Build It and They Will Come

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. ... Field of Dreams”

Have you ever wondered about science?

Ok, that is a little broad. I will rephrase the question.

Have you ever wondered what particle physics is?

Still too broad, I will try one more time.

Have you ever wondered what protons, neutrons, and electrons are made of?

Well I have. I may be confessing my inner nerd but I wonder about these things all the time. I constantly am wondering what happened before the Big Bang, or matter could appear out of nothing, or how the universe can keep expanding, and what the theory of relativity really means. I constantly get lost on Google searching what a neutrino is and what dark matter is made of. I even watch NOVA for fun.

Unfortunately for me whenever I can actually find the answer to one of these questions it is usually such an abstract concept that I cannot even begin to make sense of it.

This is the part where I start talking about the book I read this week.

But first a confession: I didn’t finish the entire book. Actually I only got about a third of the way through it. This is totally my fault because I got the unabridged version which is somewhere in the realm of 550 pages. I don’t know the exact count because I have a Kindle and it uses Loc which no one actually knows what it means or how it derives it.

I am going to finish this book. I will also buy the hard copy. I will also encourage other people to read it, especially people who have ridiculous misunderstandings about scientific topics that when better understood will make them a lot less ignorant.

So the book I read was Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’m not going to do a book report because the title tells it all.

I am not going to write about the funny anecdotes used to engage readers while reading about the history of geology, that is obviously an upside to this book.

I am not going to write about the vast amount of information that this book contains either, the length and title should allude enough to that.

I really think that one thing is worth mentioning other than sincerely expressing how great a book this is in all ways. So, what I would like to mention is that what Bryson does especially well is take complicated physics theory’s and  put them into words that regular humans can understand. Furthermore, when he feels that the theory is just plain ol un-understandable (based on the physicists own inability to understand their own theorem) he doesn’t make you feel inferior. All Bryson does in these situations is tell you that people don’t need to understand such things, nor could they.

I think this is the true genius of this book. Too often non-science types are made to feel inferior because we can’t grasp the concept of space-time. The truth is that space-time, and many other science concepts, are extremely complicated and difficult for everyone to understand. If it weren’t difficult to understand physics wouldn’t be a specialized field of study that requires years of education to enter into.

There are people out there that do what to know what is going on at CERN and what the edge of the universe is. Regular people with these questions should not be left out of the loop when it comes to the answer just because they don’t have two PHDs and can speak in binary code.

I once had an instructor teach me that when in a child asks about black holes or dark matter to steer the conversation towards a more answerable topic.

I say bullshit to this!

If a student asks me about something really complicated and difficult to explain, not to mention way beyond a middle school science class curriculum, I will tell them that I would gladly help them find out what ever there is to find out.

If a fourth grader is curious about dark matter awesome! Real learning is driven by curiosity and I would never what to shut that down.

Remember that kid from one of the articles we had to read who hated reading in English class, it was most likely because he had to read this book.

There was a moment last night, when she was sandwiched between the two Finnish dwarves and the Maori tribesmen, where I thought, "Wow, I could really spend the rest of my life with this woman".

Most of you probably don't remember Julio. He was that seventh grader that was followed around by researchers to understand what video games had to do with reading. He would choose to read a book about video games that was way above his tested reading level but would never even finish the book assigned for him to read in his lit class.

I wonder why he couldn't read the books in his lit class?

Maybe his teacher was assigning him books like Charles and Emma. The teacher probably was thinking, "I know the kids hate reading the book that Darwin wrote, but I bet they will love this one. It incorporates about ten whole pages worth of information actually pertaining to science while the rest is like watching a BBC Brit com on mute. The children will love it! Ooooo my little lovelies!"

That last part was the teacher referring to her class of seventh grade hoodlums.

The point is that Charles and Emma is exactly the type of book that a seventh grade boy would look back on and associate it with the exact moment he stopped reading.

I'll be honest I probably won't finish it. I'm about half way through it and it is terribly boring, nothing has happened yet except that ol' Chuck got married and had some kids and organized his specimens.


Add to the boring plot the fact that the voice in my head that says aloud the words as I read them sounds like Renee Zellweger which just sucks.

Now I am going to try to go and finish the book because now that the pressure is off it may actually be enjoyable and because I keep hearing Renee say, "You had me at hello."

Steinkuehler, C. (2010). Digital literacies: Video games and digital literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), 61-63.

I would rather be reading the third book in the Ember seires than writing this blog, I guess literacy wins.

