CLASS ANNOUNCEMENTS + FUN PHYSICS EXPERIMENT + WORTH A CLOSER LOOK
Class Announcements
If someone had asked you back in September "Would you like to have four weeks off
from school in the spring?" what would you have said? It sort of
reminds me of one of those movies where you make a wish and it is granted,
but the wish
has unintended consequences that the hero/heroine ends up spending
most of the movie trying to undo. Speaking of unintended consequences...
Some class-related questions have been coming in by email, so here's
some answers for everyone.
What's Going on with Physics Day at Great Adventure? Unfortunately, we are going to have
to cancel. Even if the park were open, there's now no way to collect the
money in time.
How Am I Going to Get Two Deeper Understandings So I Can Earn an A?
You don't have to. I'm going to require only one deeper understanding
for an A in the 3rd marking period.
How Am I Going to Retake/Fix So That My Grade Can Go Up?
Starting Monday, I will begin to email out screenshots of what needs to be fixed.
All retakes will become fixes. You'll fix them on a piece of paper,
take a pic and email it to me.
If you have other questions, feel free to email me.
Fun Physics Experiment
Remember the balancing bird? You can create a version of that in your
own kitchen. You will need a fork, a spoon, and a toothpick or small
sliver of wood.
Push the spoon into the tines of the fork so that the two middle
tines are on one side of the spoon, and the outer tines are on
the other side. Not too far - you don't
want to bend the fork tines too much - you'll get in trouble
with the elders. Then slide the toothpick between
the top two tines of the fork. Then balance the whole thing on a glass.
It should balance at its center of mass which will be somewhere on the
toothpick. You may have to adjust to get it right.
WORTH A CLOSER LOOK
Day 8's picture was from Colorado back in 2009 when the whole family drove across the country.
That was quite an experience. Ms. Newhart & I had driven across the country twice back in the
mid-90s when we were younger and had no kids. It's a bit different with kids. You definitely go
through stages:
Stage 1: Everyone's cheery and excited to go.
Stage 2: You play games like trying to make words or phrases out of the letters on license
plates, or we all play Mad-Libs.
Stage 3: Things quiet down and everyone settles in.
Stage 4: Everyone starts to get irritable. "I'm bored."
"Are we going to be there soon?" "Whose idea was this anyway?!"
Fights break out.
Stage 5: Everyone gets giddy and we start to have fun again.
The toughest was Kansas. At least in Missouri, you get rolling hills and corn. Kansas is empty.
I mean empty. You would pass exits on the interstate, and there was nothing there. Just
the occasional silo, maybe a building. And you could see the emptiness stretching out for miles ahead of
you because it's flat.
I'll never forget the moment when I looked at the Kansas road map we had (yes, we used actual
paper maps in those days) and noticed that most of the roads in Kansas were dotted lines.
I looked at the key and realized that they were dirt roads. Sure enough, I looked out the
window and saw a truck driving on a road off of the interstate and there was a huge cloud of
dust behind it. I didn't realize that was still a thing. This is why it's good to travel.
Not every place is like here. You really have to go and see for yourself. Not that here is
necessarily better or worse; things are just different when you get away from the East Coast.
As with all things, there's a yin and a yang to it.
Anyway, Kansas was really getting to us. It takes 6 or 7 hours to cross. We weren't sure if we
were going to make it, when we saw the most amazing thing. It had to be a mirage. Our eyes had
to be playing tricks on us. But it was real: a giant replica of Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers.
Ms. Newhart in front of a giant Van Gogh replica in Goodland, Kansas, 2009.
So of course we stopped. There it was, between the Pizza Hut and a gun shop (ah... America!)
Who'd have ever thought that such a thing existed. It turns out that Kansas is
The Sunflower State, and the little town of Goodland, Kansas is capitalizing on that fact.
