07:44 – This will probably be my last post for a while, and one of few I’ll make between now and my drop-dead book deadline on 31 January.
I thought this comment, which was posted yesterday, deserved more of a response than I could give it in the comments section.
RBT, I have a couple questions relating to your home science books. I don’t recall seeing them asked before, but apologies if they’ve been asked and answered already.
Is the Forensics book likely to be available in the next year or so, or ever? I gather there was an ownership or other legal issue. This is of interest to me because one of my kids is interested in chemistry and biology but his eyes light up when discussing forensics.
Of the Chemistry, Biology, and possible Forensics books and lab sets, is there any required or recommended order? I’ll be getting one of the kits for this coming summer when he’s with me and the second for the following summer. I’m too ignorant to have an informed opinion. (I took Bio and Chem in high school, but that was 30 years ago and the labs were minimal with junk scopes and balances. But that’s ok. The football and basketball teams were well funded, so the important stuff was taken care of.)
Thanks (and best wishes for continued growth and profitability)
I have no idea when (or if) the forensics lab book will be published. The only issue that’s kept it on the shelf until now is that the (print) publishing environment has been very challenging over the last few years. When O’Reilly/MAKE decides to put a book into print, they have to judge whether the cost of doing so is likely to be returned with a profit from sales of that book. Four-color books (like the forensics lab book) have historically been very expensive to produce and print. There’s also a trade-off between print run size and cost per book, but of course printing a whole bunch of copies also incurs warehousing costs and risks having too many copies that don’t sell.
Originally I of course envisioned the biology book I’m working on now as a four-color title, but it soon became clear when I was pitching it to O’Reilly/MAKE that the numbers just wouldn’t support the cost and risk of doing it in four-color. But then a couple months ago my editor emailed with some good news. O’Reilly/MAKE is changing over from the traditional style of offset printing to print-on-demand, at least for four-color titles. That reduces risks a lot. Instead of doing a print run of, say, 25,000 copies of a four-color book, which ain’t cheap, they can do only as many POD copies as needed at one time. That greatly cuts down on inventory cost, warehousing cost, and so on, which in turn made it practical to do the biology book in four color.
Four-color POD may make it practical to do the forensics lab book in four-color as well, and I’ve already spoken to my editor about that idea. If we do that, I’m going to have to rewrite the entire book to build it around a custom kit that we’ll put together and sell. That’s for the benefit of the readers. The current draft of the forensics lab book is written like the chemistry lab book: it assumes lab equipment and chemicals that are rather costly (compared to most homeschoolers’ budgets). By rewriting the forensics book around a custom kit, I can do two things: First, make it much more affordable (because buying stuff piecemeal is much more expensive than just buying a kit that has test solutions and so forth already made up). Second, I can do lab sessions that it wouldn’t be practical to do (if only on the basis of cost) without access to the resources of a custom kit.
One way or another, I intend to have the forensic science kits available before start of the autumn 2012 semester, and I hope to have them available in time for summer session. If we can’t get the forensics book into print by then, I’ll simply include a PDF of the manual. It won’t be the full forensics book, but it will cover all the labs comprehensively. Believe me, your son is by no means alone. Kids are fascinated with real forensic science, and many of them would love the chance to do real forensic work themselves. I mean real stuff, as in what real forensics labs do every day.
As far as sequence, the traditional method for academic/science track students was biology in 9th grade, chemistry in 10th, physics in 11th, and an advanced science in 12th. In some cases, students took more than one science class per year. For example, I did biology in 9th, chemistry and a second independent-study biology course in 10th, physics and a second chemistry course in 11th, and a second physics course and third independent-study chemistry course in 12th. (That was an extremely heavy science load, even back in the 60’s.) The traditional sequence has less to do with the sciences themselves and more to do with math. A first-year biology course required no advanced math, and so is suitable for 9th or even 8th grade. First-year chemistry requires at least algebra II, so is usually scheduled for 10th. First-year physics requires geometry/trigonometry, and so is usually scheduled for 11th. Second-year physics really should have calculus and differential equations as prerequisites, but is often scheduled for 12th grade at the same time students are taking calc/diff-e.
