Unit 1: Charge it.

First week: we jumped into Electricity by asking questions about charge. Why does a balloon stick to the ceiling after being rubbed on hair? It's not enough to say "static" or "electricity". What does that mean? Why does the balloon stick to the ceiling. We've all done it, but who among us can explain it? A roomful of dedicated physics teachers?

Nay! Not in "student" mode. Student mode is when grown, degreed adults have to "forget" what they thought they knew and act as if they were learning the subject matter for the first time. It's surprisingly easy to do when you throw yourself into it, because it turns out that grown adults, even those trained in physics, have a relatively shallow understanding of physics. It's not because we're sleeping on the job. It's more because nature is a sly fox, and is a lot deeper and richly layered than we often have time or energy to explore. And explaining it meaningfully is challenging.

We have the language to do it, but sometimes the language bars us from true understanding. That's why in Modeling, we save the name for last.

And that's why it's surprisingly easy to feign ignorance when your jargon is taken away. Imagine trying to talk to someone about being a lawyer if you can't use the words "prosecute" or "defendant" or "law!"

So we bandied about terms like positive and negative, like and unlike, and attributed it to Ben Franklin, who made positive plus and negative minus, and went right into a lab centered around sticky cellophane tape.

The sticky tape lab is elegant when it works, but very difficult to pull off. That's a pretty funny pun when you know something about the lab. We started by putting three pieces of tape down with little tabs at the ends. We ripped the top one off the middle one, then pulled up the middle one, and ended up with two lengths of tape that either repel or attract, depending on their mood. It really isn't mood dependent, but it wasn't always a sure thing that they would repel in a consistent matter, which is what this lab intends. I've tried it with students before and the variation of results is maddening. However, after going through it again, I think it's very useful to push through the variations and guide the students through it. We also threw a balloon into the mix for more fun and variation in part 2 of the lab.

Through much exploration, we came to some agreement in discussion that we can talk about charge as a thing, but not necessarily have a definition for it. That will be a common theme in this landscape. Our goal is not to be "right" but to understand as well as we can what is going on.

Fun went on when our beloved leaders handed out the Fun Fly sticks. Fun is in the name, and with good reason. Little sculpted bits of mylar performed acrobatics when brought near a positive charge producing wand. How did we know it was positive? We positively inferred it!

The silly fun sticks served a purpose in letting us lighten up in the darkness of confusion and uncertainty. It's not trivial to be put in a position of uncertainly about what you thought you knew. About what you do as a career. About what you teach other, impressionable, trusting minds!

Styro towers

Then came the pie plates. The cheap, dollar-store pie plates. With styrofoam cups glued on as non-conducting handles, of course! Easy to charge, easy to use!

touching pie plates!

apparently it's a happy event!

Ba ba bwat?

So we played with the plates and pink foam and learned a few things about charge transfer. As we pieced our ideas together, we gathered for white boarding sessions. Whiteboards are the main tool of Modelers. Discussion is the method of transmitting ideas and the whiteboards aid in that goal.

However, sitting around in large groups talking is an introvert nightmare. And I'm an introvert.
But you can't really solve problems and learn without discussion, so whiteboarding it is. And it's not so bad~ group dynamics can be very enlightening!

Delicate pith action

Through questioning, not "teaching" as we teachers are wont to do, we are able to come to some conclusions, or at least reach a point where we can move on, even with questions that still remain hanging. It's a place of vulnerability, but true learning requires vulnerability.

At some point the VanderGraaff generator was hauled out for some real old fashioned fun. I think we were all feeling pretty OK with the material at that point. Fools!

Delicate pith action

We were just wading in. Thence the pith ball lab, where we really examined the separation of charges and the electron transfer model began to grow feet in our minds. It was a challenging lab, but by the end we were able to confidently say that opposite or neutral charges attract, and the only like charges repel. Elementary, dear Watson? Perhaps, but very powerful for determining charge, since only like charges repel.

Need slo-mo camera action

The pith ball lab used a lot of math and graphing skills, and some trig functions. But we were able to divine a relationship from it, and it included an inverse squared relationship. Spoiler alert- that darn relationship shows up in places where it shouldn't in future labs! 

I must take some time to mention that in between this action packed agenda, we had time for mini pep-talks. Discussion is difficult. Slogging through the minutia of foggy understanding is exhausting. But why are we doing it? It would be easy to tell. Teachers are the know-it-alls of society. We love to tell things. To transmit what we know by talking. But the reason we are spending the first three weeks of our precious summer rejuve time at this course is that we KNOW without equivocation that telling doesn't equal learning. And no one likes a know-it-all. 

With that said, we did get some direct instruction on the similarities between gravitational fields and electric fields, and many connections were made. But it was always done with an eye toward understanding and building on what we had done and seen previously.

So on to Unit 2 to make sense of Electric Potential!