Education – David Bradley

Famous Connections – a new parlour game

I’m sure someone will tell me this has been done, but having come up with a silly meme idea on Twitter, I was thinking of a game that’s a hybrid between Six Degrees of Separation and Mornington Crescent.

Title: Famous Connections

Objective: To be the last player holding all the chips

Players: Four or more

Materials: Ten chips per player, a designated referee, a timer

Setup: Each player starts with ten chips. All players contribute one chip to the kitty

Gameplay: The player deemed oldest/youngest/tallest/shortest begins the game. The starting player states a famous name from any field, real or fictional. The next player must use part of the previous name to suggest another famous name within a given timescale (30 seconds for adults 60 seconds for children, perhaps). Homophones are allowed.

Example of play: Guy Garvey, Guy Ritchie, Lionel Ritchie, Lionel Blair, Tony Blair, Toni Basil, Basil Brush…

Andrea’s example: Phoebe Bridgers, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fats Waller, Fats Domino, Domino Harvey, Harvey Goldsmith, Jemima Goldsmith, Jemima Puddleduck…

Another example: Finger Bobs, Bob the Builder, Build-a-Bear, Rupert the Bear, Prince Rupert of Hohenzollern-Singmaringen

A successful player takes one chip from the kitty. If unsuccessful, the player forfeits one chip to the kitty. If a player repeats a name or gives a name unrecognized by all other players, they forfeit one chip. If a player cannot think of a name, they forfeit one chip.

Play proceeds clockwise until one player accumulates all chips from the kitty and from other players. If the kitty is empty, a successful play allows the player to take a chip from the next player.

Any player with no chips remaining is eliminated from the game. The referee keeps time and has final say on the validity of plays. The referee may introduce “stop names” (names that halt play), “block names” (names causing a player to miss a turn), and “bonus names” (names rewarding the caller with two chips from the kitty). The referee will have made lists of stop, block, and bonus names in advance of play.

In Andrea’s example above, there would be bonus points for coming up with Phoebe Waller-Bridge after Phoebe Bridgers as it has two “overlaps”.

Optional: Unsuccessful plays may result in amusing forfeits determined by the players.

Little and Large

My friend Andy, who, like myself, is a keen amateur wildlife photographer, often asks me questions about the birds and butterflies he photographs. I can usually come up with an answer. But, today, we were talking about Little Owls and he casually referred to the species as the Small Owl. As far as I know, there is no species known as the Small Owl. I pointed this out and he came back with an intriguing question. Why are the birds “Little” but the butterflies “Small”?

For example, among the birds, we have Little Owl, Little Gull, Little Stint, Little Ringed Plover, Little Egret, Little Auk, Little Grebe, Little Tern. But, for the butterflies, we have Small Blue, Small Tortoiseshell, Small Skipper, Small Heath, Small Copper, Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, Small White.

The Large Skipper has a Small Skipper counterpart

It’s puzzling…there is a subtle difference in our perception of what we mean by “little” and “small”, but it’s hard to define. Small is the opposite of big, little is the opposite of large. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that while little is generally synonymous with small, it can have emotional implications associated with it that the word small does not, I can’t quite put my finger on what those differences are. When we discuss dwarfism, people with that condition are often referred to as “little people” but “not small people”…

Etymologically, the word small, a word of Germanic origin, means “thin, slender, narrow, fine” but also refers to a diminutive animal. Indeed, the true root in proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the prefix (s)melo- used to talk of a “smaller animal”. Little, etymologically speaking, is also Germanic in origin, the PIE root is “leud” meaning small.

So, back to Andy’s question why are the birds “little” but the butterflies “small”? I wondered whether it had something to do with the etymology of the words or perhaps whether the naming happened at different times and one descriptor was favoured for some reason at a given time.

Another possible explanation is that the use of small for the butterflies was done because there is a large counterpart. For the Small Tortoiseshell, there is a bigger but similar species the Large Tortoiseshell. Similarly, for the Small Skipper, there is a Large Skipper. However, there are no pairings among the birds, there are lots of different species of gull, but there is no Big Gull nor Large Gull to be a counterpart to the Little Gull, the same with the Little Owl, we do not have a Big Owl or a Large Owl species.

