Homeschooling & science

I found this article through Happy Hearts at Home and I thought it might be helpful to some of my readers. I was struck by Landry's comments about science education.

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College Professor Critiques Homeschoolers
copyright 2009 by Greg Landry, M.S.

I teach sophomore through senior level college
students - most of them are "pre-professional"
students. They are preparing to go to medical
school, dental school, physical therapy school,
etc.

As a generalization, I've noticed certain
characteristics common in my students who were
homeschooled. Some of these are desirable,
some not.

Desirable characteristics:

1. They are independent learners and do a great
job of taking initiative and being responsible
for learning. They don't have to be "spoon fed"
as many students do. This gives them an advantage
at two specific points in their education;
early in college and in graduate education.

2. They handle classroom social situations
(interactions with their peers and professors)
very well. In general, my homeschooled students
are a pleasure to have in class. They greet me
when the enter the class, initiate conversations
when appropriate, and they don't hesitate to
ask good questions. Most of my students do
none of these.

3. They are serious about their education and
that's very obvious in their attitude, preparedness,
and grades.

Areas where homeschooled students can improve:

1. They come to college less prepared in the
sciences than their schooled counterparts -
sometimes far less prepared. This can be
especially troublesome for pre-professional
students who need to maintain a high grade
point average from the very beginning.

2. They come to college without sufficient
test-taking experience, particularly with
timed tests. Many homeschooled students have a
high level of anxiety when it comes to taking
timed tests.

3. Many homeschooled students have problems
meeting deadlines and have to adjust to that in
college. That adjustment time in their freshman
year can be costly in terms of the way it affects
their grades.

My advice to homeschooling parents:

1. If your child is even possibly college
bound and interested in the sciences, make
sure that they have a solid foundation of
science in the high school years.

2. Begin giving timed tests by 7th or 8th grade.
I'm referring to all tests that students take, not
just national, standardized tests.

I think it is a disservice to not give students
timed tests. They tend to focus better and score
higher on timed tests, and, they are far better
prepared for college and graduate education if
they've taken timed tests throughout the high
school years.

In the earlier years the timed tests should allow
ample time to complete the test as long as the
student is working steadily. The objective is for
them to know it's timed yet not to feel a time
pressure. This helps students to be comfortable
taking timed tests and develops confidence in
their test-taking abilities.

3. Give your students real deadlines to meet in
the high school years. If it's difficult for students
to meet these deadlines because they're
coming from mom or dad, have them take
"outside" classes; online, co-op, or community
college.
_______________________________

Greg Landry is a 14 year veteran homeschool dad
and college professor. He also teaches one and
two semester online science classes, and offers
free 45 minute online seminars..
http://www.HomeschoolScienceAcademy.com

Thoughts on Pollution

My guest blogger today is Kerm, a 7-year-old who likes "bubble gum" and "organizing things." Kerm wants to share his thoughts on pollution with you. Kerm says:

"... Pollution is cool to try to help but sad. [It is sad because] you don't want the whole world getting polluted."

(Mama Joules adds: Pollution occurs when air, water, or soil gets contaminated [or dirty]. Too much man-made noise and light are kinds of pollution, too. Pollution makes it hard to enjoy the earth. If you've seen trash floating down a river or had trouble breathing when the sky is covered in brown smog, you've experienced the negative effects of pollution.)

Kerm has several tips to help stop pollution that you can try.

"Stop using so much electricity ... When you leave your house, turn off the lights."

"Never litter. Littering is bad for the environment. If everyone littered, the whole world would be piled in trash. Who wants to have garbage in their face?"

"Stop buying stuff. If you read this blog post now, then in one year, check your closets. If there's anything that still has tags on it or that you don't remember buying, get rid of it. Give it to someone who actually needs it."

"Remember to recycle old paper and boxes. Throwing out stuff that you can recycle like glass ... is just a waste. Remember to reduce, reuse, and recycle!"

