Here we go here we go here we go

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Spent most of the day in my classroom, alternately rearranging desks and staring at the wall. I ended up taking the second classroom from the earlier post, mostly due to some late-breaking information about occasional temperature problems in the other room. The good news is that the other teacher has moved out of the room; the bad news is that she, uh, took a little bit more of the furniture than I was expecting her to, and one of the things I had to do was email the principal and ask for things like a file cabinet and a teacher desk.

I’m going to end up swapping about a third of the big desks for one-piece arm desks, which I think will end up as a best of both worlds situation in my room– I’ll have mostly the larger desks, which are more comfortable for bigger kids (and bigger teachers) and left-handed kids, and still have some of the smaller one-piece desks that will give me a little bit more room to move around the classroom once there are actual bodies at all of those desks. Right now there’s too many places where not only am I convinced I can’t move around between desks, I’m not sure I can have kids seated at both of them without bumping into each other.

I’ll get it sorted. Once I have I’ll post some pictures.

Oh, and I dropped just under $180 on classroom necessities today, too, without touching things like new clothes (not really an expense I can count, but still) and office supplies– just stuff that I know good and well I’m going to need no matter how I end up laying the room out. I do so love having to spend my own money to get my room set up, guys. It’s awesome.

Anyway. All sorts of family stuff going on tomorrow, which means I won’t have time to be in my classroom, so I’ve got Friday and all of next week to get ready for this. I am surprisingly enthusiastic about it, despite how this post might sound. This is gonna be a good year, dammit, if it kills me.

In which I leave the house

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We just got back from Doing a Thing, the annual Science Alive! event at the main branch of the St. Joseph County Public Library in downtown South Bend. This is the third year my wife has taken my son; I didn’t go the last two years because I was working every Saturday. It’s an interesting event; they basically take over the library with tons of booths and exhibits (too many, honestly; there’s stuff everywhere you turn, and tons of people, and I was stressed out from trying to keep from bumping into people or knocking little kids over) and most of them are hands-on in some way or another, which is pretty cool.

The ground floor was basically a mini-4H fair, with a lot of vaguely bemused-looking farm kids letting the terrified city folk do stuff like pet chickens, with the occasional pig or snake thrown in for good measure.

The upper floors were more … science-fair-ish, I guess? Not in the sense of people showing off experiments, but more like lots of table staffed by local college kids demonstrating some aspect of SCIENCE! to the kids. The weird thing was a lot of the time the science they were wanting to talk about was miles beyond the comprehension level of the small kids (my son is 7, and he was about average for the crowd, and there were a lot of kids way younger) who were there. I spent a couple of minutes watching some poor woman who is probably an excellent teacher when she’s surrounded by college students who want doctorates gamely struggling to relate square dancing and mathematics and fractions to each other … somehow? She literally had a whiteboard covered with equations next to her and I had to keep myself from bursting out laughing when she, entirely seriously, asked the group of elementary-age kids in front of her who wanted to square dance what the negative reciprocal of 1/2 was.

I would wager that, if you threw out the actual scientists, no more than 10% of the adults in the building could tell you what a negative reciprocal is. I mean, it’s not a difficult concept, but it’s not one of those things that most folk need to worry about, y’know? Then there was an entire room full of particle physics folks and one lonely astronomer. And, like, okay, radiation’s cool, and particle accelerators are cool, and whatever the spinny ball-balancy thing that my son was so enthralled with was neat, but I found myself wondering if anybody at all was thinking about age-appropriateness when they put this all together. Waving a hand-made Giger counter at a piece of Fiestaware is pretty neat, but I’m pretty certain that despite a valiant effort at explaining radioactivity by the two Ph.D candidates behind the table, it really didn’t get anywhere with my kid.

So. Yeah. Interesting event, but they maybe need to think a bit harder about the age group they’re pitching to and how they’re going to do that in the future.

A quick insight into my personality

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Django Wexler, an author I was rather fond of ten minutes ago, just did this to me:

I had a long day at work today, guys.  My last customer of the night kept me at work well past closing time and didn’t buy, I want to curl up in bed with a book, and instead this damn math problem is in my head and fucking with me.

I may need to grab a note pad and oh fuck it I’ll do it on the blog.

Let’s say N is 2.  So two bits, either 1 or 2.  Roll them once.

25% of the time you get both twos.  (so 25% of the time, only one roll)

50% of the time you get one two.

25% of the time you get two ones.

SECOND ROLL

If you have one die left, you have a 50% chance of being done.

If you have both, see the above calculation.

So…

this suggests you have a pretty big chance of being done after N rolls, with diminishing returns after N.  I’m too tired to nail the numbers down, but I suspect N2 is a reasonable answer. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to figure it out more carefully.

Assuming I can sleep, ever.

DAMMIT.

In which MATH NERDERY DESTROYS THE WORLD

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18lp8jstacc0xjpgThe new hotness for the boy lately has been Teen Titans Go!, which works for me because as it turns out I enjoy the program quite a lot.  It’s of that genre of cartoon where at the end of every episode the slate is wiped clean for the next episode, so literally anything can happen and the next episode they just pick up and move on.

