Introduction

What does a teacher really contribute to learning? ►


Is it not the student's responsibility to inspire and motivate himself? The teacher leads by example, establishes trust (partly by easing the fear of failure), presents to students interesting or desired topics or skills, and provides instruction and assessment (that hopefully doesn't punish). The rest is up to the student. Or is it? Is successful teaching only measurable by the extent to which a student is somehow induced to learn?

What teachers often share with each other is the craft of teaching; the employment of techniques and the solution to problems. Teachers rarely discuss what teaching itself actually is. It is like asking a fish what swimming is: "I don't know, I just do it."

There is such a thing as teaching. ►


Teaching is not coaching, though it can include coaching. Teaching is not training, though training can be a part of teaching. Teaching is not just explaining, not just instructing, it is not supervising, it is not facilitating, not babysitting, not managing, not providing services, not delivering curriculum, not simply and somehow the inverse of learning. It is its own activity, its own expertise, an expertise that happens to have student learning as an end goal.


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David Labaree - Targeting Teachers

David Labaree is a historian and retired Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This essay is taken from his website (https://davidlabaree.com/).

He introduces the essay thus: ►

In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of educational firepower, value-added measures. I show how this measure misses the mark by profoundly misunderstanding the nature of teaching as a professional practice, which has the following core characteristics:

  • Teaching is hard
    • Teachers depend on their students for their professional success
    • Students are conscripts in the classroom
    • Teachers need to develop a complex teacher persona in order to manage their relationship with students
    • Teachers need to carry out their practice under conditions of high uncertainty
  • Teaching looks easy
    • It looks like an extension of child raising
    • It is widely familiar to anyone who has been a student
    • The knowledge and skills that teachers teach are ones that most competent adults have
    • Unlike any other professionals, teachers give away their expertise instead of renting it to the client, so success means your students no longer need you
  • Teachers are an easy target
    • Teachers are too visible to be inscrutable and too numerous to be elite
    • They don’t have the distance, obscurity, and selectivity of the high professions — so no one is willing to bow to their authority or yield to their expertise

Here's the link to the complete essay on his website: https://davidlabaree.com/2024/07/04/targeting-teachers-3/

Here's the link to the original publication in Dissent, 2011: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RvOPUrxd9UKMJGDPLB7UY5ZFlzrUmsHf

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Sunday, December 1, 2019

The Collision that Formed the Moon

I was poking around YouTube looking at videos about where the Earth's Moon came from. The currently accepted theory is called the Giant Impact Hypothesis. Though details differ, the main idea is that a smaller planet collided with the early Earth, and the Moon arose from the resulting debris. This hypothesis continues to be tweaked to this day, and other hypotheses continue to be proposed, all because details remain in the existing evidence that are unaccounted for. It's both delightful and a little surprising that the research is still quite active.

I was looking for an up-to-date simulation of the Giant Impact as opposed to an artist's interpretation. I was hoping that, given the current state of computer simulations, there might be something amazing available. There are older videos on YouTube about the Giant Impact which use pretty impressive artist's interpretations. But artists will sometimes take liberties with the physics if it makes the animation more engaging. What I wanted my students to see was a computer simulation that is based on a mathematical model that is allowed to run unedited and unimpeded. Like this:



This is clearly a simulation, probably run on a supercomputer. There is no question that the imagery is based on a model. You can even see the individual elements, almost like little blobs, for which calculations are being run to determine the next state of each blob.

Eventually I came across this video:



I loved this simulation. You can see the resemblance to the one above. The video is obviously a clip from a longer video, but no credit was given. So I hunted and hunted until I found the source:



This is a longer video featuring the work of Dr Robin M Canup, who is also narrating. Dr Canup is associated with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder CO, where she has used supercomputer simulations to create and build her Moon-formation models. She has also participated in the production of "data-driven cinematic animations," like the one in the video above.

This video is a preview of a portion of a Fulldome Planetarium show called "The Birth of Planet Earth," produced by Spitz Creative Media, the Advanced Visualization Lab of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc., set for release in 2019. (More details in this report and in this video).

As nice as this 2018 mini-documentary is, I still wanted just the simulation, so I edited it out of the video as its own clip and stripped the audio. I thought about adding some kind of background music, or using music from the original video. Dr Canup's narration was pretty good, but just not lined up with the simulation clip. I really liked the idea of the female narrator also being the physicist whose work this was - something I'd be proud to point out to my students. So I copied the audio of her narration (with the music), added it to my clip, tweaked the timing a bit, faded the ends, and then had to stall the beginning of the clip to fit the whole audio. I built an elaborate fade-in with the visuals so the stall would feel more natural. It also allows the viewer a chance to focus on Dr Canup before the visual effects of the collision take over. Here is the final result:



A final note: Dr Canup appears in an earlier, similar production created for the History channel in 2007. Here's one version of it on YouTube.

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New Demonstrations

A couple of new quick labs for my students this fall. Thanks physics Twitter!





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