Day 1 Agenda

• Welcome back to school!


• Complete student information cards on your desks. and decorate your name tent


• Introduction to your new teacher


• Icebreaker: Find a Friend


• Syllabus review


• Course Overview


• Routines and Class Expectations


• Safety Contracts


• Safety Scavenger Hunt

HW:  Safety Contracts due by Monday!

Wiedemann-Franz Law: Physicists break 150-year-old empirical laws of physics

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 20, 2011) — A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published July 20 in Nature Communications.

Apparatus from the original 1853 paper in which the Wiedemann-Franz Law was first established. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bristol)

New fundamental discoveries are being made in physics every day! Not that we'll be covering the Wiedemann-Franz Law in class, but it's still fascinating when these kinds of discoveries are made. 150 years is a LONG time in science!

How Fireworks Are Colored

Just in time for the 4th of July, here's a chemistry discussion of how they make all those wonderful colors. Red is Strontium, orange is Calcium, and blue is Copper.

Chemistry Experiment: Sugar+NaOH and KMnO4

Video Classics: Eureka, ep.1

This is an animated series of educational shorts covering Physics and Chemistry lessons. Episode One is about Inertia, the first of Newton's Laws. Additional episodes will be highlighted during the year.

Is Harvard Worth It? | Mother Jones

Kevin Drum reports:

What's the value of a college education? Quite a bit, if the wage premium for college grads means anything. But maybe it doesn't. After all, smart kids go to college, and smart kids are going to earn more regardless. Maybe college doesn't have any independent effect at all.
....

David Leonhardt summarizes:

Once the two economists added these new variables, the earnings difference [of elite universities] disappeared. In fact, it went away merely by including the colleges that students had applied to — and not taking into account whether they were accepted. A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn.

“Even applying to a school, even if you get rejected, says a lot about you,” Mr. Krueger told me. He points out that the average SAT score at the most selective college students apply to turns out to be a better predictor of their earnings than the average SAT score at the college they attended.

....

For what it's worth, then, high school seniors probably shouldn't worry quite as much about which university they attend as they do. If you're good enough to get into Harvard, you'll probably do just as well if you end up going to the University of Michigan instead.

This has been my experience as well. It is far more important that you do as well as you can wherever you are, than that you be at the most exclusive possible school. Find the school that fits you - and your budget. Your future employers* are smart enough to look beyond the name on your diploma.


*or law schools, or med schools, or graduate schools, etc.

Announcement: Important Dates

The following upcoming dates are relevant to this class:

First day of school            September  6
Last day to Add or Drop       third week of school
Interim progress reports         October  4
Holiday:  Columbus Day           October 10
End 1st Quarter                 November  4
Holiday:  Veteran's Day         November 11

Announcement: Welcome

Welcome students!

This website and associated content are here for you to use! Agendas, assignments and announcements will be available here, as well as copies of handouts and documents. There will also be links to curriculum-related content, study guides, and SoL guides.

Depending on school policies and online resources, forums for comment and discussion may also be available here. You should consider this an extension of the classroom: questions about homework and readings may be asked and answered. There may be discussions of subject-related current events, for example, related to the recent Fukushima nuclear crisis. Constructive participation in these comments or forums will be considered for your class participation grade.  You should expect your contributions to persist beyond the end of the school year, and I encourage you to use the site archives to assist your studies, both this year and in the future.

Keep in mind, however, this is not an official XX School District forum, but is an additional resource for you.  It is, like the rest of the internet, a public forum viewable by other students and parents and you are expected to behave accordingly.

I REPEAT:  like everything else online, it is permanently readable, searchable, linkable, Googleable, and Facebookable by everyone, including administrators, law enforcement, college admissions officers, future employers, your grandparents, and that creepy guy at the bus stop.