omenti

the power of the liberal arts

a minipost

Tomer Hanuka of the School of Visual Arts in New York asked his third year illustration students to create a post-pandemic New Yorker cover.   Some of the pieces were so moving that he posted them on Twitter where they quickly went viral.   So viral that an article appeared in The Washington Post.

 

The power of art never ceases to amaze me.  I'm clearly not an artist, but think visually.  The few beginner art classes I had in school as a teenage played a big role in how I think abstractly.   I don't understand why art, and for that matter liberal arts in general, are on the cutting block these days.  Somehow they're not seen as relevant for the job market.  I think they're necessary if the student is preparing for life long learning.  Of course I'm biased as I was a liberal arts major (physics and math are liberal arts).

 

I've spent some time trying to link art and physical science programs in a couple of colleges. No details as it's been political and was interrupted by the pandemic, but I'm still enthusiastic.  The fact that one of the physics professors is in a rock band helps..

 

the education question

Last week I sent a note to regular readers:

 

Perhaps it’s a sense that things are possible post-pandemic, but I’ve been asked for comments on the future of education three times since the beginning of the year. While I have some unscientific and undoubtedly biased thoughts I’m happy to share it occurs to me this group is exceptionally diverse.

So the request: Could you write a bit about what you’d like to see in education going forward? The subject is huge and readers represent at least seven countries so just pick a few and stay away from clear needs in some countries - like affordable and equitable education. Those are incredibly important, but perhaps some thoughts on curriculum, teaching, etc.. I’ll collect and post them with my comments in a week - say a cutoff on the 24^th of April. Let me know if you want your name attached or not. And don’t worry about it if you don’t have time.

 

Here are the responses in order of arrival:

 

I could write too much on this but one thing I think should be focused on is an increase and improvement of vocational education including changing the name and giving it an equal or near equal standing with so called academic education. With the rapid changes in technology there are numerous supporting jobs required and they must be trained for. I would also like to change the word Engineering to Applied science and technology which might attract more women and others who have a fear or not so great feeling about "Engineering" .......................you asked for it there are many other things like required mentoring in High school, more use of the case method in all education fields...... good question

Ed Hajim

__________

Thanks for the request, Steve!

I think fixing the existing bureaucracy of schooling is a fool's errand, so I'm more interested in creating a scaffolding that helps anyone learn, at any time, with others not gated by their common age, etc. We've created many kinds of artificial scarcity where abundance exists.

With that in mind, if you have the time, I'd route you to my TEDx talk, then the Vegas talk I did right after, which dovetails into the first one, then my Brain on the Hidden Curriculum of Schooling and Great Design Questions Unschooling Raises.

Happy to talk about any of the above at any moment :)

Jerry Michalski

_________

 

As a grandparent who has primary care of two elementary school aged children, I have observed, obsessed and have a lot to comment on public education in my city, Seattle.

Our system is at once both profoundly broken and resilient.

Broken? A system that refused to use a complexity lens to plan and be able to respond to changing contexts. (And appears to have NOT been planning all along, but I don't know if that is true. They appear to operate with a fixed mindset. A mechanical mindset.When the governor set a deadline to return to school, the resulting design reflected a reaction versus a design ready for complex contexts. (The lowest common denominator?)

Resilient? The teachers and learning specialists who spend every ounce of their beings supporting their students (this is not ALL teachers, but we have been blessed with ones who have been AMAZING and have saved our collective sanity. Thank you Nadia, Michelle, Kendra, Stephanie, and many more...)

Broken is a system where children of color don't want to come back into the classroom for all the racism they endured before and during the pandemic. How is it we are shocked to hear this?

Resilient? The advocates for children with special needs, for communities of color, LBGTQ, and for families sapped by Covid-related financial and emotional losses. The people who have wrapped families as best they could with food, services, support and compassion.

The resilient people are resilient. Well supported families adapted in the pandemic with home based learning, bought the additional services their children needed/wanted, and when and where they had to, made sacrifices around their own work and parenting roles. Barely skipping a beat they continued their quest to get their kids "into a good college." Yup, the system they want is one that provides the path to a good college. They make the system work for their families or they go to private school. It is a sort of bootstrap mindset for white upper-middle and upper class families. "You can make it work if you do the work!" And they donate to the PTA so they are also addressing all the ills of the system. Yeah, right. But have we leveraged white privilege to redeem the school district? I don't think so. And lump me in there as often I crumble at the depth of need and the brokenness of the system.