My own opinion is that forensic science is an ideal first lab course. It’s cross-discipline, incorporating elements of biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, and the other hard sciences, but it typically doesn’t require advanced math. Also, it doesn’t hurt that, as you say, kids are fascinated by it.
Thanks for the detailed answer. You’re right, that was too much for a comment. Unless, of course, the comment was on bare feet.
Your description of high school science and math courses is completely at odds with my experience. I don’t know how much of that is generational (I would have graduated in 1981) and how much is because you went to a great school. I do know that my school was considered a decent but not great public school district for upstate New York in the late 1970s. On the Regents track (which was for the college-bound students; not quite a modern Honors track but close) we took general science, bio, and chem in 9th-11th grade. I think physics was 12th grade, but I didn’t take it so I’m not sure. Math was algebra, geometry and something, but I don’t remember which course was in which grade. There was no allowance of doubling up in either math or science. There were no alternate math or science classes on the Regents track; there were the “dummy” versions for the non-college-bound students. There was no provision of any nature for advanced kids except for them dropping out and going to college, and I was the only one to do that.
As for the content, I guess the lectures were OK. I have nothing to compare them to. The microscopes and triple-beam balances were much older than the students though younger than the teachers. (It should be noted that the bio and chem teachers were nearing retirement.) The microscopes would drift out of focus as they sat there, or the fine adjustment knob didn’t work, or the platform that you put your slide on had a wobble. The balances normally gave different results with every weighing. (On the plus side, we learned some practical statistics: get as many values as you can, throw out the outliers, and average the rest.) In bio, we never did an animal dissection. I don’t know if this was to avoid squeamishness or because of budget. I think we didn’t even cut up any plants, just used prepared slides. In chemistry we worked in groups of two or three because of equipment and space limitations. For anything involving expensive chemicals the teacher did the lab at the front of the class.
All that can be explained away (if not excused) by budget constraints. What can’t be explained away is that lab reports were not required. I don’t recall doing a single lab report until I got to college. Obviously the labs were not valuable or valued and the students gave them the appropriate amount of effort and attention.
I do remember teachers as early as my 6th grade snidely commenting on the remedial English, math, and science classes being taught by the local colleges, especially the community colleges and state university. It seems not to have occurred to the public school teachers that they were the problem.
Is the cost per book for print on demand more expensive than the offset method? What sorts of books would you use POD for and which traditional?
Down here we did (undifferentiated) science in years 8, 9 and 10 then specialised into one or more of physics, chemistry, biology, geology or physical science (an amalgam of physics and chemistry.) I hated biology back then so I took physics and chemistry in years 11 and 12. I’m surprised that you guys just did one science subject per year, we did the science we wanted to study in parallel.
When I did Year 12 in 1975 I was at a decent state high school and did five subjects: Maths 1S, Physics, Chemistry, Geography and American History. Most of the smart kids who were going to do science or engineering at uni took two units of maths, but I was hamstrung by a decision I made at the end of Year 10 to do only single unit maths. Worst decision I ever made, but the counsellor was pretty insistent. I still did science at uni, but couldn’t get into the maths course I wanted straight away because of the bad decision I made in Year 10.
Both. You have to remember that I hit the crest of the wave when the federal government panicked about the “science gap”. During the whole decade of the 60’s, the federal government was doing everything it could to get bright kids into STEM, although that term hadn’t been invented yet. Money, science equipment, and so on was pretty much there for the asking. Any school that wanted to build or upgrade science labs had only to ask. Money was made available for additional science and math teachers, and so on.
