9UNP0190SD_Stephen_Collins_WordPress

- Hi, I'm the director of the Interdisciplinary Education Group at the Materials Research Science Engineering Center, the IEG of the MRSEC. …of the We do education outreach related to nanotechnology. Tom Zinnen is in green bay tonight, so for those of you who knows him, he sends his wishes and regrets that he can't be here. Tonight's speaker is Mr. Steven Collins, he's a physics high school teacher from New Orleans, Louisiana, and he'll be talking with us tonight about integrating music into physics education. And so with that, I’ll turn you over to Steven. 

- Thank you great. Thanks everybody from coming. I am a high school teacher in Louisiana. I teach high school physics. 

I've had a wide range of great conversations here in Wisconsin since I got here with people here at UW yesterday and today. Thank you all for coming and being a part of this one. What I want to talk about today is the integration of physics instruction with music. The school that I'm going to be teaching at in the fall is a part of the charter school network in New Orleans. My particular school, lusher charter school, is run by a group called the coalition for arts education. The stated mission of the school is to integrate the arts into every aspect of education. This is something I’ve been doing in my classroom at another school for quite a few years, and though I haven't been teaching there yet, I do know how to do this in my own little way, and I wanted to share that with you. So this is an example of integrating music with physics instruction. Lasher’s theme that unifies all the disciplines taught there is the theme of communication. In science, in mathematics, individual arts, performing arts, communication is what underlies all of these. 

An effort to communicate ideas and emotions between people. Music clearly does that for many people, for some people, they actually communicate through math. Imagine that. And I imagine if you're here at Wednesday night at the lab, you might have an idea of exactly how that works. For a lot of my students understanding that mathematics is a means of communication and that it might have a message to deliver beyond the numbers themselves is a foreign idea. So the lesson I'm going to share with you tonight is how I begin my physics class. To take 14 and 15-year-old students and turn them on to the idea that numbers are an intrinsic part of nature. They're not something just cooked up simply for math class. Why do they do this at the school? Why integrate the arts with all the other disciplines of education? 

To some of you, the answers might be obvious. Two of the prime reasons to do this is that at our school, at lusher, the newspaper recently referred to it as the school of rock. This is a school that has a high percentage of parents who are professional musicians. Their children are musically inclined and see and believe that their future will be as a professional musician. If we don't tie what we're teaching into that aspiration of theirs, then we'll most likely lose their attention in class. These are also students who are talented in these regards. And when we can tie in our education and our educational objectives with areas where they already have a demonstrated talent, their enthusiasm and their ability to connect with it is greatly increased. At this point, does anybody have any questions about the idea of integrating arts with the sciences? Okay. I want to encourage you all to ask questions at any point. 

And at this point, I’ll just dive right into it and hopefully, you'll have some fun. So this is where we begin. We begin with a little bit of history. Pythagoras of Samos lived, what's that, about 2600 years ago. There's some argument about when exactly he lived. How many people have heard the name Pythagoras before? Okay. So you're all, or majority are familiar with Pythagoras. Maybe could even name some of the stuff he contributed along the way. He's best known for the Pythagorean Theorem. 

Oddly enough, not only was he not the first person to come up with it, it's highly likely that he didn't come up with it. Pythagoras had a school that, in the descriptions I read might more properly be called a cult. Every development that came out of this school was automatically attributed to Pythagoras because he had this fundamental primary incite upon which the whole school was based. Everything that flowed from that insight was credited to Pythagoras. So when the Pythagoreans, his disciples, professed this knowledge to strangers, it became known as the Pythagorean Theorem. A long time ago, in the history of these kinds of things, can be shrouded and when everybody points to the same person as the origin of their ideas, it's hard to separate them. But graphically, Pythagorean Theorem is fairly easy to pick up on, especially if you're comfortable with mathematics. The idea that the sides of a triangle are in their length related to each other by the size of the scares that match up with them, is a fundamental principle in geometry. Pythagoras specifically is mentioned by Plato and Euclid, very influential on both of them. Plato roundly recognized as the father of Greek philosophy. 

Euclid, recognized as the originator of our Euclidean geometry that we teach to students in school. So in recognizing this individual, Pythagoras, we realize we're really getting way, way back in the intellectual history of the western world. This is from the foundational roots. And what we also want to look at is where he sat in art history. And the answer is, not quite center and a little bit to the left. How many of you are familiar with the school of Athens? How many people have seen it? If you've been lucky enough to travel to Rome and gone into the Vatican museum, in the library of Pope Leo, he had commissioned a series of frescoes to adorn the ceilings of his library. This one was completed by raffle. Raffle titled this one philosophy. 

