings in some very important points about the difference between a conjecture and theory. The key to the latter is the weight of evidence in support of it. The fact that Darwin had been working on this for 20 years before publishing means that he had a lot of evidence to bring to bear. Certainly many people can come up with the hypothesis that natural selection might explain a range of phenomena, but that hypothesis needs to be tested across a range of instances. Darwin had that evidence.

Go on, read the whole thing.

For me, the question of which individual should be credited with a particular discovery is the wrong question. All scientific knowledge is the product of many years of investigations, hypotheses, blind alleys, and the careful collection of substantial evidence. Many people are involved working together and separately. New ideas are born of discussion and debate. It is a particular historical and social context that leads to the desire to pin particular discoveries on individuals, and most of those deserve recognition. But one reason we should study the history of science along with the science itself, is to keep those individuals in perspective.

Scientific advances are built on more than genius and “eureka” moments. They are built on long, careful study, debate, discussion, trial and error, and a bit of humility.

Another suggestion from Becky, who has linked to some great reviews. Enough to entice me to buy the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments by Robert Bruce Thompson. (I’ve linked to the publisher’s site because there is a sample chapter there.) Now that I have it, I thought I would let you know about some of the things that have struck me now that I have the whole thing. I’m not sure if these were not mentioned in the other reviews or if I just didn’t notice them.

First of all, I think this is going to be a great resource for high school chemistry. I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, but the book claims to be all the labs you need for whatever level of high school chemistry you are going to do. I’ll need other texts to go with it to give the theory and whatnot, but the labs are usually the hard part. And it is about serious labs, not imprecise, kitchen-table approximations. Now, sometimes the latter are going to be fine, but I think it is good to have a real choice to do things precisely and properly. And I know that the lack of “proper labs” is something that makes many people seriously consider sending their kids to school for high school.

Others have mentioned the extensive introductory chapters covering safety, equipment, chemicals, basic techniques, etc. These are indeed impressive. All the information you need to make good choices based on your needs and budget. That includes the implications of your choices for things like accuracy and whether that is likely to make a difference for your purposes. In addition, in the lab descriptions themselves, there is a list of “substitutions and modifications” letting you know the implications of substitutions for this particular experiment. Very helpful.

There is also a very useful, and detailed, discussion (pages 5-7) of how to keep a proper lab notebook, making the connection between even introductory laboratory chemistry and practices in industrial and academic labs. I did chemistry up to 2nd year university level and don’t remember having this kind of guidance. A friend who is a biochemistry professor was once lamenting the state of her graduate students’ ability to keep good lab notebooks. It seems to me that this is a potentially very important practical detail that it is good to learn early. (Habit training, as we know, is invaluable.) A well kept laboratory notebook would also be a good thing to include in a portfolio for university admission.

The presentation is not post-modern and funky (à la DK books) but very modern and rectilinear. Now if that doesn’t suit your learner, maybe this is a problem, but I’ve met at least one mom whose kid really requires less distraction on the page. This isn’t designed as a “make chemistry fun” book. It is designed to help people discover how fun chemistry is for themselves. No fancy wrapping. Just good, plain, easy to read, uncluttered text. Boxes to set of important things like materials lists, cautions, side explanations, optional activities, and comments from the author’s advisors. Doing the actual experiment involves following linear text, often set out as a series of numbered steps. Sample tables for recording data are included, as are review questions. The introductory chapter suggests actually reproducing these in your (hardbound) laboratory notebook.

From the point of view of a parent, the information on pages 2-4 is invaluable. The author arranges the experiments in groups according to what kind of course you are following. And suggests the amount of time that should be alloted for chemistry labs. Those few pages really impressed me. I really felt like this made the book much more useful. Given my experience so far with the government curriculum guidelines and the textbooks I’ve looked at, I really like the fact that someone lays out some specific guidelines that don’t require a lot of between the lines interpretation.

There is a list of 15 experiments that would support a general chemistry course for those not going on in sciences. Although he doesn’t use this terminology this suggests to me a “general” course as opposed to a “university prep” course. Suggested allocation: weekly 60-90 minute lab sessions. He says that some might take more than one session so I guess maybe 20 total sessions. And you’d want to have a session all on safety and basic techniques, I’m guessing.