My school was in fact a great school, although New Castle, Pennsylvania is part of Appalachia. I didn’t realize how great my school was until I got to college and grad school and listened to other students talk about their experience. Our course offerings were extraordinary. We had, for example, the option of taking five years of a language in grades 8 – 12, and those languages included Latin, French, Spanish, and German. There were also several other languages available for two or three years in high school, including (IIRC) Italian, Russian, and Chinese. Our math courses went through calculus and differential equations, which was extremely unusual for the time. I think I only ran into half a dozen students from other school systems who’d had full calculus, let alone diff-e, courses available in high school.
A lot of the course offerings were ad hoc. For example, we actually had only one chemistry course in the catalog, which I took in 10th grade. The second- and third-year courses were actually done on-the-fly. I was the only student in either of them, although others would have been welcome. Same thing with higher math. The course catalog topped out with trigonometry. That was supposedly a full-year course for 11th or 12th grade, but three of us (Steve Grube and Rick Woodring; hi guys, if you’re reading this…) ended up in a custom course made for just us, where we learned statistics, calculus, and diff-e. We were put aside in a tiny little room that also served as our “computer room” (essentially a desktop programmable calculator) and taught by Delores Callahan, the most extraordinary teacher I ever had.
RBT wrote:
“Our course offerings were extraordinary. We had, for example, the option of taking five years of a language in grades 8 – 12, and those languages included Latin, French, Spanish, and German. There were also several other languages available for two or three years in high school, including (IIRC) Italian, Russian, and Chinese. Our math courses went through calculus and differential equations, which was extremely unusual for the time. I think I only ran into half a dozen students from other school systems who’d had full calculus, let alone diff-e, courses available in high school.”
In Year 8, the beginning of high school in South Australia, we were given the choice of German or French as our foreign language. You had to take one or the other. Everything else was the same for all of us. No streaming in that year. The following year kids could drop the language or keep going with it, and add a second language: French or German (the one you hadn’t done in Year 8), Latin or Japanese. History, and perhaps Geography stared being offered as an option that year.
I don’t remember much of Year 11 maths but physics, and to a lesser extent chemistry were wonderful. (I hadn’t liked general science because of all the biology in it). There were three classes of each of these subjects, not sure if they streamed them. For chemistry we had the school’s chemistry master, who, along with seven others, had written the text book for our year. The physics teacher persuaded me not to do law at uni, so I kept my soul… 🙂
In Year 12 I had the same physics teacher and I just adored the subject. I don’t understand how people don’t like physics… In chemistry we had a young drongo who I’m sure knew some chemistry but didn’t teach it and just let the class get out of control. I and a couple of other boys complained to the aforementioned chemistry master and the teacher was replaced by the best chemistry teacher in existence: Peter Badcock. He was a fairly aloof sort of guy but he sure kept control and really drilled stuff into us. In maths we did integral and differential calculus and the people doing two units had a number of options, such as group theory, statistics, computing and many others. I don’t remember if we learned DEs that year but my year was the last with external examinations and much in the way of rigour. The next year grade inflation had taken hold and you needed an A or very good B in a subject to do university level science and maths courses.
You really hit the STEM trifecta back then, Robert, but I reckon most of us fall way short of that.
I had Earth Science as a freshman, and the way it was taught didn’t exactly “send me.” Biology in 10th grade with full lab and dissections, all of which I liked and did well in, despite a dopey teacher. And because I’d stopped (and barely passed, out of charity, twice) with Algebra I, I did not go on to Chemistry or Physics, and instead took AP American History and AP English, along with two years of Latin, and every social science course at the college-prep level that the school had.
I usually blame my dull-as-hell math teachers for the algebra, who were also near retirement themselves, and I did well in plane geometry which was taught by a lively younger guy who was also the soccer coach. But I can also easily blame myself; warm spring days looking out the window and half-dozing; teenage sorceresses right next to me; the late 60s chaos; and zero interest once we hit quadratic equations.