And it depicts the philosophers of ancient Greece that were identify idolized by the philosophers of the high renaissance and apparently the artists as well. And this is Pythagoras sitting here with an adoring crowd around him, looking at his scribblings in a notebook. It's an interesting story. Over here in the right hand corner, we have Michael Angelo while raffle was painting this fresco, he broke the rules and he snuck into the Sistine chapel. Michael Angelo had it closed off while he was completing his work in there. And when raffle saw the work in the Sistine chapel, he instantly acknowledged Michael Angelo as an artist for the ages and painted his face into this fresco. So there among the philosophers of antiquity is one contemporary face, that of Michael Angelo for the work he was doing around the corner in the Vatican, painting the Sistine chapel ceiling. Above the stanza of all these philosophers is a motto: seek the causes. And in ancient Greek philosophy that was a driving force, to find out why things happened the way they did and it's for that reason that we're focused on Pythagoras right now. What I'm going to do is pass out some straws. 

And I have to warn you, I'm going to be -- one a piece. I'm going to be asking you to do things and interact and play around and I might even ask you to get up and move your seat at some point. I hope that doesn't create too much of a problem. I'm partial to people being closer to me and closer together so that we can coordinate our activities a little bit better. And these people up front, they seem really nice. I don't think they're going to bite or anything like that, so you'll probably be safe. All right, your straws, if you take a look at them, have been cut just above the little flexible portion. I was dismayed when I went to the grocery store. Nobody seems to want straws that don't have a flexible portion anymore. I guess it's just physics teachers that find a use for them. 

Everybody else enjoys them. They're 16.4-centimeters when the flexible part isn't extended, so though it's tempting to make your straw longer, it really will work better if you keep your straw the same length as everybody else. So 16.4 centimeters long. Does everybody understand what that might mean, 16.4-centimeters? Anybody not know what a centimeter is? Keep in mind, we're talking about fundamental science here, the base level. So we've all got to keep very careful thoughts about exactly what we mean when we say things. Like for instance, if I wanted to talk about a straw that was 8/9th as long as the straw you are holding, take a moment to really think about what that means and see if you can put that in a sentence to tell me what it means to be 8/9th as long as something else. Is anyone brave enough to take is a stab at it? 

- A little bit smaller. 

- A little bit smaller, okay. Could anyone make it more specific? 

- Eight parts of nine. 

- Eight parts of nine. Do you have a method that we could use to figure out what eight parts of nine of this would be? It's not an easy question. Yes? 

- [inaudible] okay.

Okay. Does that sound a little bit like what you're thinking of? If we broke it into nine equal parts and had eight. Do you have a suggestion for an effective way to break this into nine parts and then to reassemble eight of them? It's tough. It's a very simple idea, 8/9th. And a lot of time we kind of gloss over because a lot of us here are very comfortable with numbers and we say 16.4 centimeters. If I want 8/9th of that, maybe I'm comfortable doing that in my made, maybe I take out a pencil, maybe I take out a calculator, but I can find out what 8/9th is as a number. Talking about the idea of 8/9th is a whole another story and it can be very difficult to articulate. Unless someone has an idea of how to break this up into nine equal parts. 

Of which we can then take just eight of them to make your 8/9th straw. Yes? 

- [inaudible]

- That's a very good idea. If we had a ruler request we were able to do the math, figure out what 8/9ths of 16.4 was, we could do exactly that. That's an excellent idea. There are other ways of doing it too. I want to share one of them with you now. And by the way, all those fellas pictured in Raffel's fresco philosophy, thought that the idea of ratio, this idea of what does 8/9th means, they thought it was so important that if you couldn't articulate it, you were irrational. 

I don't think that about any of you, I promise. But it is a really fundamental idea in philosophy, in science, it's an idea of comparing separate things. I have a simple way of doing that that doesn't even really involve a ruler. Unfortunately, since we don't all have our own desks, I’ll show you how it's done and at some point I will hand everybody a ruler and some scissors and you'll get a chance to cut your straw to some integer ratio of the straw that we're starting with here. This is a graphical approach. I know everybody has dealt with graphs before. Graphs are a really visual way of looking at the relationship between quantities. And if we want to look at one straw and another straw and think about a straw that is 8/9th as long, we can do that using a graph. The slope on a graph, if you're familiar with that term, the steepness of a line we draw on the graph describes the relationship between the horizontal on a graph and the vertical. Those of you who have finished your schooling, you're probably a lot more comfortable with the idea of graphing than some of the other members of our audience. 

But like I said, this is a visual approach, so all you have to do is look at the picture and you'll get the idea. A line with a slope of 8/9th would be represented like this. We'd go up eight units, over nine units, we can draw a dot there. We could repeat that process, going up eight units and over nine units, a second time. Draw another point, and then we'd be drawing a line that has a slope of 8/9. If you've already gone through an algebra course, you're probably very familiar with this idea. And now this line that has a slope of 8/9, that goes up eight and over nine is describing a relationship between whatever is positioned vertically and what are is positioned horizontally, that has this comparison of eight to nine. The relationship between the vertical and the horizontal is the same relationship that the number or the quantity eight bears to the quantity nine. How do we use that for our problem? Well, if we've got a straw that we like the length of, we put it on the horizontal axis and at the end of it, we take another straw, and we slide it up snug and where it strikes the line with the slope of 8/9, we've got a new straw that's exactly 8/9 as long. 

