Shrimp and Grits

Well, it’s official. Anti-science candidate Karen Floyd has been defeated by Jim Rex for the post of SC Superintendent of Education.

This, of course, assumes that there aren’t legal challenges to the vote. We shall see.

Updated on 11/21/06: Floyd has conceded.

Why only a little happy? Well, the margin of victory was only 455 votes! Rex’s opponent was not only unqualified for the office but also said such mind-bogglingly foolish things as

More and more scientists are publicly coming out in favor of an Intelligent Design Theory because that is what the evidence is telling them is true.

Long gone are the days when God was excluded from scientific circles. If we ignore that reality, we will only limit our children’s scientific knowledge.

Clearly, the theory of the politically-correct minority has been allowed to dominate our classrooms to the point where not only is evolution being taught as a scientific truth, but the public address system cannot be used to say a prayer for the safety of athletes before a football game - this is wrong.

(Source: SC PIE)

455 votes … out of a million. We’ve got a long way to go in South Carolina.

Here’s one of my pet peeves - “preformed”. I routinely have students tell me things like

The standardization of 0.1 M base was preformed using the primary standard grade KHP.

I’m sure the student didn’t mold the base into a predeterimined shape before doing the analysis. Perhaps this student meant that they “performed” the standardization?

Of course, even the word “perform” in a description of what you’re doing in a lab is never actually necessary - unless you’re actually performing your experiment before a live studio audience. What’s wrong with saying sometihng like this?

The 0.1M NaOH solution was standardized by titrating against primary standard grade KHP.

This is a collection of funny student answers from my first few years of teaching introductory chemistry classes at my college. All student answers are presented as the student submitted them to me - spelling and all. Enjoy!

It helps to know what science you’re in

Question: Briefly define chemistry.

Student answer: A systemic substanse study of matter.

Conservation of mass: When you do a chemical reaction, the total amount of mass remains constant.

Question: Briefly state the law of conservation of mass.

Student answers:

• Mass is equal to volume. You mass something when in something. The weight how much holds or is.
• Mass measurements can be precise or accurate. Precise ask how close are measurements to the same measurement and accuracy wants to know is it right, law wants to know can I do it again.
• Mass is how much it takes up on an object.
• Mass is the kilograms.

Fun with Marshmallow Peeps!

Picture a marshmallow peep floating in a beaker of water. This was sitting in front of the students when they answered the following question.

Question: Is the marshmallow peep more or less dense than water?

Student answer: No.

Fun with magnesium!

Magnesium metal burns in air with a brilliant (almost blinding) white flame and leaves a white ash behind.

Question: Describe as thoroughly as you can what happens when a piece of magnesium is burned in air.

Student answers:

• When a piece of magnesium burn in the air it will not show a reaction b/c the air has less density and it will not burn throughly.
• It would explore like firecrackers.
• When a piece of magnesium burns, it gets hard and turns into a metal.

Fun with oxygen!

Students prepare molecular oxygen (O₂) and investigate the effects of a pure oxygen environment on combustion. They observe that things burn more intensely in pure oxygen.

Question: How does the amount of oxygen present affect the rate of combustion?

Student answers:

• In high oxygen things give off better reaction and combustion. Compared to low concentration of oxygen.
• In high concentration of oxygen is faster than air.
• Oxygen burns faster and in air it doesn’t burn.
• The fire is more contense in oxygen. The oxygen speeds it up (fire, the burning).

Sulfur burns a with bright blue flame in a high concentration of oxygen and with a dimmer blue flame in air. The faster sulfur burns, the brighter the flame is.

Question: What evidence from the burning of sulfur confirmed your conclusion about the rate of combustion?

Student answers:

• That the sulfur when heat was added to it. It just started crackling and burning and looked like kinda like a copper color.
• It change from a powder form to a liquid form.
• It turned dark and there was a liquid.
• An environment with pure oxygen can reignite flame from embers, but low concentration can not. High oxygen content created more intense heat.

Fun with hydrogen!

Students prepare, collect, and burn hydrogen. Hydrogen burns rapidly with a loud popping sound.

