A Phila Science Saga

Saturday - Snow, Bread.
Sunday - Meditation, Superbowl.
Monday - Snow Day, House Cleaning.
Tuesday - School, No after-school activities.
Wednesday - Snow Day, sledding down the Art Museum steps?
Thursday - Snow Day?
Friday - School, I hope.
Saturday - At home!
Sunday - At MIT, Valentine’s Day, Pasta.
Monday - President’s Day.
Tuesday - School, So where were we?
July - School.

Mom keeps complaining about how we have more snow in Philadelphia than they do in New England. Personally, I’m enjoying it.

Did you know?

After spending a long weekend in the fridge, eyeballs get softer and their corneas and lenses get cloudy (instead of clear).

Now you know!

Today was a snow day.

Unfortunately, today was also a Saturday.

Oh well.

Looking out at the park from my bedroom window:

Looking out the front door this morning. Notice the classic South Philly awnings on the neighbor’s house:

Walking to the supermarket with the roomies. The streets were clear, and the sidewalks hadn’t been shoveled yet. Nobody was driving, but there were lots of people walking through the streets:

After shopping I baked bread, which has got to be the best snow day activity ever! Now were watching But I’m a Cheerleader and eating leftover Institute popcorn (slightly burnt for the full effect).

Yesterday, we were finally able to dissect calf eyes in Science of Communications. All in all, the day went fabulously. Many students stepped up their behavior, acting appropriately throughout the activity. Several students who had insisted that they would, under no circumstances, touch and eyeball got gloved up and participated. Others who had been excited about the dissection, were disgusted or felt nauseous and watched from a distance. One of my top students, a real trooper just back this week from maternity leave, felt sick to her stomach but plowed through anyway.

At one point there was a commotion at the back of the room and a group of three students ran out of the room. I got them back inside and back to work and didn’t think anything of it until I stepped outside during the passing time before the next period and found eye bits on the hallway floor. Also, one student in another section walked out just before we began to clean up, leaving his materials (and eye bits) on his desk. I hope he washed his hands.

Okay picture time:

The idea was to take the eyeball apart and identify the various components that we had studied, then place the pieces on an Eye Anatomy Organizer:

The boxes for the lens and the vitreous humor have text printed in them so that scientists (students) can observe the effects of these optical elements. Zooming in on the Lens square in the previous picture shows the text magnified by the lens:

Cows, cats, and other nocturnal creatures (not humans) have a semi-reflective tapetum just beneath the retina. This is why these animals’ eyes seem to glow when you catch them in your headlights. The cow’s tapetum is a brilliant blue green, and is super pretty:

Here’s another tapetum pic. This student had phenomenal dissecting technique! (Far superior to mine.) He should be a surgeon.

The vitreous humor is also pretty as you squeeze it out of the eyeball. The vitreous humor is a lot like eggwhite (a transparent suspension of water and protein). It gives the eyeball some form and holds the retina in place along the back of the eye:

And we’ll close out with one more. The student on the right is pulling back the cornea with her forceps. You can see into the eyeball through the lens to the tapetum below.

You’ve got a future in orange juice…
’cause I’m gonna beat you to a PULP!

In Physical Science today I had planned to do a set of Newton’s Second Law practice problems. However this never came to pass. A student asked why I had “XLIII” written on the white board next to the date. I explained that that was the number of false fire alarms we have had in school since the start of MMX. Out of curiosity, I began tallying at the beginning of the new year, and quickly switched to Roman numerals when the tally marks took up too much space. And yes, the lower bound on fire alarms over the last XXII days of school is XLIII, or approximately II each day.

The students went on to inform me that there were questions on the predictive tests last week that required the use of Roman numerals, which they didn’t really know how to use. (Predictive tests are standardized test that are supposed to predict how the students will do on other standardized tests. It makes perfect sense.)

So, in the spirit of standardized test prep (which we’re supposed to be doing at least I day a week instead of teaching our classes, since we all know that the best test preparation is skipping XX percent of class time) I launched into a quick review of Roman numerals, which soon turned into a period-long event.

Then the inevitable question: “This is stupid [awkward, confusing, cumbersome, wack] Why do we need to know this?” Teachers hate the obvious response that the students need to know it since it appears on the Test, but really what else do they need it for? I can think of IV instances where Roman Numerals are helpful:

You can decide which of these is the most relevant.

Since writing years is perhaps the most common use of Roman numerals, this is what we practiced the most. We did this year (MMX), the birth and death years of science greats like Sir Isaac Newton (MDCXLIII-MDCCXXVII) and Albert Einstein (MDCCCLXXIX-MCMLV), and the birth and death years of great musicians like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (MDCCLVI-MDCCXCI) and Michael Jackson (MCMLVIII-MMIX). We also did the students’ birth year (MCMXCV for most) and my birth year (MCMLXXXVII). They didn’t believe I was that young. I had to show my ID.

A big high-V to anyone who decoded all XXI Roman Numerals in this post!

At 6:30 this morning, I was roused from my slumber by a car horn beeping outside my window.

My first thought, of course, was, Oh shoot! I slept all the way through Sunday and it’s now Monday morning and Ms. M is here to pick me up and I’m still in bed. Ach! I’ve never slept through an entire day before, so this was an excessively paranoid thought. However, that level of rationalization was not available in the seconds after my rude awakening.