And we don't have to divide it up into nine portions, we don't have to divide it up at all. Now, a little aside. In my class, we use graphs a lot to convey information. Graphs are a very effective visual tool for communicating and by starting my students seeing that a graph doesn't always have to be about numbers, it can be about a simple relationship or ratio, it empowers them to believe that maybe if graphs were challenging in the math class, they can possibly learn to deal with them here. So if we had desks and graph paper and pens and rulers, we could do this method and come with an 8/9 straw. But we don't need to. We're going to take the young gentleman's suggestion and use rulers and scissors. And we're going to create a whole bunch of different whole number integer ratios. A line with a slope of 8/9, if we measure the straw that when placed vertically at the end of our whole straw reaches to that line, we find that straw, that 8/9 straw is 14.6-centimeters long. We draw a different line with a slope of 4/5, meaning it goes up four and over five. 

That's one, two, three, four, up. One, two, three, four, five, over. The line that passes through that point gives us a straw with a length of 13.1-centimeters. We can do that with the other whole number ratios like three fourths yielding 12.3-centimeters, two-thirds, that gives us 10.9-centimeters. A line with a slope of 3/5 when we put a straw vertically at the end of our whole straw, it gives us a length of 9.8-centimeter. So we've got several different lengths that are fractions of our original length. What I'm going to ask you to do is to create some of these. And that's where I think the rulers are going to come in. Before we do that, I want you to observe something about these straws. They're actually a little musical instrument. 

If you put your thumb along the bottom, close it off, you can blow across the top of the straw and make a sound. Now, at first, it's going to sound terrible. With practice, you can actually get a decent pitch. Try experimenting with that first question. Now I know there are other straws that are obscuring the sound, but give it a try. Take your thumb off the bottom and listen to see how the sound changes. Would someone offer a description of how the sound changes when you remove your thumb? You even recognize it as an octave. Does anyone here know what an octave is? 

-  
[inaudible]

- I am sorry, one more time. Okay. I believe you said that it was from c to c on the scale. Yes. Can anyone recognize this as a note? It's an octave, but is this a note? How can we find out if this was a note, a particular note. There is, there is. Well these two sounds are different. 

We had a notation that one was an octave higher, and which one was that? When your finger's off. Okay, we're going to return to that idea in a little bit. For now, I'm going to ask you to cut some straws. So this is where I need to organize you into five groups and for the purposes of our demonstration, it might be a little bit easier if you're all a little bit closer so that we had our five groups kind of spread out in maybe the first four or five rows. So, if you don't mind, if you're in the back four rows or so, would you come down and get friendly some of the folks up here? If you don't feel like participating, I won't be hurt. There's the ruler you wanted. And if you'd not necessarily, one per person, just kind of spread them out, pass them around. Let's see, one, two, three -- okay, how many seats do we have, three, six, nine, twelve, thirteen, it would have to be a prime number, wouldn't it? 

Yes please. 

- When you were first asking how can we measure this to get 8/9, and this gentleman back there said get a ruler and so measure, and then you brought up the example of a graph paper, which I completely understand, but isn't that essentially a ruler? 

- In a sense, it is. It's a relative measure. My reason with using the graph is to hammer home that a line on a graph show as relationship in the same way that a ratio shows a relationship. I have difficulty with a lot of my students that just finished algebra class, who believe slope is rise over run, rise over run. And it ends there. Slope expresses a relationship, just like any ratio does, and that has somehow been lost in our math classes that my students have been taking. I don't know if it's a universal truth, but it's one of the things I’ve really had to emphasize. The idea of measuring the ruler and calculating 8/9 is obviously an effective way of finding a straw that is 8/9 as long. 

But the idea of 8/9 is simpler and more fundamental than a particular object being 8/9 the size of something else. 

- Really, it's nice to be able to think a little bit differently, but essentially, I think my point is, graph paper just doesn't fall off of trees. Somebody's sitting there with a ruler measuring this stuff out. 

- Well, the difference I see is that you could construct a grid using an arbitrary length. You could say use the width of a penny and create a grid and without ever knowing that the whole straw was 16.4-centimeters, once you have your grid and you have draw a line that goes eight squares by nine scare squares, you'll be able to find that 8/9 ratio. And yeah, the fundamental processes are the same, but suddenly, you've removed any concrete measurement from it. You're just simply saying I have something that I know is uniform and that allows you to create these ratios. Do we have rulers everywhere? I'd like to divide you up into groups of relatively equal size, which is going to be kind of challenging, considering the lay out. So why don't we say, if you're on the two seats on the end here, you're group one. 