Often these kinds of differences are related to Anglo-Saxon versus Norman etymology, as in the peasants grow the pigs, cattle, and sheep, while the Norman aristocrats eat the pork (porc), beef (boeuf), and mutton (moutton). Stephen Moss just reminded me that he alludes to this in his excellent book Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. “I noted that three groups of birds have Norman French names – ducks and gamebirds, which were eaten by French aristocrats, and raptors, which were used to hunt them. Same principle as farm animals and meat!”

Then there are the Great birds…

Great White Egret, Great Tit, Great Shearwater, Great Black-backed Gull, Great Crested Grebe, Great Grey Shrike, Great Northern Diver, Great Crane. The “Great” also essentially means big and there are “lesser” birds that are generally smaller than the common species: Lesser Redpoll, Lesser Whitethroat, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker…

Moss also points out that in the US there are birds with “least” in their names ‘Least Grebe’, ‘Least Sandpiper’, and ‘Least Bittern’, for instance, we don’t have “least” birds in UK English…which maybe a throwback to US English etymology and the great divide between English and American.

UPDATE: Moss put me in touch with fellow nature writer Peter Marren, author of the excellent Emperors, Admirals, and Chimneysweepers. He had this to say:

“I have never really thought about why birds are great/little/lesser but butterflies are small/large, and I don’t really have an explanation. I suppose traditions in naming spring up early, and that namers therefore tend to follow an established formula. Some of the small/large butterfly names are 18th century or even, with Small Heath, late 17th century, so it might reflect usage at the time – Georgian vs Victorian? Simple English vs 19th Century elaboration?”

Marren points out that there are a few ‘little’ moths eg the Little Thorn – named later, perhaps. But again more usually large/small. He adds that “Great’ just seems the wrong word for a British butterfly or moth, somehow, but not sure I could explain why. ’Large’ is often (usually?) used where there is also a ‘small’, eg Large and Small White, Large and Small Blue, Large and Small Tortoiseshell. But I guess the same pairing is true of birds.”

A pub conversation with a retired friend who was an English teacher, had me saying “All creatures great and small”, which is almost a crossover usage…the hymn should perhaps be “All creatures great and lesser” or “All creatures large and small” but neither would sound quite so poetic as the original hymnal words by Cecil Frances Alexander.

Bullying teachers and musical barriers

First week at high school, first-year art class. I’d done what I thought was a nice sketch of the postbox at the end of the road, that was the simple brief, draw a post box, or pillar box as we used to call them. I sat in the cold for an hour or more sketching it. It looked okay. I didn’t see myself as having any talent for sketching, not like my mate Phil who could rustle up a tiger, a horse, or a Harley Davidson with nothing more than a few scratches of HB.

The nasty bastard of an art teacher told me my art book was too small (we couldn’t afford the twice the size one, which was three times the price, and the school had said in the letter home to parents that the size I had was fine. He also dismissed my sketch are awful because I’d used a ruler to get the straight verticals of the pillar box. Nobody in primary school ever told me not to use a ruler to draw a straight line. In fact, if you didn’t use a ruler you got told off and one teacher at junior school used to slap the tips of your fingers with his metal ruler for minor misdemeanours. At the age of 11, how are you supposed to know that rulers are precluded from art.

I didn’t bother trying again in art class after that and dropped the subject as soon as it was allowed. I did do an option on technical drawing (TD) where you used set squares, rulers, pairs of compasses, and all sorts of devices to make sure your lines were straight and at the correct, right, angles etc.

Meanwhile, in the music class, those of us with a musical bent were not allowed to touch any of the musical instruments in the classroom unless were having private lessons at home on piano or some other instrument. What snobbish educational posturing by ignorant teachers that was. It had been the case in primary school too. Awful stifling attitude and although I’d forgone putting any effort in for art class, music was my first love, as they say…I got 98 percent in the first-year exams and was second only to Alison (who got 100% and was learning piano and viola at the time and in the school orchestra, which is fine).