To wit: there is an episode where one character blows up the moon.  And they do not all immediately die.  In fact, the blowing up of the moon is more or less passed over a few minutes later once the “YOU BLEW UP THE MOON?!?” moment is over.

“Would that really kill us all?” my wife muses.  “The moon’s awfully far away.”

“I think it would,” I say.  And then I start trying to figure out exactly how bad that might be.

Feel free to correct my math or my thinking if I’ve made a mistake.  HOWEVER:

  • The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is approximately 385,000 kilometers.
  • Assuming that the moon, once blown up, exploded evenly in all directions, by the time the debris field reached the earth it would form a sphere.  That sphere would have a surface area of 1.86 x 1012 square kilometers– or 1,860,000,000,000 square kilometers if you don’t like scientific notation.
  • This is a slight oversimplification, but we shall assume that the Earth presents as a flat disc for this scenario.  The Earth’s diameter is roughly 13,000 kilometers, so the disc has an area of 133,000,000 square kilometers.  That represents .00715054% of the total surface area of the sphere that the moon has exploded into.
  • The mass of the moon is 80,994,200,000,000,000,000 tons.  Or so.
  • Excel tells me that that means that the Earth would be hit by (calculating .00715054% of 80,994,200,000,000,000,000) approximately 5,791,523,012,258,060 tons of broken moon.
  • I don’t even know how to say that number.

Most of those numbers came from Google one way or another and were copy-pasted into Excel or figured out with online calculators.  The mass of the moon, in particular, seems to have a fairly wide range of accepted values.  I can imagine a universe where I ended up off by a factor of ten somewhere but something tells me it doesn’t make a difference.  

I’m still trying to figure out if anyone has estimated the mass of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, or if I have an easy way to kludge that (I actually can think of one way) but I suspect the following is true:

EDIT!

The generally accepted diameter of the Chicxulub asteroid is six miles.  This means that, assuming a perfect sphere (which isn’t true, I know), it was composed of 113.1 cubic miles of (assuming, assuming, assuming) iron.  That’s 16,648,088,371,200 cubic feet of iron.

A cubic foot of iron weighs 491.09 pounds.

Multiplying, we get an asteroid that weighs 8,175,709,718,212,610 pounds.  Divide that by 2000, and we get an estimate of 4,087,854,859,106 tons for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The amount of moon hitting Earth would be 141,676% of that amount.

So yeah.  We’re fucked.

In which I ain’t mad

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anigif_enhanced-9949-1393531503-3So, my kids bombed the Applied Skills, and I don’t care.  I’m not legally allowed to discuss individual test items, and that’s not an issue that I care to challenge the state on, so I’m not going to.  I can say the rest of this, though: I had maybe six or seven kids who didn’t even finish, which for my students is incredibly rare.  (By comparison, I had only two kids out of all my current students who didn’t finish it last year, and at least three times that many in one class this year.)  Every other seventh-grade teacher who I talked to, in more than one building, reported the same phenomenon: much higher than normal numbers of kids not finishing the test.

This tells me that the state way overshot the difficulty level, and they’ll adjust for that when they score.  Plus, as I said a couple of days ago, I have kids who got zero points on the Applied Skills in sixth grade and still passed the test.  I learned after my first year teaching sixth grade; this test always looks horrifying and tries to destroy both my own confidence in my ability to do my job and their own confidence in their ability to do their jobs (as a bonus, the hardest question was the first one again this year) and it is manifestly not worth stressing out about.  They came in confident, no one gave up, and I felt like they did their best on the LA test that came second today despite getting beaten down by the math test.  That’s really all I can ask for.  I’m not wasting time worrying about it.

Something I am going to spend my time worrying about:  remember Raymond?  Unfortunately, his seizure during class a couple of weeks ago was only the first in a series of them.  He’s not been in class very much lately as his parents have struggled to find the cause of the problem and adjust medications, but they sent him in today because of ISTEP testing.

He apparently had at least one seizure during the test today.  He didn’t test with me because of his disabilities; he gets extra time and he has difficulty with fine motor skills like writing so he’s got a scribe with him for the test.  His para told me that there was no point anywhere during the test where Raymond had any idea what the hell was going on around him or what he was supposed to be doing on the test.

I can’t get mad at his parents; they were trying to do what they thought they were supposed to do.  But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to raise hell to get that test invalidated, and I hope to hell his parents keep him home for the next couple of days.  This is true for obvious humanitarian reasons– this test is not important enough for a kid to jeopardize his damn health to take– and slightly-more-selfish reasons, such as the fact that current ed reform theory is that there is nothing more important to student test scores than the skill of the teacher (and I’m certainly the only one who’s going to get blamed) and I suspect that fuckin’ epilepsy might have a bit to do with his scores here.  I didn’t find out about all this until late in the day so I didn’t have time to talk to his parents; I’m sure as hell going to be meeting with administration tomorrow to see what we can do about invaliding the test.

I suspect that meeting is going to be fun.