For those who want a full two years of high school chemistry, the second year being the AP chemistry course (or equivalent), he lays out the lab sessions that would be allocated to each year. In my mind this would be the “university prep” course. Suggested allocation: 90 minute to 2 hour lab sessions twice a week or a 3 to 4 hour session weekly, with the 2nd year being at the top end of that. There are 36 experiments in the first year of this course and 28 in the second. Very helpfully, for those who will actually be taking the AP exam, there is a table relating the experiments in the book to the list recommended by the College Board for the AP Chemistry exam (22 experiments).

I really like the fact that I can open the book to pages 2 and 3 and have a clear outline of a basic course, an advanced introduction, and a “further topics” course. Maybe all we ever do are the 15 basic experiments. But at least I know what kind of coverage that gives us. And we can do them properly, keeping a proper lab notebook.

So this book is going on my shelf. And anyone even considering homeschooling through high school should seriously consider getting a copy for their shelf, or at least borrowing it from the library to help make your decision. We won’t be ready for it for a couple of years yet, but I might dip into it for more rigorous descriptions of some of the experiments in Fizz, Bubble, and Flash. I’ve already discovered that we could use a bundle of pencil leads as an electrode rather than one, which might have saved us some frustration when we last tried to use that book. I will also use it as a reference for safety, techniques, and general guidance on buying equipment and chemicals.

Looking at this book and skimming the Ontario high school curriculum guidelines again, I realize that they start with a periodic table based course in the early years. So I am probably going to go back to my earlier plan (that never got executed) of doing that kind of course using Fizz, Bubble, and Flash for experiment suggestions, along with a bunch of other related books (many of which were also suggested by Becky at one time or another). Then in a couple of years, maybe we’ll try the general course suggested by Thompson.

A while ago, Steph kindly posted her plans for biology  for next year. Her daughter is going to be beginning highschool and she posted her draft plans seeking input. I think I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about Steph’s plans are that she always includes reading lists for herself. On this plan I noticed the book In a Patch of Fireweed by Bernd Heinrich. Actually it was the subtitle that caught my eye — A Biologist’s Life in the Field. I figured that this might be a good introduction to the discipline of biology, in the sense of the code of behaviour by which they “do” science.

I really enjoyed this book. It is beautifully written. (The link has a “search inside” so you can even read some of the first chapter.) And though the intended audience is adult, I think it would make a great read aloud for older children and teens, particularly for those of us who choose read-alouds that might be challenging for our kids to read themselves but that we think they will get a lot out of if they are not also concentrating on try to read it. The book is illustrated by the author’s own sketches, all of which are beautiful. We haven’t been doing nature journalling but if you have, there is lots in here that would help make the link from that practice to more rigorous science.

The book is a good combination of autobiography, nature journal, and reporting of scientific experiments. It’s real value is in demonstrating some of the invisible parts of the scientific process — how did you come to ask those questions? And how did you get from a field observation to a scientific study? Why did you collect that data and what do the statistics add that field observation without counting didn’t give you? That sort of thing. As such, I would recommend this book for anyone, not just those who are homeschooling (highschool). It has often been said that public knowledge of science is woefully inadequate and this book would be a pleasant way to get a better sense of how scientists see the world, how they think, and how they “do” science.

For those who are interested in insects, the book will be even more exciting. The subject matter of many of the chapters is beetles, moths, wasps and bees. While Heinrich is clearly fascinated by the natural world in general, he focuses on insects. He asks questions that might never occur to the rest of us, though, and makes insects more interesting for those of us who have never given them much thought.

For those who are homeschooling highschool, this book would make a good transition from elementary science, where the focus is on awareness of the world, close observation, and some general knowledge of processes, to secondary science, where more rigorous scientific method should be introduced. Whether or not nature journalling has been part of your homeschool, this book suggests to me that it would be a good practice as part of a field biology course (or course component) and gives good suggestions about how you would go beyond those field observations to develop a more rigorous observational study, collect some quantitative data, and/or do more library research.

And for those whose children are attending highschool, this book might provide some useful insights into the practice of biology that would enable you to help them if they are having some difficulty. We often notice that text-books skip what seems to be important contextual information in the rush to get through the requisite topics. Heinrich’s book would be an enjoyable way of renewing a sense of what biology is about that might enable you to help your kids get over whatever conceptual hurdles they are facing. Or just give them a different take on the subject that might inspire them to struggle through.