Do we have more rulers? Let's get those out. If you're on the two seats on the end of this row, you're in group one. If you're in these three seats, you're in group two. If you're in these three seats, you're group three. If you're in these three seats, you're group four, and if you're in these two seats, you're group five. Is everybody fairly clear on which group they belong to? Depending on which group you're in, I’d like you to adjust the length of your straw as I’ve outlined up here. Group one, your job is easy. You can release your rulers to whoever needs them. 

Those of you in group two, the closest you can measure it. If you're not familiar with measuring with a ruler or you're having difficulty seeing the marks, someone near you might be able to help you out with that. If you could pass some of those back. My apologies. Thank you. There you go. More rulers? More rulers? Did any more rulers make it over here? It's going to take a little while -- more rulers? 

I have more pens. We're sharing materials so it might take little while for what you need to get to you, but obviously having the ruler and the pen at the same time is much more useful than having just one. You just needed to make this one mark and then when the scissors get to you, you can cut it to the appropriate length. That would probably be easiest, but it's not really necessary. 

- Do you have any more straws? 

- I do. Sure. Need a pen, you have a pen. Anybody have a ruler, but no pen? Okay. 

Once you've got your straw marked, you'll need a pair of scissors to cut it off at the appropriate place. Is anyone at that point? Excellent. There you go. If you can do the conversion then I think you're all set. Scissors? Scissors? Scissors? You've done an excellent job. Scissors anyone? 

If you're waiting for scissorers or the ruler or a marker, practice playing your straws. Some people can get a very crisp, clean note playing on their straws, and some people, it just sounds like you're blowing on a straw. But I'm sure many of you have blown across the top of a soda bottle before, and sometimes you can get a good sound out of it and sometimes it just sounds like you're blowing air. We're aiming for the same kind of technique. If you can make the straw sing, you're right where we want you to be. Well, they're using them one at a time. They need the rule and the pen first and when they're done with that, then the scissors become useful. So the scissors are the quick part. The choke point is with the measurement. 

- Is there anyone who needs a ruler who doesn't have one? 

Anyone who's ready for a scissors that doesn't have one? 

- It's difficult and even as many time -- no, not particularly. I've done this many times and I can't consistently make it sound good. But you know, there's strength in numbers, and as long as we get a couple of people on any particular trial, it will work out fine. It looks like most of you are done cutting their straws at this point. Is there anyone still looking for the scissors or a ruler or a pen? Okay, let's move on. What we'd like to do is listen to the effect that changing the size of these straws has made. And the most effective way of doing that is to have all the people in a particular group play their straws in concert. So now, I'm a conductor. 

Group number one, when I lower my baton, if you would all be so kind to play one note for everybody's hearing pleasure. And then I’ll move over to group two and do the same. For reference, group one, you didn't cut your straw at all. And group two, you cut your straw to be smaller, exactly 8/9 the size, right? Here we go. Group one, are you ready? Closed please with your thumb over the bottom, just for consistency, group one, ready? Excellent. Group two? Okay. 

How does the sound of those two notes compare to each other. The first one is deeper or lower, the second one being a higher frequent sound. Okay let's see if this pattern continues, because as we move across the room, our straws in group three, four and five, if you'd all hold them up so your neighbors can see your straw. As we move across the room, the straws get progressively shorter. So, we're going to go down the whole row and as I point to each of your groups in turn, please play one note. So that everybody can here group one, group two, group three, group four and they be finally, group five. Are we ready? Group one, two, three, four, five. Thank you! Is that beginning to sound familiar to some of you? 

Let's do it in reverse. Group five, are you ready? Okay. So I propose new names for your groups. You will no longer be group one, two, three, four, five. You will be group c, d, e, f and g. Are these appropriate names? Possibly. Some of you might have better ears than me. I would not feel comfortable calling you c, d, e, f and g unless we had some kind of test to see if in fact, c, d, e, f and g were good names for you. 

So I have a well-known test. It's known as the resonating metal spheres test, and I'm going to ask each of your groups to play in this order. So, I’ll coordinate as the conductor, but pointing at your group with it's your turn to play. The problem with this, the problem with this notation is that there's no sense of tempo or timing, so unfortunately, you'll have to look at me for guidance. But, there is some chance, that somewhere along the way, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, you will say I think I know the tempo of this song. Okay. Are we ready? This is resonating metal spheres.  
(straws being played)
[laughing]

Resonating metal spheres, it's an old family favorite. Some of you might know the homage to September 7. Shall we give it a try? It's a little bit faster. Are we ready?  
(straws being played.)

- Yes! Yes. Why September 7th, do you think? 

Well, I'm from New Orleans. That's our first home game. Come on. 

- 
[inaudible]

- Let's do one more. This one takes advantage of one of the phenomenons we noticed earlier. That the sound of the straw changes when you release the bottom. So group one, you kind of missed out on the fun of cutting your own straws. Now we're going to give you something in return. 

You have two different parts. You have your normal c note, which is played with your thumb over the bottom, and then you have the c note which is an octave higher when you remove your thumb from the bottom. So if you see the asterisk next to the c, that means you've got to play one note higher. Are we ready to tackle this one? Okay.  
(straws being played)

Oh, the high one, the high one. Okay. Remember you've got to take your thumb off the bottom and play that high note. So, from the top. 

