08:03 – I got quite a bit done on the Life Science kit yesterday, including a rough TOC for the manual and a pretty good idea of what will be in the kit. Obviously, there’ll be changes to the TOC and the kit as I actually write the manual, but at least I have a jumping-off point. The main thing I have to remember is that I’ll be writing for 7th graders rather than high-schoolers.
As it’s currently configured, the kit is completely non-regulated for shipping purposes, and I intend to keep it that way. That means I’ll be able to ship these kits to Canada. More importantly, it minimizes the hazards for 13 year old students. There are sharp objects such as a scalpel, teasing needles, and so on, but none of the chemicals are particularly hazardous to handle. That means making some compromises in terms of what we can and can’t do in lab sessions, but the trade-off is worthwhile.
For the kid-friendly (and more important, nanny state-friendly) Life
Science kits, would it be practical to include a few optional labs which
require materials not included in the pre-packaged kit? Ideally,
materials which are either easy for the layman to obtain or which are
already included in the other kits. In the latter case, you could maybe
have multiple sale, the chem kit for the older kids in a family or group
and the life sciences kit for the younger.
Presumably you’ve already thought of this, but maybe not. It’s recently
come to my attention that I’m the smartest person in the world. Oh, no
one has come right out and said it, but my wife recently told me I’m the
biggest idiot in the world. I figure that she’s wrong about everything,
hence the inescapable conclusion.
Does the kit include any dissections? I fondly remember cutting up a fish and an earthworm in Life Science.
In biology we did quite a few dissections, including live, pithed frogs.
No dissections. You were the exception, which I suspect many of us here were. Dissections have probably turned off more kids to science, particularly girls, than just about anything else.
To SteveF, yes there will be lots of stuff to do without necessarily needing the kit.
I dissected a worm, crawdad and frog in HS Bio. Back when HS labs were real.
Oh, yeah, one lucky lab team in bio got to anesthetize a frog, open it up, drop a solution of nicotine (I think) on it’s heart to kill it and then finish the dissection. Go Wisconsin! No more, though. The girls always got swooney when the teacher brought out the giant pickle jar full of frogs.
I did frogs and earthworm, the latter a rather large specimen, perhaps swollen from the formaldehyde? That kinda grossed even me out. Sophomore year biology, where I got B’s. That’s as far, sadly, as I went with science courses in life.
But hey, I’m flexible and eager to learn! Send me some lawyers, politicians and stockbrokers and let me sharpen up some blades here! Let’s see what makes these buggers tick!
I never dissected anything. I think the year before mine was the last to do that in biology. I don’t know if it was dropped because of money or squeamishness or what. But, as previously noted, my school district didn’t much value academics.
Dissections are cheap, which is why they featured so heavily in high-school biology courses. Most schools couldn’t afford enough microscopes to teach first-year biology as it should have been taught, which is to say chemistry of life, cell structures and processes, microorganisms, and so on. In other words, bottom up. Instead they taught it top-down because preserved specimens and scalpels were really cheap.
Dissections properly belong in a second or even third biology course in physiology or gross (very gross) anatomy.
In Bio 1 in high school, we got to dissect a flat worm and a frog. For some weird reason I took Bio 2, where we got to dissect a placenta full of little piglets. That was interesting and the two girls tolerated it also. Later we took a field trip to the med center in Houston and watched a woman getting a quadruple heart bypass from over the operating room. That was a little tough for a bunch of 11th graders. I could watch for a minute or two and then walk away for five minutes. The floor of the observation room was about 6 ft above the patient so we had a great view.
Hmm. Well, we had plenty of microscopes – about one for every two students. Same for triple-beam balances. None of them was especially good — most scopes would drift out of focus unless you held your hand on the knob and some balances would give a different value with every weighing — but we had them. Aside from being old and worn out, I have no idea whether the equipment was any good.
In high school I was deciding between engineering and medicine*. A girl-who-liked-me’s** dad was a doctor, so at 15 I got in to see an autopsy. Right there in the room with the body. And the smell. At 15, I mentioned that, right? I was fine until the intestines were lifted out. And then I pointed myself at engineering.
* The band teacher was really encouraging me to go to music school. I never gave that a serious thought. I wanted to eat every day.
** In keeping with what several others have mentioned, I should note that I was too thick-headed to pick up that she liked me, even after some older students teased her about it in my presence.
Ack! I agree with our host that dissections do not belong in ordinary high school courses. My recollection was that we dissected worms and frogs live, and baby sharks dead. Everybody was—in turn—in charge of pulling the sharks out of formaldehyde, giving us equal carcinogen exposure. Of course, the teacher and school were not a bit wary of forcing us to do something like that.
Since I know now from the younger members of the family who are doctors, that their coursework intentionally tried to weed out the squeamish, I think dissections are better left to people who need to be familiar with anatomy, than those of us who remember the pinning back of live worms and frogs and wondering if they were in pain, but recall nothing else whatsoever.
In Year 8 Science (specialisation wasn’t possible till Year 11), age 12-13, I dissected a mouse. Put me off biology for 25 years. I loved physics and chemistry because (amongst many other reasons) there were no dissections. I remember mentioning this to a geology professor at my church, he just grimaced when I told him. I think he knew dissections turned people off unless they liked that sort of thing.
