...from my apartment window!

Here's a series of photographs I've taken over the last month and a half to document the change in the leaves on the trees. I'm a big fan of repeat photography to document changes like these.





























































Maybe I'll do the reverse of this project in the spring to watch it greening up again...

Labels: dc, plants

Yesterday, I pulled up the Venetian blinds in my office window at NOVA, and this is what I saw:


Naturally, I had to take a photograph. It's puuurty.

While I had the camera out, I figured I'd shoot a few photos of the rest of my office, since it's full of all sorts of interesting clutter. Rather than explaining what all the doodads are in these photos, I figured it would be more fun to just post them and see if you can identify them all:















Have fun!

Labels: fossils, igneous, maps, metamorphism, minerals, nova, plants, sediment

Much of the geoblogosphere has been posting about trees over the past couple of days.

I'll just make a brief contribution here, showcasing some of the incredible fall foliage seen down near Konnarock, Virginia, while my students and I were down at the Virginia Geological Field Conference a few weeks back:

Labels: plants, virginia

Last weekend, I went out to the Virginia countryside to harvest some fruit. Several of my college friends have farms out there, with organic fruit free for the picking each fall.

Just thought I would share a couple of images...

Here's my cat Lola checking out a tarp full of ugly but delicious apples:

Last year, I harvested a huge number of apples and pressed them into cider, and fermented 8 gallons to make hard cider, which was pretty good. Or at least drinkable, if not exactly "good." This year, the orchard at Smithfield Farm was far less fruitful, so I only managed 3 gallons of cider.

The good news is that Orange Springs Farm hosts a mature pear tree that was heavily laden with fruit, and I collected a good sixty pounds or so of pears. Once these ripen, I'll turn them into cider too:


The harvest bounty matches up nicely with our recent cool weather. Fall is my favorite season, and now the leaves are starting to senesce and the nights are crisp and cool. Good sleeping weather. On a field trip this weekend up to Shenandoah National Park, the sumac and the Virginia creeper had already turned scarlet, and the deciduous trees won't be far behind. Happy autumn, everyone!

Labels: lola, plants, travel, virginia

I must recommend a couple of videos to any science educators out there. (I just watched the last of them last night.)

A Private Universe was an eye-opening half-hour video that was followed by a short series called Minds of Our Own. (Links go to video on demand from Annenberg Public Media.) Both titles follow a similar format, and pursue similar content. Their subject is the difficulty in getting students to learn science. Both videos make the hypothesis that the major obstacle in science education is not complexity, or abstract reasoning, but pre-existing ideas about the way the world works. Students come into our classrooms with certain notions, and unless we teachers (a) know what those notions are and (b) explicitly confront them, then the students' natural reaction is to stick with their perfectly-reasonable ideas about the way the world works (and reject the scientifically valid ideas about the way the world works).

A Private Universe opens with a scene of Harvard's graduation, and the filmmakers interview the gowned students about the phases of the moon. Full moon, half moon, new moon, half moon again... Why does the moon have phases. Everyone shown indicates they think that it's the shadow of the Earth on the moon that give it its phases. In Minds of Our Own, similarly shocking scenes unfold wherein the graduates of MIT can't use a battery and wire to light a lightbulb, and again where Harvard graduates are tested, this time on the subject of trees. A tiny seed grows into a massive tree: where does all that weight come from? All those interviewed thought the tree's mass came from the soil (as opposed to CO2 in the air). It's really something to see -- some of the brightest students in the country, demonstrating a basic scientific illiteracy.
Subsequent one-on-one interviews with elementary, middle, and high school students probe for deeper understanding of just what these students think is going on. Some of these interviews yield bizarre interpretations of reality so that the student can match their erroneous worldview with their well-developed logic and reasoning. It's quite striking to see the lengths they will stretch their minds to, in order to accomodate their pre-conceived notions. A Harvard education professor (Philip M. Sadler) who is interviewed in the films says "The most important thing we can do as teachers is find out what our students already think when they walk into the classroom" (paraphrase). You can be an extremely skilled intstructor, in other words, but this basic step is essential. If you don't assess your students' understanding before you teach them, you're setting them up for failure. Students must be confronted with their false views and shown why they are false, if they are to open their minds to other possibilities.

One of the most gratifying scenes is when a young man is explaining why pressure increases in a closed piston. At first, he thinks that because the volume is less when the piston is compressed, it must contain less air. But as he's illustrating this notion, and being asked clarifying questions from the interviewer, you can see him realize that the same number of air particles must be in the piston when it is both extended and compressed: they're just closer together when it's compressed!

From the perspective of an educator, the depressing side of this realization is that we have nowhere near the amount of time it would take to have one-on-one conversations with every student to explore their misperceptions and then gently lead them through a line of logical inquiry to correct those ideas. That takes some serious time. Is there a more efficient way to root out these ideas? I'm not sure.

Has anyone else seen these videos? I was very impressed. Now I'm wondering how best to incorporate this new perspective into my own teaching...

Thanks very much to Nicole LaDue (NSF) for sending a DVD of these videos my way.

Labels: astronomy, movies, plants, teaching, tv

This was the scene at the campground I stayed at this summer on my first day south from Bozeman to Las Vegas. This is a campground south of Huntsville, Utah, in the Wasatch range west of Ogden (map).

It's not snow you see on the ground, despite being white stuff that accumulated in a layer several inches thick, and blew into drifts like snow would.



These are the seeds of the cottonwood tree (Populus fremontii), which like dandelions, have a bunch of fluff emerging from them to catch the wind. This allows the species to spread its range by letting the wind carry its seeds to new locations. While cottonwoods are ubiquitous in wet areas of the west, I've never seen this kind of accumulation of cottonwood fluff before.



It was like warm snow -- quite magical to see.

PS - Prius note: The fuel mileage out west this summer wasn't as good as the regular commute back home in DC, but it was still pretty good. The total roadtrip (~10,000 miles) ended up averaging 52.6 miles per gallon of gasoline. Can't complain about that.

Labels: plants, prius, travel, utah

Sorry for the lack of posting lately -- end of the semester crunch.

Just thought I'd post a link today, to an article in today's Times looking at some of Charles Darwin's botantical experiments.

Also, if anyone's in the neighborhood, I'll be giving a talk at the National Science Foundation in a couple of hours: "Geology Along the C&O Canal," starting at 12noon at NSF headquarters in Arlington, VA. Free & open to the public. Come one, come all... Sorry for the late notice.

Labels: evolution, plants