I got a chance to learn saxophone, but for the first couple of weeks of those lessons we weren’t even allowed to put the instrument together we just had to use the mouthpiece and practice getting a sound without in any way damaging the precious reed. For actually feck’s sake, what? I was eventually allowed to put the sax together, it hung naturally on me and I could probably still play Three Blind Mice and Merrily We Roll Along, on a tenor sax. But, playing it used to give me awful headaches and worse I would have to be in the woodwind band and at that age I was far too shy to be exposed in front of other people doing something I couldn’t do. I ended up teaching myself to play guitar from books and listening to records of bands I loved. Didn’t take any more formal music lessons until sixth form, aged, 17, one term of piano.

I had meanwhile, always been into sharks and dolphins, and magnets and motors, and dinosaurs and volcanoes and space and everything else sciencey so that was the route I ultimately took. I wrote about the person who was probably the only inspiring teacher I had at high school, Miss Hall. I’d love to be able to get in touch with her to thank her. She was in her early 30s back then, so probably in her early 70s now if she’s still around.

Obviously, this is all ancient history, but it does affect how your life goes when teachers deliberately stifle you and others close off opportunity. I hoped by the time our children got to school that things might have changed, but in some ways, I don’t think they had at all. There were still teachers who were bullies, stifling and condescending attitudes, and limited resources available.

I don’t think much has changed since they left school either, although education seems to be more of a commercial enterprise focusing on business targets and metrics now rather than actually teaching our children anything useful or giving them opportunities to grow into the people they might imagine they would like to be. It’s sad.

I am sure there are exceptions. There are inspiring teachers, I know a few and there are. But, those teachers are constrained and constricted by forces beyond their control. I just hope that the bullying and negative attitudes of my old art “teacher” have been pushed out of the system by all those metrics and the business head…I can almost feel from here that they haven’t but one can hope.

Shallow questions and deep answers

@EstOdek on Twitter asked her followers a simple-seeming question

What did you want to be when you were a kid? And what are you now?

Her answer to kickstart the thread:

I wanted to be a professional rugby player or boxer. I'm now an antibody selections scientist

Well, I was born just before the Moon landings era and grew up reading every single science book I could find in the library from the space books to the dinosaurs and the sharks and whales. There was a series of novels about a team or marine biologists following the submarine passion for sharks, whales, and all the creatures of the sea. And, inspired as an 8-year old I thought I’d probably forsake being an astronaut and be a marine biologist. There was even a Marine Laboratory in the bay of my hometown of Cullercoats on the edge of Northumberland.

I don’t think I’ve ever stopped reading, always have 2-3 books on the go at once, usually a novel, and a couple of non-fiction (these days, they might be about songs, snaps, or science). By the time I got to that career-choosing age where they seem to push you along based on simply how well you pass or how badly you fail trivial memory-recall tests they call examinations, I was doing all the schools sciences – biology, chemistry, physics – and maths and the obligatory humanities ones but not music, despite getting 98% in the exam and being second in the year (I learned saxophone for a couple of terms but it used to give me headaches so I gave up. Nobody nudged me towards piano or guitar lessons, I ended up teaching myself the latter and taking a few lessons on the former when I was about 17).

Anyway, by the time O-levels came around, my biology teacher was advising me to not take that subject at A-level. So, I ended up doing maths, physics, and chemistry. The unholy trinity for boys at the time, only girls got nudged towards biology in my school for some reason. Anyway, at A-level mock exams my physics tutor was advising me to not do physics but to take chemistry at university. It feels like a shame so many years later, although I did eventually fall in love with chemistry, but it just wasn’t sharks and dinosaurs! That said, I did like all the bio and med stuff in the degree more than the inorganic content. The chemistry and all those books became the passion and as I’ve discussed several times on this blog I (obviously) became a science writer.

So, today, a close friend said they hadn’t realised that about my “career path”. I wasn’t shocked that they didn’t know, childhood passions kind of fade from memory, and although we’ve had a lot of late-night conversations where such discussion might arise, that particular one has not surfaced over a single malt.

But! Look!!!

Birds, moths, butterflies, sharks, dolphins, seals, stoats, burying beetles, bees, flowers!!!

Of course, none of this post is about regrets, you take the path you take.