Students collected hydrogen by bubbling it through a bottle of water. This works because hydrogen does not mix well with water (it’s “insoluble”) and is able to push the water out of the bottle.

Question: What physical property of hydrogen, other than it is less dense than water, allows it to be collected in this manner?

Student answers:

• Oxygen.
• Very reactive.
• Because it’s lighter than air.
• Its ability to mix with other gases “diffusion”
• It’s a molecule found in air.
• It is an element, reactive, and can burn and also a gas at room temperature.

You don’t get a “pop” from hydrogen combustion when you bring a burning splint over a bottle which has sat open for a full minute. The hydrogen is very light and escapes into the room.

Question: How do you account for this?

Student answers:

• Because hydrogen is dense.
• B/C it was left open for 1 minute + the hydrogen left out. Was oxygen.
• Air and hydrogen in the bottle did not make a popping noise.
• The hydrogen was at the top of the bottom.
• Oxygen put out the flame.

CNN is carrying a small story pointing to a report from the National Research Council on science education for young people. The press release is here.

I haven’t had time to read the full report (352 pages!), but this part of the press release resonates wilh me (bold added by me, for emphasis).

Today’s standards are still too broad, resulting in superficial coverage of science that fails to link concepts or develop them over successive grades, the report says. Teachers also need more opportunities to learn how to teach science as an integrated whole — and to diverse student populations.

A little while ago, I was briefly involved in a workshop whose goals were to try to align the courses of the high school with the courses at the college - making it easier for the high schoolers to transition to our college when they graduate. This gave me some opportunity to talk with some of the high school teachers about what sort of things were in the standards to be covered in high school science classes.

While this National Research Council is about K-8 education, I find that the high school standards suffer from the same problems: too many topics and too few underlying principles. In the mad rush to get through all the bullet points the course is supposed to cover, important concepts receive rather shallow treatment. I remember remarking at the workshop - “Wow, if my freshmen actually understood half of what’s in that list [the standards], all I’d need to do in class is pass out the test.”

My incoming students might have heard the terms “chemical reaction”, “percent yield”, and “equilibrium” Were Alex Trebek to uncover a definition of percent yield on an episode of Jeopardy, many of my incoming students might respond with “What is percent yield?” But they aren’t able to connect these concepts - because they do not see chemistry as a set of ideas linking things together. And, they don’t see science as a way of getting things done. Instead of knowing science, they know Jeopardy.

The National Research Council recommends, for K-8 students, this:

Students should have a wide variety of learning experiences in science classes, the committee said. Those experiences should include conducting investigations; sharing ideas with peers; talking and writing in specialized ways; and using mechanical, mathematical, and computer-based models. Science should be presented as a process of using evidence to build explanatory theories and models, and then checking how well the evidence supports them.

Sounds good to me, but I have my doubts as to whether a lot of this will be implemented. It’s all a matter of cost. All the stuff suggested above costs money - not just in terms of technology, but in terms of personnel. I teach classes for adults who wish to work in the chemical industry - and I try to do a lot of the stuff above with them. For it to work well, the class needs to be small - so you can have meaningful interactions with students on the concepts they’re investigating. You also need adequate technology. For schools that have trouble keeping the buildings from falling apart due to lack of funds (read: poorer districts in my state, for instance), this’ll be a tall order.

Real science is better, but Jeopardy is a lot cheaper. At least in the short term.

Iodine is a rather neat element. It’s a nice - if a little boring looking - crystalline solid at room temperature. Chunks of iodine are similar in appearance to things you might find in the bins of rocks at places like Black Market Minerals at Barefoot Landing.

Solid iodine

Iodine is interesting because it is easy to make solid iodine go into the gas state. Plus, unlike many gases, iodine vapor has a distinct purple color and is easy to see. Solid iodine slowly sublimes (goes from the solid state to the vapor) at room temperature. It’s easy to accelerate this process by supplying a little heat.

If the iodine vapor comes into contact with a cool surface, it will deposit (resolidify) on the surface, forming pretty crystals. (A similar thing happens when water vapor comes into contact with a cool surface, although in that case you usually get liquid water.)