From the top. Ready.  
(straws being played)
[laughing]

Thank you. Thank you. Very nicely done. The straw orchestra of Wisconsin is as good as the one in New Orleans. There should probably be an exchange. 

I know we're all missing the concert on the park, but not anymore. Just as good. Just as good. This is another song, stellar warfare. You all interested in playing another song? Not really. Okay. Fair enough. Would it be fair to say we're making music with these straws? Okay. 

We can detect these songs. These are songs you know by heart. These are songs that you've been hearing all your life. Is it surprising to anybody that you can make music with just a straw? Possibly, maybe, maybe not. Some people are more familiar with the mechanics of music than others. Let's pay attention to what we just observed there. We know that the straw makes is sound when we blow across the top of it, but what we also saw was that if make our straws have certain ratios to one another, the sounds they produce have a musical relationship. Pythagoras is initially credited with one key insight to which his entire school and consult, if you will, and his philosophical tradition takes root. Does anyone already know what that insight was? 

- 
[inaudible]

- No, not the triangle formula. But there was something even deeper than that that led either he or his disciples to come up with this theorem and many other theorems of geometry. There was a day Pythagoras was walking the streets. Outside a blacksmith shop, he heard the sound of two blacksmiths working, and realized that the sound of their hammers hitting the anvils was creating a harmonious noise. In his mind, to his ear, the sound to those two anvils was actually creating a harmony. And being curious, he looked into it. And he discovered that one anvil was exactly three-fifths the size of another. And he had an insight that has actually shaped all of society, all of modern society since then. 

The insight was a simple one. If numbers are fundamental to music, perhaps numbers are fundamental to understanding everything else. We can credit Pythagoras with that one insight, the idea that numbers and quantity can give us insight to nature, and that's actually the foundational idea behind much of the study of physics today. And that's why I start my students right here with this lesson. Is this science, though? Science is about creating theories that give you testable predictions. I know a lot of you probably have enough musical background to have been able to answer questions about those organ pipes and those string instruments before having done this, before having played around with these straws. But based on what we did today, simply on your observation about the sound that straws make, could you look at those organ pipes and tell me which one is going to make the lowest pitch sound. Which one do you think's going to make the lowest pitch sound? The biggest one. 

Okay. Which one do you think will make the highest pitch sound? 

- Smallest. 

- How about with the string instruments? 

- Same thing. 

- Same thing. So does this sound like it might be a general rule? Something that you could apply to all musical instruments. Do you think big drums make the lowest noise? 

- Yes. 

- Yeah. This is what physics is all about. Finding general rule that is you abstract from perhaps a single example and then find that they're applicable across an entire range of examples. That's what we attempt to teach in physics class, and the reason why we involve numbers is because numbers are relevant to that investigation. Ratios between straws demonstratively produce music and that insight allows us to develop a world where numbers can give us insight to all kinds of other things. So that's about all I have on straws and music. For those who are interested in the process of integrating music further into the instruction of physics. There's a whole sequence that stretches deep into the year that I carry my students through. We develop a model for mechanical waves and sound waves. We look at an analysis of sound waves, using a microphone hooked up to a computer, and through that analysis learn how to make our own musical instruments, from scratch, from fishing line, a couple wood screws and maybe a 2x4 or maybe far more elaborate instruments that rely on the resonance of the sound waves within cavities. 

And I have to tell you, some of them are quite impressive. And they can certainly create a band of their own at the end. That is all that I have to offer you directly, but I’d love to entertain some questions. 

- So if you had a straw that was fatter, you would need a different length to get a c note, correct? So that 16.4 is based on how big -- how the diameter of this straw. 

- Ideally, I’d love to hand you another straw and allow you to compare and see. Actually, the reason that 16.4-centimeters work, is that's one quarter of the wave length of the frequency that you're predominantly hearing. Other frequencies can interfere within that cavity and produce harmonious sounds. And then, of course, there's a lot of noise blowing across the surface of this here. But the length is what's fundamental in something that's inherent, most closely a one dimensional object. 

As we get to creating real good sounding musical instruments that don't sound like people blowing across straws. You have to consider the fact that, in fact, they're three dimensional and there are other vibrations going on. So if we were content with the sound that these straws make, fatter straws, until we got to a diameter that perhaps a tenth of the length of the straw which would be a pretty fat straw, the interference of the waves bouncing sideways probably wouldn't affect the sound too much. 

- [inaudible]

- It's a quarter of the wave length of the sound that you're hearing predominantly, and I believe it's a 660-hertz frequent wave. That quarter wave length. If we wanted to sit down and do some calculations involving the speed of sound and frequencies, you can figure out how I decided to cut them all at 16.4-centimeters. It's mathematically trivial and also pretty uninteresting, so I figured I’d spare you from it. Oh, absolutely. 

