What can science teachers do to elevate interest in their classes and make learning more exciting and fun? This is an age-old question that educators have been grappling with forever. It is commonly assumed and studies have verified that students learn more if they are actively involved in the learning experience. Anything the teacher can do to peak interest in a subject pays rich rewards. It is common sense that if a student is enjoying a learning experience, that student will put more effort into the experience. J. L. Smith taught high school and college physics for thirty-five years. In that time he developed a teaching style that that achieved great success. Anecdotal comments from his former students express their positive attitudes towards his physics classes. One major ingredient in Mr. Smith's approach to teaching physics was his emphasis on demonstrations that were thought-provoking, awesome and right-down fun. If a teacher can get the student's attention and stroke the thinking process, success will soon follow. In this offering J. L. Smith describes fifty demonstrations that he has used over the years in his physics classes. Though designed for the physics classroom, Mr. Smith's attitude and approach to the demonstrations could be extended to many disciplines of education. His techniques developed in the physics classroom will work in many other settings. J. L. Smith is also author of the stand-alone science fiction novel, Adam. His understanding in the field of physics is obvious. It is hoped that this offering will make the teaching of physics specifically, and science in general, more student-friendly and quite simply, fun.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
"Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous," writes Michael Kowalewski. "They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful." In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging from scalpings and torture in The Deerslayer to fish feeding off human viscera in To Have and Have Not, to show how highly charged descriptive passages bear on major issues concerning a writer's craft. Instead of focusing on violence as a socio-cultural phenomenon, he explores how writers including Cooper, Poe, Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Pynchon draw on violence in the realistic imagining of their works and how their respective styles sustain or counteract this imagining. Kowalewski begins by offering a new definition of realism, or realistic imagining, and the rhetorical imagination that seems to oppose it. Then for each author he investigates how scenes of violence exemplify the stylistic imperatives more generally at work in that writer's fiction. Using violence as the critical occasion for exploring the distinctive qualities of authorial voice, Deadly Musings addresses the question of what literary criticism is and ought to be, and how it might apply more usefully to the dynamics of verbal performance.
No matter what you teach or how long you've been teaching, The Interdisciplinary Teacher's Handbookwill help you inspire the curiosity and motivation at the heart of students' best learning experiences. True advocates of localized, exploration-based methodology, Tchudi and Lafer present a thoughtful approach to interdisciplinary teaching with lots of advice on developing your own program and curriculum. Rather than reduce interdisciplinary education to either "theory" or "practice," Tchudi and Lafer offer a full explanation of how the two areas can work together. They provide a rationale for interdisciplinary teaching so that you can understand the "why" before accepting the "how." Since the teacher's attitude is as important as the student's, Tchudi and Lafer include brief exercises that ask you to reflect on your most powerful learning experiences so that you can discover ways in which interdisciplinary methods match your natural thought processes. These "Intermusings" enable you to introduce new methods with an experiential understanding of how underlying theories work. Tchudi and Lafer never lose sight of the day-to-day difficulties teachers and administrators face. They offer practical information on several levels. The second part of the book is filled with "Interdisciplinary Jumpstarters," ideas for organizing interdisciplinary projects on a number of topics, complete with lists of additional materials. Throughout the book, Tchudi and Lafer suggest resources for interdisciplinary teaching that are commonly overlooked, such as local businesses, government agencies, and people and places with histories and stories to tell. Administrators and teachers at all levels and from all disciplines will find inspiration and practical support in The Interdisciplinary Teacher's Handbook.
"Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers since Kant, and his work, private life and historical events intertwine in a fascinating, complex web. Edward Kanterian explores these intersections and provides a careful account of Wittgenstein's notoriously abstract philosophical works, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) to the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), making them comprehensible to general readers as well as offering new interpretations. Yet the philosopher's passions were not solely confined to theoretical musings, and this book explores Wittgenstein's immersion in art, architecture and music as well as his social position as a member of the sophisticated Viennese upper class at the beginning of the twentieth century." "His personal and professional relationships also offer insights into his thought, as he was friends with some of the the most fascinating intellectual figures of the time, among them Gottlob Frege, John Maynard Keynes, George Edward Moore, Bertrand Russell and Adolf Loos." --Book Jacket.