To show this, I tried to replicate a picture of a demonstration from one of my older chemistry books. I took some solid iodine and put it into a beaker, then set the beaker on a hotplate. On top of the beaker, I put a watch glass (curved piece of glass that looks something like a lens) and some ice - to provide a nice, cool surface.

Setup

To speed up the production of iodine vapor, I turned on the heat (just a little). You can just barely make out the purple iodine vapor in the beaker.

A little vapor is visible

If the hotplate’s temerature gets to about 114 ^oC (about 237 ^oF), the iodine will begin to melt, forming a dark purple liquid. The amount of iodine in the vapor state goes up, too!

More vapor is visible. If you value your nose, keep it away from this vapor.

What’s impressive about this demonstration is the sheer number of phase changes that are going on at once.

Pick a phase, any phase!

At the bottom of the beaker, you have some solid and liquid iodine. Since the hotplate is providing heat energy, you have the solid iodine melting and subliming. The liquid iodine is also evaporating. Near the top of the beaker (and to some extent on the sides of the beaker - which are cooler than the bottom), you have deposition of iodine vapor, forming solid iodine crystals. (It also looks like some iodine may have condensed on the hotter parts of the beaker nearer the bottom, then frozen after the beaker was removed from the hotplate.) That about covers it!

… not counting the ice, that is. The ice at the top of the beaker is melting, removing energy from the iodine vapor as it deposits on the bottom of the cold watch glass.

Deposited iodine crystals, forming from purple iodine vapor

The crystals formed on the watch glass are flat and shiny - almost metallic in appearance. They’ve grown to look a bit like perverted stalactites.

Deposited iodine crystals, closer view

A few words of caution if you attempt this experiment yourself. Iodine may look harmless (it won’t blow up on you - provided you keep it away from combustibles), but iodine solid can cause chemical burns on skin contact, and iodine vapors are very bad for the lungs. This sort of experiment needs a fume hood, and solid iodine shouldn’t be handled directly.

News from the department of the obvious: Basic medical instructions hard for most adults, study finds

The subject of the article is how folks have trouble following “health instructions”, which is … not surprising in the least. We do pretty poorly in many areas of science literacy - medical science certainly isn’t an exception.

But here’s the quote that I’m going to fuss about, since I’m your friendly neighborhood chemist.

A consumer may want to know the salt content before buying, but the word salt isn’t on the label.

“Of course, they wrote ’sodium,’ but that’s a technical term, that’s a chemistry term,” [Dr. Rima] Rudd said. “You don’t sit at the family table and say, ‘Pass the sodium please.”‘

Well of course you don’t ask someone to pass the sodium at the dinner table. Pure sodium is a soft, metallic element that reacts violently with water. It would be a decidedly bad thing to pass around at the family table. The stuff you pass around at the dinner table is a sodium-containing compound called sodium chloride.

Plus, “sodium” is hardly a more technical term than “gold”, “silver”, “iron”, or “oxygen”.

“They’re writing things at a level in the health field that is very difficult for the general public to work with,” Rudd said.

While I’d certainly agree that information leaflets that come with prescription drugs are written in a language that is difficult for someone without medical training to understand, I do not think the same thing applies to “sodium” on the side of a soup can. Anyone who makes it out of high school without enough knowledge to know a few basic things about what common table salt contains has been done a disservice.

I mentioned in a previous post that, in my unvarnished opinion, the ACE curriculum was “bad pedagogy and bad science”. I have my reasons for saying this - not the least of which is the fact that I went, for several of my childhood years, to an ACE school.

Let me briefly describe life in the ACE school. The school I attended was a small school, and what passed for learning in that school was to sit in a desk facing a white wall. On the sides of the desk were red and blue dividers to prevent you from looking to the sides. The day consisted mainly of sitting in that little isolated desk and working through workbooks, called PACEs.