And actually, the c sharp, all you have to do is take the d note and cut your straw halfway between them. Roughly halfway. Halfway is not exactly right for an even tempered scale, but it's so close that I'm pretty sure that no human, even one with perfect pitch, could tell them apart. If they're even willing to differentiate between our c and a c sharp. That might be stretching it a little bit. Are there other questions? Yes. 

- Well, I have to ask, your school was a public charter school. 

- It is. 

- Is it subject to the requirements of no child left behind, which means that you have to demonstrate adequate yearly progress year after year after year. 

My guess is that this curriculum which is terrific, fascinating, may not be precisely in line with the Louisiana state tests, by which yearly progress is gauged. I realize you have changed schools, but what's your experience doing something creative, innovative in curriculum when there's a standard out there that probably isn't very innovative? 

- We have curriculum standards in Louisiana that are written in such a way that they can be interpreted to greater or lesser degrees of emphasis. Certainly anything that's talking about measurement as we did today, using the metric system, and talking about sound waves, all those things are part of the standards. So whether, if someone was to step into my classroom from the state board and say, well this is relevant. The issue as a physics teacher, I am very happy to say, I don't have to deal with. Our students report to us that the exit tests include two to three questions at most about physics and they tend to focus on newton's laws, mechanics type questions. We do spend a lot of time dealing with that, so I hope that they'll do very well on those two or three questions, but I feel fortunate in that that drive in education hasn't affected the way my classroom is going to have to operate. It's a great question, and something that matters to me a lot. I could definitely, if I had a soap box handy, get up here and talk about how I feel about standardized testing and what it might be doing to our educational futures. 

But it's probably not the appropriate time to do that. It might be why you're here right now. 

- How do you integrate things other than music? Suppose you were talking about physics of light. 

- Great question. One of the things I like to do with optics and it's the concluding project in this unit is the construction of an instrument. The concluding project in the optics unit is to take a photograph, any photograph that the student has actually taken themselves and in 250 words or less, adequately describe the physics that produced the phenomenon in the photograph. Some photographs are obviously better subjects for such a treatment, but it's one of the great things about physics is that it's everywhere. If they just like a picture, any picture, there's something to talk about. Whether in the phenomenon of color or reflection or in, depending on the photo, it could be any number of an amazing array of topics. 

That has a similar ability to hook students in with their interest in, for instance, photography. And get them to say, okay well I guess there's something more to be said about this than the subject I was looking at, there's a broader context here. And I found that those kind of projects at my old school, I can't speak for the students I’ll be teaching at lusher just yet, but it tended to get people who were very disconnected from the mathematical side of physics very excited about it. I'm particularly proud of one student this year who captured a photo of what's known as an iridescent cloud, a cloud formation where all the water droplets come up in uniform size and they form a giant diffraction grading in the sky and you get a cloud of just unbelievable color, that most people at first glance say, well if there's color in the sky it's a rainbow. Then you look more carefully and the colors aren't right to be a rainbow, so it needs a whole new explanation. And she pursued it, because she loved the photograph and wanted to know why this will cloud was so beautiful. There are places. You know, we do a video project where they post it up to you tube when they're all done. And some of them take home movies, some of them take movies that they've enjoyed on DVD and then they narrate it like a sports caster who only cares about physics. Talking about how newton's laws are engaged. 

For the ones who are interested in film and video, that's engaging. And you know, with a diverse range of interests, at any given time, I'm probably only grabbing a fraction of them at once. But in the process, I'm exposing them to other means of expression. Like I said the name of the game is communication. Getting them to communicate effectively in as many different formats as possible, whether it's through a static visual medium, through a dynamic one like video, whether it's a written explanation, an oral explanation or even in building a musical instrument that they then play for the class. 

- Do you get into atomic physics at all? 

- I have. That is one area that in moving my teaching back to freshman in order to cover the content that I think is more fundamental, I think atomic physics is going to fall by the wayside. Trying to elicit good illustrations of their mental models of atoms is a great place to start, and it's where I usually do start with that unit and have them progressively change their illustration of an atom structure as they learn more and more. Getting the arts involved in science is a tool. 

There's a lot of research out there in physics that says multiple representations, the ability to depict and describe something in many ways is really one of the best indicators of understanding, and also one of the best tools for developing understanding later. And since we've got so many different kinds of talents at our school, which is probably the case at most schools, we can really utilize that and get as many representations as possible out there. I'm a big fan of taking work that's just exceptional and really representing not just a model to shoot for, but somebody who’s gone even beyond the mark that we're hoping for and put it up on display for everybody to share. Yes? 

- I was just thinking about the 16.4 and could you use the same, could you use the same example in volume? Like if you had a set of eight glasses that were all the same size, and you started out with 16.4-ounces of liquid and then broke them up like we did the straw, would that -- would it make the different notes, or does it have to do with the size of the container? 

