Tag Archives: education

Natural Pesticides and 4th Graders

In Oregon farmers are working with a class of 4th graders to educate them on natural alternatives to pesticides. For earth day this year the farmers from the Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers will release 10,000 ladybugs that will eat the bad things that hurt the farmers’ crops.

Because when you consider the fact that most people have never had the opportunity to watch tens of thousands of insects working together towards a positive, natural result I think it becomes obvious the kind of impression it will leave. And a lasting impression provides their teachers with a great opportunity to teach math, art, literature, social studies and science to them in various ways around the theme of environmental sustainability.

100 Things We Didn’t Know Until 2007

bbc logo100 things we didn’t know last year is a year-end list put together by the BBC, and it’s a fun list. I read all 100!

Some selections from the list:

1. Coach travel is the safest form of road transport in the country.
6. Dishcloths are purged of 99% of their bacteria during two minutes in a microwave.
26. Harvesting rhubarb in candlelight helps preserve its flavour.
35. Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest. (The UK was 9th out of 15.)
54. The Australian town of Eucla has its own time zone.
74. Sheffield FC is the world’s oldest football club.
91. In Iceland, 96% of women go to university.

Learn More by Studying Less

I’m back in Toronto now and discovered a bunch of people are starting their school year; so to celebrate their return to education I figured a post on studying is needed.

The ever helpful ZenHabits strikes again with a good overview of how to study and retain knowledge. They focus on a holistic approach to studying, which may or may not work for you. The key is to figure out what does work for you and role with it.

For example, the last thing they suggest happens to be a waste of my studying time but the same thing is essential for one of my friends:

Write – Take a piece of paper and write out the connections in the information. Reorganize the information into different patterns. The key here is the writing, not the final product. So don’t waste your time making a pretty picture. Scribble and use abbreviations to link the ideas together.

Euro-centric Thinkers Humbled

In every science text book I’ve seen only European thinkers are praised for their discoveries and this was to go unquestioned. As a result of my education I take great pleasure when those who wrote the books (so to speak) are proven horribly wrong. It boils down to the fact I like seeing credit given to those who deserve it.

Sir Isaac Newton is credited with discovering a cornerstone of modern mathematics, but in reality a group of Indians made that discovery 250 years before Newton!

The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.

And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself.

A Guide to Climate Change for the Perplexed

earth.jpgNew Scientist has a great article for people who are at all confused, misinformed, ignorant, or othwerise boggled by all this talk about climate change. They clarify many things that people may not know much about. It’s worth a read if you don’t think you know enough about climate change, or if you just want a reminder what climate change means.

Our planet’s climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors.

Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.