Broken is a system so weirdly funded that when pressed to bring back students into the classroom, the caveat is "and sorry, transportation only for those federally mandated." (Note: this example is one of cascading impact. Bus drivers laid off, weird funding approaches and what might be perceived different motivations to remove choice options from the system by denying transportation.) A system that responds to loud, privileged parents who want their kids out of the house now. How is that an option for working families and single parents, particularly those with children in multiple schools? (Broken, in that the district has poor understanding and management of their own budget and yet resist audits and insights, preferring to spend money on PR to make things look good.)

Resilient? Parents who try and set up, moderate and endure Facebook support groups (that are often hijacked) that try and serve as a critical connection points (neighborhood car pools, walking busses?) even if the data shared is often wrong. (What happened to data???)

Broken is a state leadership that says schools MUST OPEN for the mental health of students, and yet the state nor the district provides funding for additional physical or mental health services (or has to cut them due to budget shortfalls), offers no support to families struggling with the mental health needs of their children beyond a link to a help line (not the school district's), and diminishes students who must stay or choose to stay remote by hyping those who are returning to the classrooms.

Our systems are designed based on outdated, broken financing models, labor/management relationships that have deteriorated over time into spaces of zero trust and constant battles, and the instantiation of our profound, national racism.

There is no better time to reinvent, not just tinker. To do that, however, we have to re-prioritize socially and financially the role of public education for all. We can't have schools funded on real-estate taxes which continue to thread red lines through our communities. And those of us with means CANNOT WALK AWAY.

Nancy White

__________

 

I think the focus on making students a product for companies is wrong.  The skills someone might need in 10 or 15 years may be very different.  I'd like to see school focus learning how to learn rather than memorizing facts that may not be facts.  At least some of it needs to be fun and play is overlooked.  Play's where you find your passion.  For people not going to college I like apprentice systems like the German and Danish systems.   

In Alberta we had streaming. Kids were assigned to groups by what they thought was ability.    They must have thought it would be easier to put me in the slowest group because I'm deaf.   We were the kids who were constantly reminded we'd never amount to anything.   On top of that  kids and even some of the staff bullied me because I look unusual.  My parents didn't know enough to advocate for me.  Some children fall through the floor.  I'd like to see that fixed.  

Oh - I want people like Steve to teach math and science:-)

Jheri

 

__________

 

I've written quite a bit on what I think is important assuming the issues Nancy points out can be addressed, so I'll spare you.  Get in touch if you'd ever like to talk about it. But one thing..

 

The first time I was in my grad school mentor's office I noticed something on the top left of his blackboard

Knowledge is acquired and never bestowed

It was always there. 

 

when subtraction beats addition

The hammer and feather were released at the same time as a few million people watched back on Earth.  Absent air resistance, both objects fell to the lunar surface at the same rate.  David Scott had performed a version of the experiment Galileo Galilei is known for - the one your high school physics teacher said was true if you could ignore the air.

 

It turns out Galileo never dropped anything from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.   Instead he rolledballs of different masses down inclined planes.  The balls accelerated uniformly independent of their mass, but at a rate related to the angle of the plane.  He recognized their acceleration on a 90° ramp would be the same as dropping them from a tower.  One of his insights was if you get rid of friction and air resistance, the problem becomes simple.   This is one of the deepest insights in all of physics - that you can make seemingly ridiculous simplifications and get useful results. And once you know the idealized solution you can add in the fiddly bits that kept you from seeing things clearly at first. 

 

Physicists are trained to simplify wherever possible - (paraphrasing Einstein) just not too much. It's part of the art of the sport. It's so deeply engrained you find yourself using the approach in unrelated areas.  With this background I was struck by a piece in Nature showing people tend to add rather than subtract when solving problems.  It's very common.  Software can get overloaded with features in a hurry consider Microsoft Office.  It's fine to add some functionality over time.  The hard part is understanding something enough to subtract features to improve it's functionality takes serious creativity - in some areas it might be called taste.