Mens Agitat Molem

TL:DR – The Newcastle student union motto Mens Agitat Molem means “mind moves matter”. One of the bars in the union building was called the Mens Bar, it was not for men male only, but they renamed it recently out of sensitivity for those who thought it sexist.

When I was a fresher, we used to drink in the Mens Bar. I blogged a bit about it a couple of years ago. It wasn’t some exclusive male-only venue, it was a shortened form of the Latin motto – Mens Agitat Molem – Mind moves matter. But, there was confusion among the confused and the Mens Bar monicker had to give way to something less ambiguous.

There’s now a swanky new bar in the Student Union called “Luther’s”, It sounds like an 80s nightclub, but the name is worthy in its own way. Gone are the wood-panelled walls (actually they went decades ago) and in with the trendy tables and seating.

We paid it a visit last week, aside from some non-student youngsters queuing for local singer-songwriter Sam Fender, there was nobody partaking of the facilities but us. Anyway, it’s named Luther’s after Dr Martin Luther King Jr who received an honorary degree from my alma mater, the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne back in 1967.

Newcastle was the only UK institution to bestow such an honour on him. He ad-libbed one of his most poignant speeches in accepting the degree. I suppose they could’ve called it Martin’s but that sounds a bit modern, and given that Newcastle used to be King’s College, Durham, King’s wouldn’t have really worked either. So, Luther’s it is.

There was both a red and a white Poppy deposited in the statue’s cap.

Here’s the film of MLK receiving his honorary degree from NCL in November 1967, cued for the start of his speech:

Poppies of remembrance

2018 marked the centenary of the end of World War I, which concluded on November 11, 1918, with the signing of the Armistice agreement. In 2018, many countries around the world held commemorative events to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the war, and to honor the millions of people who lost their lives or were affected by the conflict.

The First World War was a significant event in world history, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people, the reshaping of Europe’s political and social landscape, and the beginning of a new era in international relations. The events of World War I continue to influence the world to this day, and studying its history is important to gain an understanding of the global dynamics that have shaped the modern world.

Poppies are a symbol of remembrance of those who died in World War I and subsequent wars. The tradition of wearing a poppy began in 1921, inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. The poem describes the poppies growing on the battlefield where many soldiers died, and the red colour of the poppies is associated with the bloodshed of war.

The wearing of poppies is particularly common in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where it is part of the commemorations of Remembrance Day (November 11) or Anzac Day (April 25). The poppies are sold by the Royal British Legion in the UK and other organizations in other countries to raise funds for the welfare of veterans and their families.

The poppy has become an enduring symbol of the sacrifices made in war and is often worn as a sign of respect and gratitude for those who have served and died for their country. It serves as a reminder of the devastating effects of war and the importance of working towards peace.

Rise in top grades boosts GCSE record

Rise in top grades boosts GCSE record – My son just returned with his GCSE results to a very proud Mum and Dad, and sister, with a clutch of excellent passes in his exams. Very pleased he got an excellent grade in chemistry, although he claims to hate "my" subject.

One thing I will say, is that despite the mathering of the O-level generation, these teenage trials are not easy, they're not dumbed down, and the effort the students have to put in to get the grades is just as much as we did for ours back in the day. Only difference seems to be they waste far less time writing up notes than we ever did! I'll spare his blushes and not list all 11 pass grades ;-)

As you can probably guess, we’re all very proud of the grades achieved. But, on a wider, more philosophical note: Shouldn’t they scrap exams altogether and have ongoing assessment and random intermittent trials of skills and knowledge, character, stamina, you know, like in the real world…

I’ve never understood how s(h)itting yourself in a room for three hours with a sheet of questions and a blank sheet of paper and a pen was meant to assess how good you’d be at any job or activity other than taking exams. More to the point, the timing of exams is the worst you can imagine. 16 years old and forced to ignore your hormones and happy genes to spend endless hours poring over textbooks and notes trying to prep for exams? What were they thinking?

Why is teaching environmental science so controversial?

Environmental science is about as politically charged a discipline you might find, stem cells GMOs, vaccines, and nuclear energy notwithstanding. In some circles, particularly certain sectors of academia and the media, environmental discussions are synonymous with controversial debates.