If you had questions or needed to take the test at the end of each workbook, you were to raise a flag (either an American or a Christian flag - depending on what you needed), and one of the “supervisors” would come by and attempt to help you. Help was often rather limited, as the supervisors weren’t necessarily experts in any particular area of the curriculum. The supervisors meant well, I suppose, but they were far more concerned with keeping an appearance of order than they were about scholarship.

If sitting at a desk most of the day working through bland workbooks and staring at a blue, a white, and a red wall sounds to you like a lot like an inquisitive child’s vision of hell …. that’s exactly how it felt to me. I would not wish this type of education on my worst enemy or his children. Thankfully, I was eventually sent to a more sane school after four years of this - but I’ve always felt that my four years at an ACE school stunted my intellectual growth. It takes a long time to deprogram yourself of all that nonsense …

At the risk of bringing on some nasty flashbacks to my ACE days, I’ve dug up some samples of the ACE curriculum - so you can judge for yourselves how awful this stuff is.

The lessons start off looking mostly harmless.

Here’s an early sample of Math, for first graders. Counting money is, of course, something you’d want kids to pick up. But the curriculum rapidly goes downhill from there.

Since I’m a teacher of science, I’m going to focus on the science part of the curriculum for now.

Here’s a page from first grade science that describes the taste buds. You’ll notice that the page is as much about thanking God for taste buds as it is about the taste buds themselves. Also notice that the kids are asked to fill in the blanks, with answers that are trivially easy to find in the preceding few paragraphs. While this might not be much of an issue in first grade, the entire curriculum is based on “read and regurgitate” - little if any critical thought is involved.

Here’s another page from first grade science. This page highlights one of the severe failings of the ACE curriculum - it’s more about making kids into fundamentalists than it is about educating kids. Can anyone tell me what this has to do with science, and why it is in the science workbook?

God made all things.
So, all things belong to Him.
All things tell us that God is good.
All things tell us that He is wise and kind.
All things we see tell us that God loves us.
He helps us all day and all night.
He will help us all the time.
God is wise, good, and kind.
The Bible tells us so.

This might be a fine Bible lesson (provided you don’t let the kids hear about Katrina or that tsunami in Asia that killed 200000+ just after Christmas), but it’s in the wrong place.

Let’s move on to third grade science. Here’s what passes for the history of the Earth in the ACE curriculum. The most obvious criticism of this material is that it isn’t science at all - it’s simply part of Genesis in simpler words.

Another criticism of this material is that, again, no thought is involved. For instance, the text says that

There is a band of air which God placed around the earth on the second day.

It then asks the kids to select the best completion to this sentence.

There is a (creation, sand, band) of air around the earth.

Whether you know the real answer or not, only one answer can fit! Lots of ACE questions are this way - even on their end-of-workbook tests. It’s like this at the higher levels, too.

If you have the stomach for it, continue reading the sample third grade science book: here, here, here, here, and here. You’ll find no science, of course. You’ll find only fundamentalism - in big print.

Moving on into the fourth grade, you’ll find that the science ACE is peddling doesn’t get any better.

We use measurement to compare one object with another.

If we want to check or measure our own lives, we compare ourselves only to God. We do not measure up to God because we are sinners.

The curriculum is short on science, and long on fundamentalism. And, like the other pages we’ve looked at, the ACE curriculum relies almost entirely on rote memorization. Science is not viewed as a process of discovery - it’s viewed as a laundry list of facts to memorize. Facts are important, but they’re only part of science.

One thing that I noticed while I was in the ACE school was that the later science PACEs seemed afraid of presenting science. The curriculum was careful to dismiss well-established scientific ideas as “what scientists believe” and cast doubt on established science that might not agree with the ACE authors’ take on the Bible. Take a look at this sample.

Have you ever wondered how many kinds of plants there are? Even scientists do not know for sure. They think there are about 350,000 varieties; however, no one but God knows exactly how many kinds of plants exist in the world.

Sounds innocent (for a religious school) so far, right? Read on, in the ninth grade ACE materials.

Most scientists classify man as a mammal in the phylum Chordata since he has characteristics similar to those of mammals. Man, however, is a unique being with characteristics that he alone possesses. For this reason, we will not classify man as a mammal. Man is not an animal - he is a unique being who was created in God’s image.

