07:57 – I’m still cranking away on new kit manuals. Everything always takes longer than I expect it to, but the important thing is to keep moving forward every day and every week.
Speaking of moving forward, I need to get another big batch of chemical bottles labeled.
09:21 – For the first time in what seems like a very long time, I’m spending some serious time on writing. I have two manuals to write: Earth & Space Science and AP Chemistry, and I’m having a lot of fun working on them.
Meanwhile, work on building science kits goes on, as it must. FedEx showed up yesterday with 2.5 kilos each of salicylic acid and dextrose, both of which we were short of.
07:42 – I’m giving up on refillable butane lighters. Pipe smokers are hard on lighters. Years ago, I used special butane pipe lighters. None of those lasted very long, including expensive brands like Dunhill and Kolibri, so I ended up switching to cheap refillable Ronson refillables. Those come in packs of three for about a buck apiece, when you can find them. I’ve been using the Ronson lighters for 10 or 15 years. Years ago, they lasted longer than the new models do. A few would fail in a day or two, but most lasted a couple weeks to a month, and some several months. Recent examples seldom last more than a week and often fail in a day or two.
So yesterday I finally decided just to order a traditional Zippo lighter from Amazon, with spare flints and wicks and a can of lighter fluid. Zippos are famous for their durability and for lighting first time, every time. I’ll see how that goes.
Barbara got a lot done over the weekend. Among other things, she made up 150 bottles each of sodium bicarbonate tablets and magnesium sulfate and 72 bottles of sodium dithionite, all of which we were completely out of. With a few exceptions (which are currently on the to-be-done list), that means we now have bottled chemicals sufficient for 150 more chemistry kits, 60 more biology kits, and 60 more forensics kits. We need to get all of those binned and bagged, and then start on more.
12:52 – Pure FD&C dyes (food coloring dyes) are surprisingly hard to find. Even Fisher Scientific and other specialty chemical vendors don’t carry them. For the AP chemistry kit, I want to include 2.5 mL vials of 0.5% aqueous FD&C Blue #1, Red #40, and Yellow #5 solutions. In other words, I need 5 grams of dye to make 1 liter of solution, which is about 200 kits worth. So I planned to order 25 g or so of each dye. That turns out not to be easy. I just found a source for all three dyes on eBay. That’s unusual in itself. Most of the FD&C stuff on eBay (and elsewhere) is in the form of lakes (precipitated dyes), which do me no good. But I found one eBay source that actually knows the difference between dyes and lakes, and had 5 pounds of FD&C Blue #1 dye for $500. When I checked their web site, I found they also had Red #40 and Yellow #5 dyes, also in 5-pound packages. So I emailed them and asked if they’d sell in 25 g or 50 g quantities. Unfortunately, they won’t, so I’m back to square one.
10:09 – I just mentioned to Barbara yesterday that our water pressure seems rather low. With the washing machine filling, the dishwasher running, and her taking a shower, I was getting very little pressure on the garden hose. Then this morning I was talking to a neighbor down at the corner who’s just sold his house. Among other things, the inspector flagged their water pressure, which was 115 PSI. Normal is 40 to 60 PSI.
Barbara is cleaning house at the moment. This afternoon, she’ll be filling and labeling chemical bottles while she watches Netflix streaming or golf.
07:55 – UPS showed up yesterday with an order from Costco, a dehumidifier and a case of canned beef. Barbara hadn’t decided what to have for dinner, so I called her and said I’d make dinner from our emergency food stocks. That always makes her nervous–she doesn’t trust my cooking experiments–but she finally agreed. So I just made a simple casserole with some rice, a can of the beef, a can of beef broth, and a can of corn. It turned out well, as Barbara admitted. The next time I’ll use twice as much rice, which’ll make enough for two meals.
At this point, I’m still spending half my time building and shipping science kits, the second half working on the new AP Chemistry and Earth Science kits, and the third half doing everything else that needs to be done.
11:10 – Do Not Call has become a complete joke. For a while it kind of worked. For the first couple or three years after it went into effect, we got noticeably fewer spam phone calls than we’d been getting. But it’s been getting worse gradually, and recently not so gradually. We’re at the point now where we’re getting 20 or 30 spam phone calls a day, many of them from a vacation scammer who uses Orlando, FL as its caller ID. Enough is enough.