"It all comes down to this roll. Roy Munson, a man-child, with a dream to topple bowling giant Ernie McCracken. If he strikes, he's the 1979 Odor-Eaters Champion. He's got one foot in the frying pan and one in the pressure cooker. Believe me, as a bowler, I know that right about now, your bladder feels like an overstuffed vacuum cleaner bag and your butt is kinda like an about-to-explode bratwurst."

The Ember/Sparks books got me thinking about a lot of things: Religion vs. Atheism, Seeking knowledge rather than living in a state if ignorant bliss, communism vs. capitalism, feminism, entitlement/fairness, and war.

I am not sure which of these the author was really to get us to think about. I don't think  I am going to try and tackle all of these in one blog because its Valentine's Day and I am getting ready to go out to eat some Pho at Just Pho.

I think I will discuss the most alarming attribute of the characters in the book; their sense of entitlement and fairness as presented in the second book.

The Emberites and people of sparks seem to have this innate sense of entitlement. Actually it really only lies in the Emberites, the people of Sparks are just greedy. When the Emberites came to the city of Sparks they asked for help. I feel like this was a natural thing to do. I would do the same thing if I arrived in a strange new world and had nothing. I would ask the people I met to help me. The people of Sparks did the nice thing and made a plan to help them. What they should have done is incorporated the Emberites into their community. They would have had a larger workforce, and despite the initial scarcity of resources they would have faced everyone would have been OK in the long run.

The Emberites were guilty in making the people of Sparks hate them, besides Tick's stupid antagonism. They never offered to help do anything when they got there. All they did was ask for food and shelter and more of it. I guess that since they were use to the Builders giving them everything they had no sense of work, but it should seems obvious that they should have offered to earn their stay.

This trait of the Emberites made me really mad. I thought they should have been kicked out of the town of Sparks because they were acting like horrible guests.

 Luckily Doon and Lina were there to save the day through kindness and goodwill towards others.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the book and plan on reading the third one as soon as I finish burning my tongue on some super hot pho I do think that the author was too naive in her vision of a post disaster world. She obviously has never The Road or 28 Days Later. In the post apocalyptic world there will be bands of murderers running around raping and pillaging those who have resources. The truth is that people hate to work and if they can stuff without having to do anything they will.

Maybe that is the point of the book. Not that war is bad, or girls rule/boys drool, or that curiosity and innovation are good things but rather that it is better to work for the things you need in your life and not just expect them to be handed to you.

So in addition to the other things I will do as a teacher (in case you forgot they include not using any technology and only allowing students to make a 100% on assignments) I will also devote a portion of every class to instruction on how to survive on your own. Lesson one: how to grow butternut squash.

The Digital Revolution Zealots Are Just Plain Annoying

After watching the two Frontline documentaries yesterday I came to the conclusion that two things are happening simultaneously regarding the digital revolution that is taking place inside and outside of the classroom.
1. There are a bunch of crazy people complaining about a completely unstoppable force called the internet.
2. People's concer with other people's well-being (basically sticking their noses where they don't belong) is stopping natural selection.

For me the internet has never created a problem, nor has it ever gotten close to becoming an addiction. I have an IPhone, home PC, laptop, Kindle, IPod Touch, IPod Nano, 2 Tv's with HDMI hook-ups, 6 GPS devices, a digital camera, and a TI-83 calculator. Never have I felt like these have casued harm in my life. They are all just tools that I use to communicate, be entertained, find my way, and play Mario (thanks TI-83).

Some people it seems play video games too much and forget to eat. Not really my problem. If it was my kid it wouldn't have happened in the first place. I say let the person get really hungry and then they will probably put the controller down and go eat some Doritos. I'm not really for telling someone else how to live their life. It should be a given that sitting in front of a screen all day is probably not the best thing for you. But if it makes you happy and you feel fulfilled then its cool with me, I don't want to stop anyone from being happy.

We are constantly trying to look out for other people, but it is in a very selfish way. Take the whole suicide thing. Yeah it sucks, but the whole reason for being against it is selfish. You don't want someone you love to kill themself because it will cause YOU pain, regardless of the amount of pain they are in. I'm not saying it isn't sad/bad/horrible, I'm just telling the truth.

If you do some research to find out if technology is good or bad print it up and then let people decide for themself. And if they want to smoke two packs a day that is there choice. I'll be honest cigarrettes are pretty tasty! Wait I was talking about technology, I meant to say electric vapor cigarrettes are pretty tasty.

When it comes to your children teach them what you think is good and bad, but don't worry about other people's kids, leave that up to the religious right.

In my classroom I am not going to have any technology. I am going to make every student handwrite everything and I don't want to use a smart board. Why? That way I will not have to grade any papers the entire year because kids these days don't know how to communicate other than via text message.