Why is the sky blue? and orange? and what else?

So as I was looking and thinking of stuff to do one day, I simply looked up to the sky and noticed how beautifully orange and even red it appeared in the evening one day. I began to wonder why or what exactly causes that color change to occur? And to expand on that I questioned myself on a broader scale and wondered why is the sky blue in the first place? Needless to say I have had thoughts before about the sunlight perhaps playing a role in this (given the time of day) but I never was sure or even bothered to care before...until we started our color unit in this class.

In short just starting and wondering more about color in general has also inspired me to delve into discovering why this could occur and also maybe what exactly is causing this before. I guess sometimes just seeing the beauty of something in nature, even something so commonplace as this, can be enough to make you question why some day. When it comes to trying to understand behaviors of "sky color," I guess today was one of those kinds of days for me.

Hating Math

This child sounds a whole lot like I sounded back in elementary and middle school. In my experience I had several other students in my classes in 3rd and 4th grade that I remember as being pretty advanced and fairly fast when it came to learning math and science but especially math. I would find myself frustrated at not being as fast as some others and that frustration only added difficulty to my ability to understand math. Plus I just had hard time comprehending some of the more difficult concepts and I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of others. I think that a child like the one in the topic would have experienced many of the same things and maybe then some. I think this student probably had an experience where another student may have made fun of him or her when trying to solve a problem in front of the class and so they learned to associate a sensitive topic with that subject. Repeated frustration and an inferior feeling when it comes to comprehending something as fast as others probably ran through this child's mind as well. It is also possible that more emphasis was placed on another subject at home or through another teacher and the child just learned to like that subject more, caring less and less for something like math.

Pendulum Motion

This entire article about the history of the pendulum was surprisingly very new too me in terms of what I learned. I had no idea that the invention of the pendulum itself offered so much to the scientific world from being able to provide a much more accurate and reliable time-keeping method to even leading astronomers to better map out our planet. The idea that the pendulum was developed as a standard that all scientists could reference as a period of time measurement was astonishing because I didn't think that keeping time before this development was all that difficult. Besides contributions by Galieo and his developments with pendulum laws I was really interested to see that before further developments with pendula, the problem of correctly mapping out longitude on a map was very prevalent. As Gemma Frisius, the Flemish astronomer discovered, measuring correct revolutions of the earth with the times of day required some sort of standard in time-keeping. So overall I was pretty astounded at the many uses of the pendulum itself and how important it was to world history.

Observations with Flashlights

To begin making observations for the second homework assignment I obtained a handheld "spotlight"about 12V DC and a handheld mag-light slightly shorter then the ones we used in class but this one had multiple small bulbs in the lens. To begin I wanted to see the visible differences and effects between two completely different power levels in lighting. In one hallway of my house I shined each light down and noted other then the fact that the beam of light from the spotlight was obviously much wider, the point where the light stopped at the end was also much brighter in the spotlight and also a yellow tint beam as opposed to my mag light which was bluish.

Both beams also reflected off all of the walled surfaces down my hall mostly because I noticed them to be white and thus reflected the lights more vividly. So I also observed that although I still couldn't see a "visible" beam of light from the side or in the middle of the stream, I could tell that the beams were very wide and dimmed out in brightness as well.

On the Virtues if Not Knowing

There were many interesting ideas expressed in this chapter by the author that I found to be very helpful in understanding what we as teachers place in top priority in learning and what we should place in top priority. The thought about the process of learning, and in that regard, figuring out an answer you may not know, was enlightening because it applies so much to any subject and pretty much every school in a given school system to some degree. The emphasis that we as teachers tend to place on the "fast" and "right answer" is viewed of as more importance than the process along the way. I agree with the author's notion that truer intellectual ability should be placed on the "thinking" aspect.
      In the given examples, I thought it was very wise for the researchers to use an experiment in the first to better help exemplify the process of thinking and figuring out the answer when you "don't know it" in an interactive sense. By listing and describing the reactions that Jac showed during the experiment, I felt that the opportunity for him to explore his own ways of thinking without pressure from a time limit or standardized testing, was incredibly telling in how we as teachers, especially in science or math, can use more settings like this one to determine true intellectual ability.
      In overall view of the passage, I agree with the author in how they state that "what you do about what you don't know...is what determines what you will ultimately know." As stated, it isn't necessarily outright the teacher's fault that we tend to focus more on the quick right answer often based on previous knowledge, the over-bearing weight of standardized testing places us in that predicament. However, the applications of such said virtues, as the author suggests as well, would undoubtedly make an incredible difference in what we perceive and practice as true intellectual functionality.