Archive for June 26th, 2011

For the SP YCISL program, we went to a finale dinner. Before we sat down to dinner, I had the students take my video camera and record each other [important feature is that I did not do the video recording so that they weren’t directly talking to me – hopefully, their statements were spontaneous] make a short statement about (a) what they liked most about the workshop, and (b) what they liked most about the whole trip. They also had to state their name and which school they were from – for future reference. I plan to make this available to them in the near future. This is firstly, good feedback for me; it also pushes them to recall and set a memory before the moment has passed and become fuzzy; lastly and perhaps foremost in usefulness, it can be used as a discussion point when we meet in the future to see if they have acted on the lesson – and I have a way to recall name with face.

It occurred to me that I don’t have a good idea what the pH of certain things are. I know Coca Cola is highly acidic, and that vinegar is quite acidic. I know the pH range of rainwater, common laboratory chemicals, soils, my aquarium (and so on). But there are also a lot I do not know. So perhaps it would be a good idea to start a collection of pH values based on contributions from the students. I could equip them with pH paper (standardize the method) and have them spend a half day going around measuring the pH of anything that catches their curiosity.