In contrast, and kind of unusual for girlz, Mrs. OFD left publik skool in upstate NY and did her last two years of high school (as a scholarship kid) at a very nice private girls’ school down there. Where she took advanced science courses and math as far as calculus, later majoring in History of Science at McGill over five years of grueling math and science courses. Then she got shunted off into entry-level nursing in NYC at Bellevue and then married-with-kids and then thirty years of working in public health, with a graduate degree from Columbia and ABD PhD at Dartmouth.
By comparison I am a mere slug, fit only for dissection on somebody’s little slides.
Wow, you had AP courses? I thought you were about my age, and I didn’t realize AP courses even existed back then.
Yeah, I think you’re right to blame your teachers. The step from Algebra I to Algebra II is often considered what separates students who are capable of abstract thinking from those who are not. But if you did geometry successfully, you’re obviously capable of dealing with abstract concepts. And how did your wife not end up in med school? I’m assuming that she’s about your age or younger, and by that time many of the barriers against women in med school (also vet school) were coming down.
Actually, I have a hard time remembering exactly what I did and when because there was such a mix. There were regularly scheduled classes mixed in with independent study at school, and at home I was doing a lot of science stuff on my own based around college textbooks that my dad kept giving me. At any one time I was usually working on different stuff, with a mix of biology, chemistry, and physics going on both at school and at home.
My high school was pretty incredible, too. In fact, I went to 2 different school systems as a kid, and I am well aware that those were some of the best in the state, at that time. The overwhelming majority of teachers and administrators came from Ball State Teacher’s College in Muncie, Indiana–before it became a state university.
I sometimes wonder how school systems can get so bad. My kids got nowhere near the education I did in high school. They learned more about English lit from me than they did in school.
My high school in Indianapolis, Arlington, is now considered an ‘inner-city’ school, although we were on the edge of the city-limits when I was growing up. It has been such a miserable failure for so many years, that the state department of education has just taken it over, and is giving the entire school to a private firm to try to turn the results around. If that firm is not successful, word is that the school will be closed.
In my birth town, the New Castle, Indiana high school (we moved away before I got to high school there), is on the ‘watch’ list, and has been graded as “F” in results by the state, and may also be taken over by the state.
I suppose it is not just one issue that has soured education, but it sure did not seem like any miracles were being performed in my day, just good old-fashioned lecturing from teachers who knew their subject, combined with keeping the discipline problem kids out of the classroom.
FYI, switching from Firefox to Chrome has been on my to-do list for some time, but I just have not gotten a round tuit. Today, Firefox wanted to upgrade to 9.0.6. Since I feel I screwed up by upgrading way back around version 4, I said ‘what the heck’ and did it.
It appears Firefox is losing share rapidly, and from what I can determine, that has been due to its rather recent insatiable demand for memory, that took a dramatic bump around v6. If I have had anything like 12 to 15 windows open, Firefox is normally hogging so much memory, that Outlook refuses to work (says it cannot find the .pst file). If I kill Firefox, Outlook goes back to normal.
Outlook had just refused to work when the Firefox update dialog popped up, so I decided that if I upgraded, at least it would shut down Firefox, and I could use Outlook again. Memory usage was closing in on 2gb, which is all I have.
After the upgrade, Firefox opened all the same windows (about 15) I had previously been using, plus some more as upgrade info windows for Firefox and several of the upgraded add-ons were newly opened. RAM usage since the upgrade has not exceeded 1gb, and is currently at 940mb with 16 windows, all with at least 6 or more tabs open in them. This is a vast improvement, if it holds.
So, I’ve always wondered…
Is it true that there is a portrait of the founder in one of the main buildings, with a plaque underneath it that says “Hung by the Balls”?
I only keep Firefox as a backup browser here and have used Chrome practically since it came out; forgot when I last used IE. We have really old Firefox on the RH cluster consoles at work to access the blades with a GUI but I never use it, preferring CLI nearly 100% of the time. I have nearly zero complaints about Chrome over years now, and it is easily still the fastest.
Ditto for gmail, although I have had a few more minor complaints, again over years, almost since its beginning.