Obviously, the ACE curriculum doesn’t teach evolution - the theory that binds biology together. So biology is simply presented as a big dump of largely unrelated information. Much of ACE biology revolves around the classification of organisms. But ACE can’t even give the kids that without screwing it up with fundamentalism!

Finally, we come to tenth grade science. The site I’ve been pulling this material from doesn’t have much in the way of actual content from the science part of the curriculum at this grade level, but what they do provide supports the points I’ve made above. Just take a look at this tenth grade science quiz. For reference, in the tenth grade at the normal high school I went to after escaping from the ACE school, I was taking laboratory-based chemistry and biology courses. The poor ACE kids at that level sit in their cubicles and regurgitate stuff like this:

Special revelation ______________________.
A) reveals God in natural laws
B) is the Word of God
C) teaches man how to know God
D) reveals Who God is
E) B, C, and D
F) A, B, and C
G) all the above

It goes without saying that special revelation is not a scientific concept at all, and has no place in a decent science curriculum. If you click the link above, you can see that the other questions on the page are worded in such a way as to overstate the uncertainties in science. While it’s true that in science all knowledge is provisional, this point isn’t what the ACE curriculum tries to drive home. The ACE point is, plainly put, don’t trust science.

In summary, here’s why i think the ACE curriculum should be put “in the hole”.

• It relies on rote memorization - and only rote memorization - in most areas except some parts of math.
• The assessments are simplistic and don’t involve any sort of critical thought.
• The content is so steeped in fundamentalism that important topics are either left out or distorted. This is especially apparent in science, where the curriculum spends much of its time on theology instead of science.

We’re going to have an election soon to choose the new education superintendent. This is potentially important for the future of education here in the Palmetto State, and as all three readers of this blog know - science education is one of my big issues.

The main thing I look at to see whether someone supports quality education is the evolution issue. It’s not because I’m a biologist (my wife teaches biology, while I teach chemistry). It’s because evolution is such an established part of one core science that it allows you to see what a person things of science in general. A person that rejects evolution without looking at the science will reject any other areas that the don’t like - and that leaves science education stranded on some extremely thin ice.

Here’s what I’d really like our two education superintendent candidates to say when asked about whether evolution should be taught in schools:

“Well, I’ve looked at the issue, and I think the theories taught in the high schools should be the theories that help our scientists gain new knowledge in their fields. Biologists use evolutionary theory to give us new insight on how living things work. It’s a fundamental and well-supported idea in biology, much like the concept of the atom is a fundamental and well-supported idea in chemistry. We’d be doing out children a disservice to avoid evolutionary theory in the classroom.”

Here’s what they actually say:

Karen Floyd, Republican, who won a close primary election

There are a growing number of prominent scientists who are “poking around” in the foundations of evolutionary theory. Irreducible complexity is just one issue that causes heartburn for the evolutionists.

As science evolves, so do the opinions of the scientists. More and more scientists are publicly coming out in favor of an Intelligent Design Theory because that is what the evidence is telling them is true.

Long gone are the days when God was excluded from scientific circles. If we ignore that reality, we will only limit our children’s scientific knowledge.

Clearly, the theory of the politically-correct minority has been allowed to dominate our classrooms to the point where not only is evolution being taught as a scientific truth, but the public address system cannot be used to say a prayer for the safety of athletes before a football game - this is wrong.

Source: SC PIE - State Superintendent of Education candidate supports Intelligent Design

Jim Rex, Democrat

South Carolina is a very spiritually active, involved state. … I believe there are other venues for supporting and nourishing religious beliefs outside and inside our schools. There are more appropriate places to deal with that (subject of alternative theories) than in the biology classroom

Source: The State: Veteran educator kicks off campaign

Which one are you more comfortable with setting the science agenda for your kids?

(Hat Tip: SC-SCIED)

Cola drinks, as almost everyone knows, contain dissolved gas. The gas is present in two forms in the drink: dissolved CO₂ molecules, and carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) - which forms in a reversible reaction between the carbon dioxide and water.