If you need a good, short example of why we sometimes need to count things and why quantitative data and graphs can be useful, I recommend the chapter ” Counting Yellowjackets”. The main argument in this chapter is for the value of quantitative data as close observation.

And the first chapter, “Flight into the Forest”, would fit well in a history syllabus about WWII. Although it’s purpose in the book is to describe how the author developed his fascination with the natural world, a fascination that developed into a career as a field biologist, it also serves well as a story of how one particular German family survived the war. And an interesting story it is, too. (That’s why I’ve put it in the history category.)

When I first came across the reference, I was somewhat annoyed that my public library had many books by Heinrich but not this one. I am glad I was forced to purchase it. I think it may be read by everyone in the house eventually, perhaps more than once.  And I am now keen to explore some of his other works, many of which are in my library.

Spring has sprung. There are still heaps of snow, particularly next to north facing walls, but the birds are about, plants are poking up through the soil, and the weather is lovely. I have snowdrops and crocuses in my front garden and they make me smile. We need to plan more in the back garden in the corner that melts first so we can see that kind of joy from the window. The cats are very happy (though not this afternoon because I’m keeping them indoors so I can find them for their vet appointment later) and have tried to bring birds in. I draw the line at wildlife in the house, dead or alive. Mostly they don’t bring it to me but catch birds (mostly sparrows, I am not worried about the general state of the population), chipmunks and other small wildlife for their own purposes.

My spring plan was to study botany and now that we can see the ground we have started. My partner, Mat, is leading on this because I will be travelling a lot in May. But when I’m in town, I’m joining in. Overall, my objectives are pretty simple.

• Develop the habit of taking nature walks.
• Observe nature carefully.
• Learn something about botany.

We are using the Elpel books as a guide. Mat and Tigger started reading Shanleya’s Quest this morning. He has been reading Botany in a Day at bedtime, giving me highlights and interesting facts. Also, Mat loves to draw and his Christmas present was a drawing class at the local art school, which he loved. So he is a much better candidate for the whole sketching side of this study.

We actually started on Wednesday. We went for a walk in the little woods that borders the Experimental Farm (an AgCanada site near our house). There was still snow in the woods so not much coming to life. We ended up collecting different kinds of pine cones and needles (ones that had already fallen to the ground). We came home and sketched what we collected (well Mat and Tigger did) and talked a bit about how conifers work and where they fit in the evolution of plants. I found a field guide online but it wasn’t designed in a way that makes it helpful for the kind of identification we are doing right now. We need to get some field guides that are organized by family so we can look at the characteristics of the plants we are observing and relate them to classification and whatnot.

Other things that happened included a rather detailed discussion of the plot of the Agatha Christie novel they are currently reading (Death on the Nile), with Tigger putting forward her thoughts on who might get murdered and who might do the murdering with her reasoning. Very interesting and worthwhile. Sometimes just going out walking offers an opportunity for this sort of thing in a more natural way. Since one of our learning goals is for her to develop her ability to discuss what she reads, I’m very happy that this is starting to happen spontaneously.

And while my goals are vague, I did decide to push her a bit to go out in the garden and actually sketch something related to the reading on the mint family that they did this morning. They had both gone out into the garden after reading the chapter but hadn’t done any sketching. I think I was right to give that gentle push because when I came back from my fitness class she had done some drawings and explained to me what the characteristics of the mint family were (clearly illustrated in her sketchbook). It didn’t take her long and she wasn’t bothered by it at all. The trickiest part of this whole homeschooling thing is knowing when to push (gently) and when to just drop something.

So we are off to a good start. Our plan is to go for 2 or 3 short nature walks every week. I suggested to Mat that a further objective of this unit could be

• To explore local conservation areas, parks, and other related amenities.

We like to go hiking. We like nature. We enjoy cycling. But we don’t get around to getting out and doing those things as often as we might like. And we’ve lived here for over 4 years now and haven’t been to some of the parks and conservation areas that are really close to us. So this might be part of objective 1 above. We need to get in the habit of going out and doing these things more often. And we need to have a sense of the places that we could go. We seem to be on our way.