- Well the basic physic phenomenon has to do with wave interference. So if we have a medium where the waves are moving essentially one dimensional, down the tube, bouncing off your thumb and coming back, or even just bouncing off the interface between this zone and the other. It's the interference that matters. So with glass of different sizes, I imagine --

- No, the glasses would all be the same. They would have different volumes of water, 16.4-ounces and then --

- I think the glasses being a little more complicated because in addition having varying heights above the water line that are free to vibrate, the water itself provides a damping mechanism, and it gets a little more complicated, so when you try and set up, if anyone knows the name of that instrument where you rub the glasses. 

- Glass harmonica. 

- Glass harmonica, that's an easy name to remember. If you were going to set one of those up, I don't think it's quite as straightforward, but this is another great example -- 

- Why? 

- Like I said, I think it has to do with the damping effect of the mass of water that's in the glass and it changes the frequency at which the glass vibrates. Not just because of the length, but because of the mass it has to push with it. Here we're vibrating air and the air isn't being asked to push anything else around. 

It's not a vibrating straw, it's a vibrating air column. So when you're vibrating the glass, you're actually vibrating the glass which vibrates the air. But since the glass is in contact with the water, my theory, is that the vibration of the glass is damped by the water that it's in contact with, and with different masses, it just doesn't come out being quite as simple. And I believe those are usually tuned more or less by ear, but people who are much better at picking out a musical note than I. Yeah? 

- Do you have a sense how much better you connect with your students to bring them into the subject by these means, either to just give them a more common knowledge of the field or for that matter, to bring a subset of them into the field in a really intense way, or make sure 
[inaudible]

- That's a different question. I've always been tasked with teaching the very first physics course. And it's tough for me to see how far they're going to go with it. 

I'm told by my students as they leave physics at the end of the year, that they enjoyed the class, they enjoyed interacting with concrete materials, that I had several of them say, I like coming to your class because we don't just get talked at. And you know, every science class ought to be that way, and I think physics especially, because it's about the tangible fiscal world that's our scale much of the time. But you know, other than making sure I don't turn students off to physics, it's very difficult for me to find out what happens to that 5-10% in my student community who are actually going to end up becoming doctors or engineers along the way, and maybe that one-tenth of 1% who might actually look at a career as a scientists. And since I'm right at the front end of what to me is the most fundamental science, kind of opening their eyes to all these different avenues, is to me the best thing I can do and I can't report to you how well it has affected them as wanting to continue to really rigorously pursue it. If there's a fault with it, it's that that top half of 1%, the ones who have the talent to really push forward in this on a rigorous mathematical sense, might not connect with it as tightly as some of ones who connect with it on other levels. Yeah? 

- If you're teaching mechanics, which you say you did teach. Teaching like force equals mass times acceleration. I don't see too easily how to do that through music, but there must be sports analogies. How hard you have to kick the ball or things with hockey pucks or bill yard balls that could be used for that. 

Do you do that? 

- Absolutely, and one of the tools that I utilize a lot for actually collecting data, is video analysis. To take a video recording of an event and then use a computer to correlate what you see on the screen with real measurements. Our school is not overly athletically oriented, but had a lot of very proud athletic teams. So brought a lot of those girls in by saying take that camera to practice, analyze what's going on here. And they're told things in volleyball, like well you want to hit that ball when you're at the top of your flight. And they look at it and they see that their center mass is following a parabolic path as they arc through the air. And I’ve seen it develop an appreciation for the connection for what's being instructed in their physical education and the theories we're talking about in physics. It certainly works in a lot of different realms, besides art, but the school I'm going to, the focus is really on art, because of the special populations there. 

- What school are you going to? 

Is it here or --

- No, no, it's in New Orleans. Hence the high number of musically oriented people. It's run by a group that's targeted on making sure that the arts are integrated throughout the curriculum. Many of the students, when the school day is over, spend an additional four hours at school in intensive coaching in either their musical instrument of choice, drama, sculpture, ceramics. It's very thorough. Its goal is to produce people who are ready for the college world, but also have a very strong arts background that they can return to the city of New Orleans with and keep that culture alive. 

- What was the other school you came from? 

- Also in New Orleans. It's one of the sacred heart schools, which is a network, actually worldwide, but also throughout the country. 

It's an excellent environment for the time, but it was just time for a change. 

- Is it a catholic school? 

- Catholic, all girls. I was there for nine years, so it's going to be a change. 

- It seems like an impressively high percentage if they go on into the profession --

- Yeah, expensive private schools, you get children of a different subset of the population who are brought up to believe that's what they can do and in my opinion, that's a big part of what drives people into that, is starting out from day one being, well yeah, you can be a doctor and you ought to be because dad and mom both are. 

- That's the uptown side of New Orleans. 

- That's exactly where the school is. Lusher is right down the street from Tulane. We have a partnership with Tulane University. 