 

Once the core ideas are understood it becomes possible to go much further. Before the scientific revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries Aristotle's teleological view of the world dominated Western thought.   An object's motion was determined by its nature and all processes were determined by goals.  It's a crude handwavy explanation that sort of makes sense if you don't ask too many questions.   Place a coffee cup around on your desk and give it a shove.  It moves for awhile and comes to a stop.   Everything in motion must constantly be moved by something. Galileo shattered this way of thinking and others built on it.  Newton came up with a good model for motion and gravity that still works well for most of what you and I do - you can and a probe on Mars and fly a helicopter there with it. .  About one hundred years ago Einstein, motivated by some foundational flaws in Newton's work, created "simple, but not too simple" theories that gave a much deeper view that solves a few thorny issues.  That helped to explode our view of the universe.  It also made global positioning systems work. 

 

With this deeper understanding of Nature our minds can travel to the most exotic places. Recently a visualization of a binary black hole system was released.  While the calculations are difficult, requiring a lot of supercomputer time, the core ideas are straightforward.  Enjoy the lightshow as the massive black holes warp nearby spacetime  (the notes are a good explainer)

 

There's much to be learned talking with people in very different fields.  Some are motivated by simplicity, but their approaches are often different and enlightening. .  These people have a lot of skill and experience playing with their kind of simplification.  I'm thankful for conversations I've had with some of you where you've been open enough to let me learn a bit from you.  It's sharpened my approach.

 

 

natural conditions

a minipost

Natural conditions impact outdoor sports.  Tokyo in late July and early August is "interesting" - it's very hot with humidity rated as oppressive about 60% of the time.  Pleasant weather doesn't return until the Fall, but TV demands drive the Olympic schedule.  Some endurance events will probably be run at night and athletes will be adding high temperature conditioning to their training routines in the next month or two.   Excessive heat has important physics and physiology consequences and the understanding of physiology has changed a lot in the past decade (you can drink too much in endurance events and electrolyte drinks are ineffective).  Perhaps something for future posts, but for now let's stick with the wind.  

 

Tokyo, during the Olympics, will probably have consistent winds around 7 mph mostly from the South or East.  To establish a record events like the 100 and 200 meter sprint, 110 meter hurdles and the long and triple jumps record the wind velocity and require a trailing windspeed to be less than 2 meters per second - about 4.5 mph - measured at the track.  The wind doesn't matter much within a race, but qualifications can be biased if the wind changes much between qualifying events. 

 

You'd think a tailwind would always be advantageous for hurdlers, but they have to mentally adjust their strides and launch points for a variety of winds and only the best can handle a variety of conditions.  Long jumpers have to adjust their approach to launch as close to the takeoff point as possible and not foul. Assuming they succeed, a trailing wind can be a big advantage.  Except for record setting pole vaulting is similar.  The height they clear is related to the square of takeoff speed so a tailwind can be a big help.  Oddly there's no wind assistance limit for records. Perhaps an approaching hurricane would be useful in world record attempts.

 

Closed road course races are problematic.  One might think tailwind and headwind portions average out, but if the wind is at a constant velocity, the headwind portions are always slower (here's a simple explanation).  Of course there's the larger problem of shoe performance so maybe we're at a point where records aren't terribly meaningful in running.

 

For some sports the wind adds an interesting dimension.  The density of a beach volleyball is low compared to other most other sports balls, so the wind makes a big difference.  Additionally volleyballs have interesting aerodynamic properties in airspeeds between 14 and 17 meters per second - speeds commonly seen in the women's game and exploited by the better players.  Teams must to adjust for windspeed and direction, but events often go on in strong  and gusty winds - sometimes with heavy rain, which is not unlikely in Tokyo during the Olympics.  

 

Many other sports are impacted by the wind, but last Spring the final project in a science of sports class I taught got my attention.  An amateur bicycle racer/biology major proposed human powered flight.   You would charge a battery by frantically pedaling  generator.  After some amount of time you'd take flight adding whatever power you could muster with your legs to what the motor could produce. Finding the right limits for weight,  charging times, and allowable technologies would make or break the sport.  It probably wouldn't be much of a spectator sport, but would make a great project for engineering students.