I grabbed my alarm clock and brought it 6 inches from my not-yet-spectacled eyes so that I could read the day of the week. It was Sunday. Relief. I went back to sleep.

In other news the big buildup to eye dissection was great! But, the butcher didn’t come through with the eyes. So I cried a little, the asked a few other butchers if they could get eyes. We’ll try again for next Friday.

Tomorrow or Thursday, I’m expecting a call from a pork butcher in the Italian Market informing me that my eyes are ready. The butcher gets 10 pigs delivered each Wednesday, and the eyes usually go to a local hospital or ophthalmology school where doctors practice operating on them. But this week, I called dibs first, so all 20 of this weeks fresh porcine eyeballs will be coming my way. We’ll dissect them in Science of Communications on Friday. It’ll be sweet.

I’ll try to remember to take some pictures to share with you, but if you just can’t wait to see the inside of an eye, there are a bunch of dissection videos on YouTube. Here’s one of them.

Last night, I heard the UPenn Choral Society sing Mozart’s Requiem. I know the piece so well that it’s difficult to simply enjoy it without critiquing too much, but all in all it was an enjoyable performance.

I’ve titled this post Requiem, by Mozart, et. al. to remind us that Mozart is just one of several composers responsible for the work’s composition. Mozart died while the mass was largely unfinished, so that task fell to several of Mozart’s students, principally Süssmayr. However, there were still some expected pieces missing. This performance was unique among those I have heard, in that one of those missing pieces was filled in!

All the major sections of the requiem end with a fugue… except the Sequence, ending with Lacrimosa, which ends with a simple plagal cadence (IV to I) on the word “amen”. (This is the same cadence you hear on the word “amen” at the end of many hymns.) In the 1960’s, a new fragment was discovered that appears to be the subject to an amen fugue that Mozart had written but his students had not attempted to complete. Scholars believe that this fugue was intended to close the Sequence of the requiem.

Well, a UPenn graduate student did just that, and last night the choir sang a new amen fugue, based on Mozart’s sketch. It didn’t sound very Mozartian… or maybe it was just odd to hear unfamiliar music in the middle of a familiar work. Halfway through the fugue I decided that I would be willing to give it my stamp of approval if it ended with a plagal cadence to tie it back into the familiar version. Unfortunately, it ended with a deceptive cadence followed by an authentic cadence—just like the end of the Kyrie/Cum Sanctis fugue. Oh well.

Here are the promised pictures of our holiday mini-decorations in our *cough* immaculately clean house. (The irony is, in the hour since I took these pictures Ms. F has tidied the living room for guests that are coming over this evening for dinner and games.)

Yes, the menorah, with candles, is shorter than a 12 oz. Coke bottle.

Note the homemade aluminum foil angel, along with the bike parking lot which dominates our living room.

I took a sick day today. This was my first missed day of school. It felt fantastic. I’m only marginally unwell, but the main purpose of the day was to catch up on overdue grad school papers, get ahead on next week’s grad school work, catch up on paperwork that’s been piling up at home (insurance, benefits, loans, etc.), plan the next physical science unit (forces and motion), and rest my voice before Sunday’s concert… yeah it’s been a busy day.

This being the first night of Chanukah, I set out 10 minutes before sundown to buy a menorah and candles. Candles were easy. A menorah in South Philadelphia… not so much. The only thing resembling a menorah was a mini-menorah in CVS. To give you a sense of scale, the candles are about the same size as (maybe slightly smaller than?) your average birthday candle.

I left CVS without buying the mini-menorah.

After crossing the street, though, it occurred to me that Ms. S’s Christmas tree, which stands a whopping two and a half feet above the top of the side table on which it sits, is equally small and pathetic looking. So, I went back into CVS and bought the thing.

We now have the matching holiday mini-set.

My Chanukah candles burned for 10 ± 1 minutes before going out. It was, in fact, fairly pathetic… and they will only burn faster as their number grows.

I’ll post pictures of our holiday mini-decorations (and maybe mini-latkes) tomorrow.

Happy Chanukah!

Physical Science unit test today. So how about some stats:
Max score 90%
Min score 0% (she ripped it up… then later blamed the boy next to her for ripping it up)
Mean score 45%
Standard dev 32%
3 out of 12 students had passing grades (and they passed with an A and 2 B’s… nobody scored in C or D range).
We had 80%(ish) mastery on one of the six learning goals.

One girl who misses a lot of school to care for her son came in for extra help yesterday. That really paid off: one of the B’s is hers.

Another boy was being taunted and hit with projectiles through the second half of the test. I called for police to take the attacker out, but the policeman basically refused. The victim had near perfect scores on the first part of the test (what I expect to get from him), but that good start deteriorated rapidly as he was distracted by the taunts, projectiles, and the strong urge to retaliate. I was proud of him for not retaliating, even when he received an eyeful of hand sanitizer as he was leaving the classroom.

I feel powerless in this class. My pink slips don’t do anything, and if the police don’t back me up when I ask to have someone removed from my class then I’m sort of out of luck. I really feel like this one kid is the lynchpin holding the whole class back from respectful behavior and learning. I just want to get him out of the class.

In other news… this morning’s monsoon has caused the Wissahickon stream to overflow its banks onto the bike trail, so I’ll be riding in with Ms. M again tomorrow. Also, during our review yesterday, I gave my students a moment to work through a problem. I asked one student what he had come up with.
He had nothing.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“I was thinking about the ocean,” he replied.