Lusher at its elementary level, is a parish run, which is to say school district public school and as you get into the middle and high school levels, it becomes a charter school, which means they'll draw people in from a lottery and not just from a neighborhood. Tulane's faculties’ children are the exception to that in that Tulane’s faculty is automatically able to enroll their students in this school. This is something of a marriage of convenience, post-Katrina. Tulane provided the funding for the charter school to start up and the charter school provided the means for Tulane’s faculty to return their families to New Orleans. It was one of the first schools to reopen after the storm. One of the only public schools to open at the time and I don't know if new Orleans public schools education's reputation has preceded its way all the way up here, but to have one of the good public schools open and available to faculty was a huge incentive. So that relationship is alive. Our students, the ones who are advanced to the point where they are ready for a college course as seniors, actually walk five blocks down the street and take it in a Tulane classroom. They have access to their library and their athletic facilities. Yes? 

- Can you speak for a moment about storm and how you view the recovery effort down there in New Orleans? 

- I'd be happy to. It's a really complicated issue. There's a lot of progress being made, and it's difficult to answer everybody's questions because there's a lot of imagery of the current state of new Orleans that's just simply inaccurate. A large part of the city was utterly destroyed, and a large part of the city escaped damage entirely. For better or for worse, the part that escape damage entirely is the exact part that most people from the rest of the country are most familiar with. So a lot of people have come to visit New Orleans in the two and a half years since we've been back in the city, and have left saying everything's fine. If they don't take the time to drive just a couple miles further toward the lake, they don't see that there are entire neighborhoods that are still waiting on the federal money that's been promised to them. There are people that had insurance and find that the process of getting the insurance money out of their mortgage company and into a contractors hands is held up by the rules of mortgage companies. There are people who have handed over what's become the standard down there, which is one-half up front to contractors and found that their contractor vanished, never to return with their money. 

There's a lot of people who were extremely responsible by every financial standard, who are now in dire financial straits because of some of the particulars of how things have happened. For the most part, most of the longest standing communities in new Orleans have not recovered, and there's real risk that some of the neighborhoods that have made new Orleans what is it will not come back. It's going to be a difficult few years and we have to, for one thing keep our fingers crossed that we're going to make it until the project of rebuilding the levies is completed. 

- In the long-term new Orleans is still sinking, there's going to be more and more water coming down the Mississippi river because of what they're doing upstream from there. Is the long-term prognosis, let's say 50-100 years from now, of New Orleans something that's going to be able to survive that? 

- Between all those different factors, if the engineering projects that have been proposed are carried out correctly, absolutely. That's a big question mark, of course. 

- [inaudible]

- Well, you know, presently, there's a 100-mile long ring of levies that encircle the city, and that's not the only city in the world that's been built that way. 

And as you all are way to intimately aware, rising water is a phenomenon everywhere where there is water and people who generally don't have so worry too much about rising water, they face other water problems, like not having it. It's a sure way to start a fight with the new or lean to grab them and say what are you thinking living there. The phenomenon that's been going on all over the country is to say you know what, every area has its weather and climate related issues and certain there are some places that are better choices than others, but we can't all live in San Diego. It's going to be an ongoing battle and it's probably, very well could define our national character over the next century. How we deal with it. And the idea that we're going to let a storm take a city away rather than make an organized decision about how to deal with the particular situation, what we've done to that area of the country from wetlands degradation, to large, global scale climate change and, all of those things that have affected it adversely. How we deal with the investment that people have made there, the communities that have developed there, and the fact that there are family roots there that go hundreds of years back. It would be insensitive to say the least to say it's time to pick up and move somewhere else because of water. There's a whole country in northern Europe that's done a very good job of protecting itself because they made it a priority. And there's room for us in this country to have a dialogue about exactly how we need to get about the urgent business of protecting our country from wild fires, river flooding, ocean flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes and the list goes on. 

It's my opinion that we are a long way from taming nature and that at some point we're going to recognize that is still mankind's struggle and that these battles between nations are a different beast entirely. We need to work together to solve that fundamental issue of how we deal with our planet's systems as a whole before we concern ourselves with some of these other things. I'll get my soap box out of here. Yes? 

- Are you a believer in the idea, since you’re familiar with the single-sex school, that it's necessary for the building up of self-esteem of girls that they be taught in sexually segregated classes? 

- You know, I think the word necessary is really strong. But my experience, I’ve taught in an all-guys school, and I’ve taught in an all-girls school. And this is one person's experience and certainly just one person's opinion, but I found that it was great for the girls and horrible for the guys. I think the girls really thrived academically, and the guys might have done a little bit better academically without the inevitable distractions of adolescence being right in front of them, but it was not impressed with the social comport of the fellows that I thought when I took them out in public. They didn't know how to handle themselves to put it short, and that's partly because you've got a pretty artificial environment when it's all guys, all teenage guys all the time. 

And they weren't fans of it. The girls were fans of it. So I think if you ask kids that age, they actually, what they want is probably what's best for them. 

- Well thank you all for coming. I appreciate your attention.