Pics from 8th graders successful 100k foot high flight, $200 ballon
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This type of out of the ordinary teaching gets kids excited about learning. And the best part is because it is exciting, they probably do not even realize that they are "learning", they just go home and talk about all the awesome stuff they did putting a balloon into space. And the talk of that "stuff" is all the stuff they learned without needing to sit and study from a book or have a teacher lecture at you while you stare out the window.
Because, you know, it wouldn't be real or exciting if it wasn't like a scene out of Hollywood.
But the school has a nice page on this here with video: http://www.potomacschool.org/campus-life/campus-life/interme...
The author details the ways in which entertainment has become the metric by which many Americans judge their lives.
Unfortunately, a lack of inspiration is only part of the problem. My middle school science teacher would do stuff like this all the time, and it was great. In high school I had a teacher try similar things, but after a while they were asked to stay in the classroom and teach from the book. Tragic, if you ask me.
All government school teachers now have to "teach" to the test and can't waste time on projects like this.
Those tests are a fairly low bar, so competent teachers have no problem making sure that their kids pass and doing things like high altitude balloon flying.
The problem is the teachers who don't manage to get their kids over that low bar. They don't do high altitude balloon flying, but they will do pointless field trips and never get around to teaching kids to read.
Feel free to argue that high altitude balloon flying is more important than reading.
I would rather that 20 kids be able to fly a balloon, and the 21st kid who can't read be shuffled off to some other program/classroom to learn to read, than for 21 kids to sit in a classroom learning to read when 20 of them already know.
That wasn't so hard. All I had to do was reject the idea that children are all identical and if they aren't being exposed to the exact same education each then they are being misserved.
This is yet another argument that, in order to make sense, has to take as axiomatic that the current school system is already optimal and anything that isn't perfect must be because we're not applying the current system correctly. I find it astonishing how many arguments about school fit this classification.
So would I, and there's nothing in NCLB that stops that from happening.
> All I had to do was reject the idea that children are all identical and if they aren't being exposed to the exact same education each then they are being misserved.
Good for you, but again, this has nothing to do with NCLB.
> has to take as axiomatic that the current school system is already optimal
Strawman. No one claims that.
I'm not saying that NCLB can't be improved, let alone that it is perfect. I'm merely pointing out that it doesn't have certain flaws.
In some sense, I'm "old school" - I think that it helps a lot if you know where you actually are and where you want to end up before you decide what direction to go. Heck - I even think that it's useful to know what has been tried before and what happened.
No, that's not nearly as much fun as describing utopia's outcomes as a plan but ....
I don't care what's causing it, because something is. What label you stick on it, I don't care. NCLB was merely a small course correction sitting on top of a fundamentally broken system and I reject your attempt to frame my argument as anti-NCLB. I'm talking about the whole system.
That "framing" was yours; if it wasn't what you intended.... I'll quote.
> Right, high altitude balloon flying is not on the standardized test that all government schools are judged by since the "No Child Left Behind" act. > All government school teachers now have to "teach" to the test and can't waste time on projects like this.
So a teacher may be very competent, but not have the right opportunities to do interesting stuff like this if they cannot easily and directly tie it to classroom studies, especially those around standardized tests. And unfortunately it seems like teachers with lower level students only have enough time to focus on getting them to pass those tests.
Like I said, feel free to argue that those kids should do high altitude balloons instead of reading.
Yes, do both if you can, but if you have to make a decision, which one do you choose?
This isn't a duplication, it's out own jgc attempting to do the same thing.
But realistically, the odds that any aircraft would even get near the balloon are very small. Most of its flight was far above the cruising altitude for commercial aircraft. And during its ascent and descent, contact with aircraft is minimal: the atmosphere is very very very big and the combined volume of all the aircraft in the world is very small comparison.
As long as your payload is under 4 lbs there are virtually no requirements. Here is an excerpt of FAA FAR 101 http://www.eoss.org/pubs/far_annotated.htm
Canadian geese are demonstrably a much greater threat.
Does apple actually pay them to print things like this?
You would think that the iPad invented 3G data access or something. What a ridiculous distraction in an otherwise interesting story.
My first impression was of a really long balloon tube. :)