As I said to Barbara last night, I gave up reporting such calls to the FTC. It’s a waste of time because they never do a damn thing to resolve complaints. By this time, there should be a lot of phone spammers sitting in federal prisons. What we really need–and I mean this literally–is for some civic-minded hero to hunt these bastards down and kill them. Maybe someone should start a Kickstarter project to get funding for travel, ammunition, and other incidental expenses. I’d happily contribute and I wouldn’t expect any reward other than reading the news stories about a rash of dead phone spammers.
Last night, I took the extreme step of turning off the ringers on all our phones. Phone spammers hang up without leaving a message about 99.9% of the time. Real callers can just leave a message. I’m trying to get our Panasonic cordless phone system set up to silence ringing but let us hear messages being left on the speakers in the base unit and the phones themselves. So far I haven’t been able to do that, but I think it’s doable.
Barbara suggested just dropping our land-line, which I may end up doing. The only reason we had a land-line was that Barbara wanted it to make sure that her parents could get through to us in an emergency. That’s no longer an issue, so we may just go to cell phones only. The only real problem with that is that our house is down in a hole physically, and cell signals are pretty unreliable. That, and the fact the phone spammers are calling cell numbers more and more often nowadays.
Oh, yeah. To add to my aggravation today, I went downstairs after Barbara left this morning to empty the dehumidifier bucket and found that it hadn’t shut off. There were a couple gallons (~ 8 or 10 liters) of water on the basement floor because the auto-shutoff didn’t work. I looked in the bucket and where I’d expect to find a freely-moving float I found nothing but a rigidly attached piece of white plastic labeled “DO NOT REMOVE”. The manual is useless, so I suppose I should call their tech support line and find out what the problem is. Either that, or just run a hose to outside or to our sump pump.
09:00 – When I walked Colin at 8:15, it was already muggy. The next two or three months are going to be miserable, particularly for furry guys like Colin. It’s no coincidence that all of the South’s big cities were sleepy little towns before air conditioning became widely available. Summer in the South can be pretty miserable.
I’m still struggling with the manual for our AP Chemistry kit. The problem is that the 2013 revision of the AP-recommended labs went from the old 22 labs that were mostly Structured Inquiry to only 16 labs that are all Guided Inquiry. As College Board says up-front, they had to reduce the number of labs because Guided Inquiry labs take a lot longer. They recommend that at least six of those labs, covering a wide range of topics, be done as Guided Inquiry investigations. It’s acceptable to do the others, as well as supplemental labs, as Structured Inquiry. Here are Wikipedia’s descriptions of the four levels of inquiry-based learning:
Level 1: Confirmation Inquiry – The teacher has taught a particular science theme or topic. He or she then develops questions and a procedure that guides students through an activity where the results are already known. This method is great to reinforce concepts taught and to introduce students into learning to follow procedures, collect and record data correctly and to confirm and deepen understandings.
Level 2: Structured Inquiry – The teacher provides the initial question and an outline of the procedure. Students are to formulate explanations of their findings through evaluating and analyzing the data that they collect.
Level 3: Guided Inquiry – The teacher only provides the research question for the students. The students are responsible for designing and following their own procedures to test that question and then communicate their results and findings.
Level 4: Open Inquiry – Students formulate their own research question(s), design and follow through with a developed procedure, and communicate their findings and results. This type of inquiry is often seen in science fair contexts where students drive their own investigative questions.
Obviously, whether by name or not, all four of those levels have their place in science education. The problem in a homeschool environment is that Guided Inquiry requires a guide. In other words, College Board assumes that these labs will be taught by a science teacher qualified in AP Chemistry. Some homeschool parents will meet that requirement, but the majority will not, and will be very uncomfortable in the role of AP Chemistry teacher. On the other hand, we’ll probably sell a lot of AP Chemistry Kits to public and private high schools that do have teachers qualified to teach AP Chemistry.
So I’ve decided on a compromise. I’ll write up all 16 of the core lab sessions as Guided Inquiry labs, which will be all that’s available in the student lab manual. The teacher’s manual will include materials for teachers who are doing the labs as Guided Inquiry, but will also include full alternative procedures for those who decide to teach some or all of the labs as Structured Inquiry. I’ll provide the teacher’s manual in both PDF and DOC formats to allow teachers to cut-and-paste material from that manual to create a modified student manual.
It’s a lot of work, and I’ll have to do this all over again when I do the AP Biology kit.
09:54 – I’m still making up chemical bags, building component inventories so that we’ll have what we need to assemble finished kits quickly as sales ramp up for the autumn semester. If I have all the subassemblies in stock, I can easily assemble a month’s supply of kits in a day or two. The trick is making sure to have all the subassemblies in stock.
