Episode 165: Back to school: Jump into science, e.g., electricity

Episode 165: Back to school:  Jump into science, e.g., electricity   (Wed.  Aug. 28, 2024)

Start small. Teach the littlest amount of information possible. Over time you can give children the fundamental information they need.

Kids are sometimes given no preliminary instruction and then expected to grasp sophisticated phenomena. Won’t happen without a struggle. Teach them the most basic stuff before you start.

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Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION    by     Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 165: Wed.  August 28, 2024

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Back to school: Jump into science, e.g., electricity


A lot of bad education results from people not really caring whether children learn or not, and the teachers themselves not really knowing much.

There are three phenomena we live with every day but nobody can fully explain them: GRAVITY, LIGHT, ELECTRICITY. How could there be a description that any child would find useful? 

So, I suggest starting small and attracting children into these mysteries little by little. Kids don't know much, so give them a small pool of knowledge and encourage them to frolic in it.

Now, in the case of electricity, start with someone/everyone blowing up rubber balloons. They'll probably be charged without further effort; or rub them together. Balloons will stick to your hand or the wall. When students see this for the first time, they think: wow, what's that all about? They're ready to learn more.

As best I can explain it, when there is more electricity in one place than another, the two places start to act like magnets. They attract and repel each other. When there is too much electricity in one place, it will leap across to the other place, sort of like water seeking its own level.

Show video of lightning bolts zigzagging across the sky, and working their way to ground. Those bolts are strong enough to power a neighborhood. But it's the same phenomenon when there's only a tiny amount of electricity on someone's clothes and it sparks across to another person.

Clouds — huge clouds — bump against each other the same way balloons do when children are playing with them. As the clouds bang into each other, they  cause electricity to gather unequally in different places.

Ideally, if you have the right kind of carpet and eager kids, let them build up as much current as possible and then touch a radiator. If you turn the lights down, students will be able to see the spark. That's lightning in miniature.

All these activities illuminate Tesla’s wonderful comment that if you want to understand the universe, look at energy, vibrations, and frequencies. The sparks are not solid "objects," as we might study in much of physics. But think of one area vibrating, and another area vibrating at a different frequency or a different level.

We might say that electricity is just like water. It wants to seek its own level. It wants to go to ground. That's why most appliances have had an obvious wire connected to the ground. Many plugs and products still do this.

So now let's look at a flashlight, the simplest circuit imaginable. You have a switch on-off. You have a coil that gets hot when electricity goes through it. You have a battery or power. Push the switch to on, the wire gets hot and makes light. Or you might have a device designed to heat a room. The coil throws off heat/light.

Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb by finding a substance that you could heat up over and over and it would not burn out (in a vacuum). He tested hundreds of substances. Finally he settled on the substance tungsten, that's what the coil is made of.

You might want to draw the circuit on the blackboard. The parts that you have been talking about are represented symbolically; it's very simple with a flashlight. I think that just seeing an electric circuit would be wonderfully educational. Every appliance, every room in the house, has circuitry drawn up somewhere.

The next day or the next week, the next thing is to show that electricity can also create magnetism. Wind wire around a nail, connect the ends of the wire to a battery, and the head of the nail becomes magnetic. Everyone can see that the head of the nail attracts any bits of metal nearby. This phenomenon lets us create a door buzzer or an electric motor.

Finally, just these easy steps week after week will create very educated students by the end of the year. My big fear is that average students at the end of high school have not been taught even this minimal information about electricity. That ignorance should be labeled as criminal misconduct. 

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The one most important thing is reading. Please see Episode 164.