So, asks environmental scientist, Chyrisse Tabone of Argosy University in Pittsburgh, USA, how can educators teach students about the science without diluting the issues, dumbing down the curriculum, or being accused of politicizing their lectures? She emphasises that students need a safe environment in which they can weigh up compelling arguments, deal with the complex scientific and value-laden issues and develop their own critical thinking skills to wade through the political quagmire of misinformation and insubstantial evidence weighing heavily on both sides of any environmental issue.

Tabone and many scientists like her with many years, if not decades, of experience “in the field” have recently begun to recognise that theirs is a “controversial science”. In the 1970s, environmental science was not yet an umbrella term for the mix of biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, and meteorology we know today. At the time, it was semantically nothing more than a component of the overall remit of the earth science faculty. Although there were public health implications, perhaps sparked by the (in)famous Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the subject itself was not burdened with the baggage with which it is associated today viz. the climate change (so-called) debate and other hot global issues.

The advent of mass media and its apparently insatiable appetite for environmental stories has led us to a state of affairs in which every climatic phenomenon, every aspect of oil drilling or pollution targets is fair game for pundits the world over. Lay people, including political commentators now think of themselves as “experts” in the science, and there are no end of books from political pundits, statisticians, self-described environmentalists and scientists outside the “field” who have waxed lyrical on diverse environmental topics in occasionally best-selling books and movies.

“The morphing of environmental science to a ‘religion’ known as ‘environmentalism’ shows the distorted misinterpretation of science and the desperate means to communicate a fallacy,” says Tabone. She suggests that the same drivers underpin the attack and distortion of science in general particularly by conservative America. This is a nation she suggests that has seeded intelligent design as a pseudoscientific disguise for creationism and during the Bush era stifled on ludicrous religious and misguided moral grounds perhaps one of the most important areas of medicine – stem cell research.

This is heavy baggage for any educator to bring to the lecture theatre indeed.

“By today’s standards, simply teaching the environmental science textbook with sub-chapter titles such as ‘Oil dependence, terrorism, and global climate change’ would be frowned upon by [faculty management],” Tabone says. “Then, what topics are considered permissible and non-controversial? Must college instructors water down the curriculum and tip-toe through the textbook with fear of offending a student? Is ignoring the ‘elephant in the room’ fair to students who expect an enriched academic experience from lectures by field experts?”

Tabone told Sciencebase that, “Instructors live in fear of retribution from conservative-leaning students. It is like ‘walking on eggshells’ when discussing so-called controversial topics,” she says, “most instructors just avoid the whole area.” She adds that “Academic Freedom Bills” in the US might make it possible to punish instructors through legal measures. “It is ludicrous!” she says. “I have been teaching for the last six years and have ‘gotten away’ with discussing so-called controversial issues. I tell the students ‘nothing is taboo or off the table’ in my classroom. We are in academia,” she emphasises.

“Environmental science, formerly deemed as an ‘earth science’ with public health implications has evolved into a politically charged science branded as ‘controversial’ in some academic circles,” Tabone concludes. Much of the controversy lies in a lack of understanding of the scientific evidence on various sides of any debate, the nature of scientific discovery, which is not a bipolar, right-wrong endeavour, and the interventions of groups and organisations, activist, political and corporate, with a multitude of hidden agendas. But, there really isn’t anything controversial about environmental science, if the topics are taught with honesty, citing respectable sources and allowing probing questions, then the benefits of educating in this area far outweigh the risks of ignoring that environmental elephant.

Chyrisse P. Tabone (2011). Environmental education under assault: can instructors teach environmental science without fear? Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, 12 (2), 146-153

Testing tests

Teaching is meant to help students learn, usually about a specific subject, but more broadly about social interactions, working in a team, under duress, about life in general. They say that your schooldays are the best days of your lives, but perish the thought I’ve never been one for clichÃ©s and that one smacks of sentimental notions about the good-ole-days, as far as I’m concerned. One aspect of institutional learning, the kind to which the vast majority of us have succumbed at some point in our lives is assessment, tests, exams, SATs, O-levels, highers, GCSEs, CSEs, K12 , degrees, vivas etc. Those are not part of the “best days” ethos, as far as most people are concerned.