Yeah, Bob, we had AP courses at my high school in the late 60s (I’m 58) in a heavily Jewish demographic twenty miles west of Boston. The really bright kids, again mostly Jewish, took the AP courses in math and science, and went on to National Merit Scholarships and the like, and places like MIT and Stanford. Substance-abusing, rock concert-attending, SDS/Panther demonstrators like me took the AP English and social science courses, including Russian Studies.
I took the SAT and the max three Achievement tests all in one day in my junior year and did pretty well, especially, of course, on the humanities and history stuff, and could have easily gotten some combination of scholarship/financial aid package to go to nearly any university I wanted. But I was sick to death of school and living at home with four siblings and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. So I signed up to work for Uncle at age 17, requiring the signatures of both parents, as my dad had done before me in World War II. Figured I would join the Air Force, the high-tech service, and avoid infantry-type combat stuff in Vietnam (I also had a low draft number and the draft board in town would have loved to send my ass directly to the hottest LZ they could find instantly.) and go to Germany and drink beer in those gigantic steins, served by blonde goddesses with huge boobs busting out of those dirndl things.
Things didn’t turn out like I’d planned.
Mrs. OFD did not go to med school because she got married (to a fairly brilliant lefty guy who was brilliant at languages and did two years with the Peace Corps in Africa) and had two kids. Med school is hard enough, but trying it under those circumstances would have been pretty tough. Husband also, for various reasons, had trouble finding and keeping steady employment, and then he got killed in a stupid car accident in upstate NY in ’92, about twenty years ago this month, leaving her with a seven-year-old son and a baby girl. Frosting on the cake here, if you can call it that, is that she has had a life-threatening thyroid and heart condition since she was 18, and spent time near death in the hospital’s ICU at about the same time I was in southeast Asia with some life-threatening shit going on. So med school didn’t pan out, and she hasn’t been real fond of doctors anyway, for a long time.
Right now she is a national independent consultant involved with public mental health and emergency first responder, PTSD, etc., issues, and, for example, was on the scene at the time of the Fort Hood shootings.
I am just a lowly IT drone in the mercenary army of one of the world’s biggest organizations, but by jeezum, I know some stuff about the Commedia, Anglo-Saxon numismatics, and the Eighteenth-Century world of Augustan humanism as represented in the poetry and prose of selected smarty-pants Englishmen.
Ya never know what could be useful.
Chuck wrote:
“I sometimes wonder how school systems can get so bad.”
I’ve often wondered the same thing. Most of the state high schools when I was in Year 11/12 (1974-5) were quite good, by the time my nieces and nephews were in high school in the Nineties and Naughties you *really* had to go to a private school, or one of the few selective state schools – and you often had to be in their district to be eligible. From what I’ve heard no responsible parent would sent their kids to Daws Road High School in Adelaide nowadays, although in the Seventies it was quite okay. My sister deliberately moved into the catchment zone of Unley High School (my father went there in the Thirties) just so that her kids would be assured of a place. They’ve all got university degrees now, although only my elder nephew did a “hard” degree (Bachelor of Engineering in Structural Engineering.)
My parents got both their undergraduate and first Master’s degrees from Ball State. I, too have heard about that sign, but only occasionally do I drive past the campus, and have not been inside a building there since the guy running the radio and TV program there, was trying to get me to go there as a student. (I didn’t.) I’m sure that such a sign is not hanging for long, when/if it does.
You probably know that David Letterman funds a scholarship at Ball State for a radio-TV student who makes “average” grades. It cannot go to high-achievers, because he assessed himself as purely average when he was going to school there.
Funny we should have been discussing glass. Muncie was built on glass factories owned by the Ball family. Due to the Depression, canning was in, and the Balls cashed in heavily and the prime source for canning jars. One just does not see the kind of philanthropy that the Balls in Muncie and the Lily family in Indianapolis gave back to their home cities. The teacher’s college was built on Ball money, as was one of the major hospitals in the state, Ball Memorial Hospital (recently bought out–oddly–by the Indiana University Health System, one of the major teaching hospital systems in the US). The Balls are long gone, as is their manufacturing empire, but their name remains all over Muncie.