Dissolved CO₂ is partially responsible for the flavor of colas, and is completely responsible for the fizz. The fizz is what we’re interested in for this blog post. Like all gases, carbon dioxide takes up a lot of space relative to its mass. When dissolved in liquid, it takes up less space than it would in the gas form. What if all the dissolved carbon dioxide in a bottle of cola were to come out of the liquid at once? The gaseous carbon dioxide would push against the liquid and the sides of the bottle. if there was a path for the liquid and gas to escape, they would shoot out rather rapidly.

You can get some dissolved carbon dioxide to come out of a cola by shaking it (who hasn’t seen this at least once?). This is good for practical jokes, but doesn’t make for an impressive fountain. For that, we need something better: Mentos mints.

While I’m not sure of the mechanism (I have a few ideas), Mentos mints catalyze the release of carbon dioxide from colas. Catalysts speed up a process, and Mentos mints make the carbon dioxide come out of cola fast. Really fast. Fast enough to blow three quarters of the liquid out of a two liter cola bottle.

We tried putting some Mentos into a two liter bottle of Diet Coke in my introductory chemistry class - it’s a good demonstration of the effects of gas pressure. Here are the results.

Click each image to enlarge.

Loading the Mentos. I had the students use the folder as a chute to get the Mentos into the bottle because that way it would be less likely for the students to put their head directly over the bottle. (See? I’m not completely evil!)

You can see the cola already starting to shoot out of the bottle. My students haven’t yet noticed, since this is only a few seconds after the first few Mentos make it into the bottle.

Have they noticed yet?

Thar she blows!

Behold! The mighty Coke fountain!

We estimate that cola shot up about four feet over the top of the bottle. This is similar to other results from around the web.

Is that the face of Jesus in the cola? Or is it something more sinister? (This experiment was performed on 06/06/06, after all!

Who’s going to clean this up, anyway?

I think I’ll try this again with my other classes. It’s cheap, safe, entertaining, and requires no special hardware. Just don’t do it inside!

Much to my parents’ dismay, when I was a small child, I was a an amateur chemist. Not having much in the way of chemical glassware, I would mix various things in the toilet to see what would happen. This, more often than not, produced amusing rather than toxic results. Amusing, that is, unless you were the one who had to clean up afterwards!

While I soon graduated to crystals in jars, ripping apart electronics, and putting them back together again (occasionally successfully), I eventually came back to chemistry and got a degree in it - then started teaching it.

Even in my youth, though, the chemistry set was on the decline (hence the reason for putting reagents into the big white bowl with convenient “waste disposal” lever). Too dangerous, they said. You can’t let kids play with magnesium ribbon! They could poke their eyes out! Or blow up the house! Or whatever the heck that stuff does …

So I have a certain affinity for household chemistry, and articles like this one in Wired disturb me. There’s a drive on - spurred by the unavoidable fact that chemicals can be dangerous coupled with the mad desire for protection from terrorism and drugs - to legislate the amateur chemist out of existence. The elimination of budding scientists might not be the intention of the criminalization of amateur science, but consider this: Almost everything that causes an interesting chemical effect can be dangerous. Take away everytihng that’s potentially dangerous and/or could potentially be used to make some kind of drug and you have … nothing.

Want proof? Take a look in the Wired article:

more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.

I’ve bolded the ridiculously common items here. Iodine, rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol), and hydrogen peroxide can be found in most medicine cabinets. Got an aquarium or pool? You’ll need the pH strips. (Not mentioned on this list, but another household compound associated with meth is pseudoephedrine - found in Sudafed.)

Sulfuric acid’s one of the most common compounds in the world - you’ll find it in your car battery. And here’s a hint to overzealous legislators: Erlenmeyer flasks are not actually required to make drugs, but they sure do make simple kid-level experiments like titration of household vinegar easier.

So heaven help you if you have a car, a pool, an inquisitive kid, and a reasonably stocked medicine cabinet. You’re probably on someone’s watch list!