"If everybody tried a little harder, the world would be a lot better."

Length, Area, and Volume

Hello, I'm Mama Joules' husband. Julie has asked me to write a blog post for her. I have loved science since I was a little kid, and still find all kinds of questions fascinating. I work as a researcher in cryptography, and I usually try to understand things in terms of math, even stuff like biology.

Have you ever wondered why ants can't be ten feet tall? The answer has to do with scaling. If you made an ant ten feet tall, all kinds of things inside the ant would stop working, because they wouldn't scale up well. The same thing applies in a lot of other places. Even if you made a perfect scale model of an airplane or a bridge or a building, some things about how it worked would change, as it got bigger or smaller.

Making things bigger or smaller changes the length of each part of those things, but also their area and volume. In this post, I want to get you thinking about these different ideas, because they help explain why ants aren't ten feet tall, why elephants and mice move so differently, and all kinds of other things.

The area of something tells you how much paint you would need to cover it. If you have a square piece of paper, you need a certain amount of paint to cover it. But if you get a square piece of paper that's twice as big on each side, you will need four times as much paint! You can see why it works this way in the picture below.


You can experiment with this. Cut out two squares, so that one is twice as big as the other on each side. Then, see how many pennies it takes to cover the smaller square, and how many to cover the larger square. Doubling the length of the square quadrupled the area.

Think about a very small house, maybe a doghouse. Maybe you only need one can of paint to paint this house. Imagine stretching that house, till it's twice as big on each side--you would need four cans of paint! If you stretched it until it was three times as big on each side, you'd need nine cans of paint. (Those numbers, 1,4,9,..., are called squares. Look at that picture again, and see if you can guess why.) That's a scaling effect. If you double the size of your house, you quadruple the number of cans of paint you need for it. If you triple the size of your house, you need nine times as many cans of paint!

The volume of something tells you how much paint it would take to completely fill it up. Since paint is kind of messy, you might prefer to think about it in terms of the number of marbles it would take to fill it up.

Let's think about that house, again. How much stuff could we put in the house? Let's suppose we have a house that's 10 feet on a side, and we fill the house up with marbles. Now, suppose we could somehow stretch the house to be 20 feet on a side. We'd need eight times as many marbles to fill it up! And if we stretched the house to be 30 feet on a side, we'd need twenty-seven times as many marbles! Look at the pictures to see why. (You can also probably guess that these numbers, 1,8,27,64,125..., are called cubes.)

You can do an experiment with this, too. You'll need to either find or make two boxes, so that the bigger box is twice as big as the smaller one on every side. Then, find something to fill the boxes with--packing peanuts will work, or ping pong balls. Count the number of items that fit in the smaller box. Then count the number in the larger box.

As anything gets bigger, its volume increases faster than its area, and its area increases faster than its height, width, or depth. Can you think of other ways things work differently, as they get bigger or smaller?

Ant NebulaPhoto credit: NASA/Space Telescope Science InstituteNote from Mama Joules to Itinerant Cryptopher: This was the biggest ant I could find! :)

I like caterpillars

Today, I am pleased to announce that I have a guest blogger!

"Kerm" is 6 years old and likes to "play fun games and jump on the couch." Kerm's favorite subjects in school are science and math. When I interviewed Kerm, this is what he had to say about caterpillars:

I have a caterpillar in my room because I like studying the earth around me and I like studying bugs. I want the caterpillar to change into a butterfly. If it doesn’t, then it will probably turn into a moth. Between those two times [from caterpillar to butterfly or moth], it will turn into a cocoon. If it is a moth, I will let it out late at night. If it is a butterfly, I will let it out in the day. I feed my caterpillar leaves. Last night, I saw it nibbling on one.

If you are studying caterpillars, you might want [to read] these books:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle
From Caterpillar to Butterfly, by Deborah Heiligman and Bari Weissman

Photo credit: BurningWell.org