Chuck wrote:
“Since I know now from the younger members of the family who are doctors, that their coursework intentionally tried to weed out the squeamish, I think dissections are better left to people who need to be familiar with anatomy…”
I’ve often wondered if the squeamish get weeded out or whether they get used to it. I’d be repelled by the idea of performing surgery on someone of something, looking in their mouth, ears, and, ah, other places. I guess some people get used to it.
*of. or
SteveF wrote:
“* The band teacher was really encouraging me to go to music school. I never gave that a serious thought. I wanted to eat every day.”
An English friend told me that in the UK not so long ago people did a BA in Classics first, *then* did their real degree in what they wanted to earn a living in. I would have liked to have done a BMus (trumpet or piano) if I had that sort of skill, then my real degree. But that’s three years of your life when you’re not earning dough, which doesn’t appeal to me that much. I have friends who are dirt poor and I am not keen on following their example.
When I did biology at uni 10-15 years ago I deliberately focused on biochemistry, cell biology, microbiology and immunology, and genetics. I found that stuff most interesting and it avoided the crossness of dissecting stuff. I can look down a microscope at a cell having things done to it, but not at a mouse, chicken egg, whatever.
The strange thing was that in high school most of the smart girls (and practically all of the dumb ones) did biology, almost all of the smart boys did physics *and* chemistry (the dumb ones did biology, art, English.) So the allegedly squeamish girls did biology. Weird. Very few girls did either or both of physics or chemistry.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-18/report-dismisses-australia-nz-currency-as-impractical/4268160
Looks like the NZ and Australian dollars won’t be merging any time soon. Kiwis come here to work (and the males to do evil things with our sheep) and we have free trade. The report says a single currency would be impractical without some sort of political union, and no one here wants that.
…the males to do evil things with our sheep
Um, are you sure you don’t have that backwards? I heard it was the sheep doing evil things with the poor, innocent Kiwis.
The Aussie doth protest too much, methinks…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f2Do8SNIEk
I can’t believe you didn’t write
Obviously college science programs need to include mandatory English Lit
classes. (If they feel overloaded, they can cut down on the math
classes. No one really needs to take Advanced Calculus.) This
will give would-be scientists a proper grounding in our common heritage,
so they won’t go haring off in directions Aristotle would not have
approved. My plan will also allow for increased hiring of English Lit
professors as well as of grad students to teach the classes. It’s a
win-win solution.
It has been my experience that most scientists are pretty well-rounded educationally, with at least as much knowledge of history, literature, art, music, and so on as most non-scientists. Some of them even have expert-level knowledge of a non-science field that happens to interest them. But very few non-scientists have even a basic grasp of STEM subjects.
Oh, yeah. I’m not much for puns.
Brad, the Kiwis are the perps, the NZ sheep willing accomplices, the Aussie sheep fight like crazy to maintain their honour.
I have a NZ Mills and Boon somewhere with all the gory details…
Oh, well, if you’re going to turn the conversation serious…
Yah, I’ve noticed the same thing. Though I should point out that I read
about the phenomenon when I was a kid, maybe in Pournelle, long before I
had any real exposure to people trained as anything except school
teachers. It may have biased my observations, seeing what I expected to
see.
Me being me, which is to say, bright, obnoxious, and largely indifferent
to others’ purportedly hurt widdle feewings, I postulated that STEM
types can easily pick up music history or English lit or anything
they like because they’re bright and capable. The majority of
English Lit and Music History and Law and whatever types, well, they’re
taking those courses because they’re not bright and capable.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that “postulated” isn’t the correct verb in a
scientific sense, but it’s good for how I put forth my idea in
conversation.
Yes, that series of assertions tends to cause many hurt widdle
feewings…
Good to know, but I was coming from the opposite direction. Let’s say
the parent bought the book and kid-safe, nanny-state-approved kit for
the kid, but wanted to do some more advanced, more interesting labs
requiring materials not approved by the nanny state for preteens — with
parental guidance, of course. Will the book have any optional labs like
these?
Part of my reason for asking is because I think that motivated
“children”, with just a bit of guidance, are ready for a lot more than
the nannies think they are and I hate to not push them as far as they
can go. Another part is curiosity about tie-ins between the different
disciplines and the books/kits — learning *this* in the chemistry labs
will help you understand *that* in bio or earth science better. (Though
I can see where you would not want to get too involved in that — it
would easily become a combinatorial nightmare.)
As a nut-job English lit nut who got A’s all through skool in it, got a BA in it, and went to grad programs in it and got everything done except the dissertation, I have seen for long decades now that fah more STEM types are way more literate than the other way around. I am a classic case of the latter, of course, but at least I’m interested and follow the nooz.
I have to say, though, that very few folks will have a need for math beyond, say, the plane geometry that I got B’s in during my sophomore year and the last math class I ever took. I would even be willing to go back now and study more geometry and trig but no way am I gonna mess with algebra or calculus again. And I may attempt some high-school level genuine lab biology and chemistry, and if I feel good about that, I’ll move on to physics, within reason, and of course without the math needed for higher levels of any of those.
Gotta keep what’s left of the old brain matter firing away here, use it or lose it, they say. And I do not intend to end up like my family who have finished out their time on the planet in a state of senile dementia, Alzheimer’s, or the other nasty variants thereof. The other two most frequent causes of death among my relatives so far have been cancer and gunshot. Yeah, you read that right. Cases of domestic disputes ending very badly and armed robbery.
Fell asleep during my last English lesson in Year 11 way back in 1974. Glad it wasn’t compulsory in Year 12. It was the only subject I failed.