Having graduated from Indiana University, as students, we had nicknames for the two other state universities: “Cow College” for Purdue University, which had long been a land-grant agricultural school, and “Testicle Tech” for Ball State. Of course, as Playboy’s #1 Playschool for most of the past 4 decades, there is not much the others could call us that would get under our skin.
Lily’s drug empire philanthropy was (and through their incredibly rich foundation, still is) even more instrumental to life in Indianapolis than were the Balls to Muncie. Over my lifetime, just a few of the things they–single-handedly–made possible, were: the art museum in Indianapolis (built on the stunningly beautiful grounds of the former Lily estate); the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (rescued from near oblivion); several private schools; significant donations to several hospitals in financial trouble over the decades; a one-time classical music radio station; large donations to nearly every institution of higher learning in Indianapolis; large donations to the Indianapolis Zoo (which got the zoo started in the 1970’s); many historical development projects; couple of historical sites, one of which is now a type of museum of prairie life and also is home to the outdoor concerts of the Indianapolis Symphony; small donations to hundreds of arts-oriented and neighborhood redesign projects around the city;–finally, various buildings named after them at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, including a library for the arts.
Without the Lily family, Indianapolis would be a very different place. Their fingerprints are all over the city. I just wish there were similar commitment by other very well-off corporations to do what the Lily’s have done.
Having grown up in Indianapolis, I’ll agree completely with Chuck about the philanthropy of the Lilly’s. However, I’ll also point out that their philanthropy is only a small part of Eli Lilly’s legacy. Eli Lilly (the man who founded the company) was born into a world without quality pharmaceuticals. He decided this was a problem so he did something about it. It was the Eli Lilly company run by the Eli Lilly’s grandson that figured out how to mass produce insulin.
Ohio is changing it’s requirements starting with the kids graduating in 2014. They are moving from requiring 3 math units to 4 math units with the kids having to at least make it through Algebra II. Previously you could manage to make it out of high school without taking anything beyond Algebra I and a business math course. The science requirement is still only 3 units, however the requirements are more specific now with one required unit of physical science, one required unit of life science, and one required unit of advanced study in science. It’s a move in the right direction I think, but I’d still like to see the state require 4 units of science instead of just 3. The total number of credits to graduate in Ohio is still 20. I believe the number ranges across states from 17.5 to 22.
Oops. We have a female family member named Lily with one “l”. I have auto-correct set to remove an extra “l”, and it did just that when I typed “Lilly” with 2 “l’s”. Dave has the correct spelling, of course.
For a couple decades, my mom taught at the Catholic high school seminary prep that was only a couple blocks from one of Lilly’s pill plants. Several times a month, a stench emanated from that building, which made everyone at the school take notice. The students always claimed those were the days Lilly was burning the rats used in their various experiments.
Ok, what’s in Algebra II? (I’m not an American so I wouldn’t know.)
My son is taking Algebra II right now. His text includes sections on imaginary numbers, the quadratic formula, graphing systems of equations, graphing parabola and hyperbola, radicals, fractional exponents, solving equations with three variables, vectors, etc.
I did that stuff in single unit Maths 1S in the South Australian school system in 1975, and of course the kids doing both Maths I and II would have done it as well. Only 2-3 years after I left they really dumbed down the science and maths syllabi, in Physics they took out simple harmonic motion, which is a basic thing to want to know if you’re going to do university physics. And whereas a D in Matriculation Chemistry was good enough to do Chemistry I at Adelaide Uni in my year, within a couple of years they strongly recommended an A or high B, due to grade inflation and dumbing down the school subjects.
The quadratic formula is what tripped up OFD, twice. And ya know what? OFD ain’t never used a bit of algebra his whole dang life, but has had on occasion, a use for geometry, and can foresee even more use anon.