But, what do we mean by “assessment”. According to Ana Paula Alturas of the Lisbon Business School and BrÃ¡ulio Alturas of the Department of Information Science and Technology, ISCTE — Lisbon University Institute, writing in IJIOME, “Despite the good intentions of teachers, assessments always end up transmitting, essentially, information about the position of some students in relation to others, or identifying the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ students.” So, not necessarily a good thing.

Pressure groups are constantly applying, well…pressure…to the educational authorities either to increase the power of tests, to eradicate tests, to dumb them down and ease off student workload, or to un-dumb them up in order to raise standards to what they were “when we were at school”.

The Alturas team has examined the results when the same test is applied to assess two different groups of students (a group of graduate students in a post-graduate program and a group of non-graduate students in a post-secondary program) who were taught exactly the same content. The tests were designed so that neither group required prior knowledge of skills.

The team found that the average grade in the test among graduate students was almost 16, whereas it was just over 11 for non-graduate students. Female students averaged a smidgeon over 12, whereas males scored over 14 on average. In addition, the average grade of students over the age of 25 years old was almost 15, whereas it was two points lower for those under 25. Age and experience seem to be very important in how well a student does in a test, given that all volunteers had the exact same training for the tests.

The researchers suggest that this finding, which is corroborated by other studies highlights a fatal flaw in testing students and current teaching methods. “Considering that compulsory school should prepare students to continue their self- learning, the current form of assessment seems to us incompatible with this objective,” they explain. “It is in school that all favourable conditions for a prudent choice can be found: information about the world of work, information about themselves, about their possibilities, interests and values.”

Ana Paula Alturas, & BrÃ¡ulio Alturas (2010). Differentiation in the assessment between different groups of students: are experience and maturity more important than learning time Int. J. Information and Operations Management Education, 3 (3), 256-271 DOI: 10.1504/IJIOME.2010.033549

Revolutionary Solids

pisa-balloon History teachers can always turn to the significant figures and battles to enliven their lessons, biology education has the enormously diverse range of species to point to, and even physics can pull in metaphors and anecdotes for the more esoteric aspects, try teaching gravity without mentioning Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But, teachers of mathematics have it tough. They can describes solids and shapes, discuss how Alice and Bob might share out an apple pie fairly between nine friends. But. How does one visualise an abstract equation like this:

big-equation

A rare few students will cope entirely, finding a way to see what such a formula means, but most struggle (I know I did) to imagine an object like a four-dimensional hypercube, for instance.

Annunziata Cascone, Gerardo Durazzo, and Valentina Stile of the Department of Information Engineering and Applied Mathematics, at the University of Salerno via Ponte don Melillo, in Italy, point out that mathematics obviously plays an instrumental role in technical degrees, science, engineering, computing etc. Moreover, given how common is the use of computers and calculation programs today in these areas it really is critical that students can get to grips with seemingly esoteric mathematical concepts that have direct application but are hard to visualise.

mathematica-model-2 The team suggests that Computer Algebra Systems (CASs) are the way forward in teaching mathematics for engineering and other technical subjects. Unfortunately, there are many professors who hesitate to use such technologies. They cite technical, personal or even political reasons, Cascone and colleagues explain. “An explanation for such behaviour can be found in the fact that most teachers were not taught to use CASs when they were studying to be teachers,” they say, and so perhaps don’t recognise the enormous possible benefits.

Writing in the International Journal of Knowledge and Learning this month, Cascone and colleagues describe an approach that can effectively integrate CASs into an analysis course, which they say can improve students’ conceptual understanding significantly.

To improve students’ ability to make some geometric concepts concrete, we developed a Mathematica package that is able to realise and visualise the result of a plane domain revolution in a three-dimensional space.

In other words, the package can generate pictures and computations for an equation that would otherwise not have its significant figures, events, battles, and apple pies. “CASs, when used thoughtfully, allow students to concentrate on conceptual development,” the researchers say, “The same students claim that the use of CASs created the possibility of checking their paper-and-pencil results; it enabled them to discover their mistakes and it clarified the processes to solve problems.”

Annunziata Cascone, Gerardo Durazzo, Valentina Stile (2008). Solids by revolution: materialising an idea International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 4 (2/3) DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2008.020651