But I seldom spend full days doing work like that. So, just having finished binning another batch of chemical bags, I’m going to spend a few hours designing lab sessions and writing the AP chemistry manual.
09:22 – I need to get some small purchase orders issued for stuff we’re running low on. Things like 2.5 kilos of salicylic acid, ten meters of MFF #43 fabric and 250 g of TIS #1 stain, 50 g or 100 g each of ammonium metavanadate, sulfanilic acid, and diphenylamine, and so on. Most of them are for forensics kits, but some are for biology or chemistry kits.
I also need to finish building another three dozen sets of chemical bags for chemistry kits, which are already in progress. After that, I need to do another two dozen sets each of chemical bags for biology kits and forensic kits, as well as small parts bags for both. Then, of course, I need to build the kits themselves.
Meanwhile, I’m still working on the manuals for the Earth & Space Science kit and the AP Chemistry kit. When I get tired of working on one, I switch to the other for a while.
07:29 – Fourteen months ago, I mentioned that Joe Hester, who lives down the street from us, had been charged with sex offenses against a student in the high school where he taught. This morning’s paper reports the resolution of that case. Mr. Hester was sentenced to a prison term of 7 years and 10 months to 14 years and 5 months and was ordered to register as a sex offender for 30 years following his release. All of that for what I suspect was probably consensual activity with a 15-year-old girl. As Barbara said, the punishment was all out of proportion to the crime. This guy will spend more time in prison than the habitual drunk driver who killed the mother of one of Barbara’s co-workers recently. I don’t know Joe. This all happened very soon after he and his wife bought the house down the street. I’ve only talked with the guy once for a few minutes, and have never done more than shout hello to his wife. But he seemed like a nice enough guy. And now he’s ruined not just his own life, but his wife’s as well.
12:21 – I’ve been dithering for a while about doing an AP Chemistry kit. I’d originally intended to introduce one in 2012, but the College Board had announced that they’d have a completely revised set of AP Chemistry labs in 2013. So I waited on those. I wasn’t happy when I saw what CB had done. They reduced the number of labs and (as far as I’m concerned) dumbed them down considerably.
To do the labs as specified, a homeschooler needs an accurate balance/scale. That’s not a problem. One can buy an electronic scale with 100 or 200 g capacity and centigram (0.01 g) resolution on Amazon for $10. A balance with 20 g capacity and milligram (0.001 g) resolution costs about $20. That’s doable for most homeschoolers. But the new labs also require a visible-light spectrophotometer (or at least a colorimeter) and a pH meter. A pH meter with useful resolution and accuracy runs $100 or more, and even the least expensive standard spectrophotometers start at $500 and go up rapidly from there.
I’d about decided to do a lab kit that covered the new AP Chemistry labs as closely as possible without requiring a lot of expensive equipment, but unfortunately “as closely as possible” wouldn’t have been very close at all. Part of the AP Chemistry lab experience is supposed to be learning to use this type of equipment.
I finally decided to do an AP Chemistry lab kit that uses an inexpensive electronic balance, that $100 pH meter, the $115 Vernier Colorimeter and the $61 Vernier Go!Link interface. The balance and pH meter I already have. I just ordered the Vernier stuff, which should arrive next week. The Vernier colorimeter isn’t a perfect solution. Unlike a true spectrophotometer, which allows varying the wavelength of the light continuously or in very small increments, the colorimeter offers only four discrete wavelengths, but that suffices to teach the important concepts.
I think I can take the balance(s) as a given, but there will be many homeschool parents who do not want to or cannot afford to spend $100 on a pH meter or $176 on the colorimeter and interface. For them, I’ll provide data that I gather myself and that their students can use to graph and analyze as they would if they actually had the instruments. It won’t be the full lab experience, obviously, but it’ll be a lot better than nothing.
I’m also concerned about the dumbing down thing. The truth is that our standard CK01A kit, which we specify as honors first-year chemistry level, is considerably more rigorous than the new AP Chemistry, which is supposedly second-year level. So, I plan to do the AP Chemistry labs as specified, but to fill out the kit manual with additional lab sessions that are actually of appropriate rigor for a second-year chemistry lab course for students who plan to go on to major in STEM at college.
07:51 – Barbara is delighted with her new garage doors. I almost dated this entry “Tuesday, 31 June 2014” because that’s what the installer dated the installation sticker on the doors.
I’m still designing and writing up lab sessions for the Earth & Space Science kit. Until yesterday, I had a gaping hole for the group on Plate Tectonics, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes”, none of which are exactly easy to model/simulate at home. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a few ideas to test.