Frodo

If Frodo Baggins had been a student at DHS, he would most certainly have been awarded Scholar of the year!

Frodo sat for hours at the feet of the great wizard Gandolf learning all he must know to bring the evil ring of power and corruption to its end in the fires of Mordor. At DHS our scholar absorbed every nuance of Calculus from our math wizard Mr Henry.

Frodo watched in horror as the great Saruman created Orks from the slime of the Earth. In AP Chemistry our scholar learned from the master alchemist Mrs. Reeves to create the ultimate chemical compound - ice cream.

Gimly the dwarf taught Frodo the virtues of manly courage just as in weight training, Mr. Sciocchetti taught our scholar of the year how to build himself into a powerful physical specimen.

In Rivendel, Arwen the Elfin princess taught Frodo to appreciate the beauty of art and literature just as Mrs. Wood introduced our scholar of the year to the treasures of British literature.

Frodo learned from his uncle Bilbo how to record history in maps and drawings in ancient books. Ms. May taught our Frodo to reecord DHS history on good old-fashioned black and white film.

Just as Frodo witnessed in awe the power of great catapults and war machines of Mordor, our scholar learned in AP physics how to wire a circuit and calculate the velocity of a deadly projectile - a soccer ball.

All these factors came together to strengthen and support Frodo for his final quest and his finest hour. Today we honor our own Frodo Baggins, our unsung hero, our senior Scholar of the Year… Yoshito Shibanuma


Scholar of the Year Presentation
5/12/04

NHS Induction Address

The four pillars of the National Honor Society are leadership, service, scholarship, character. Many of you sitting on this stage as well those sitting in this audience exemplify these four qualities in your life every day. Now you do it in school. You organize dances, raise funds, play sports, tutor younger students, study hard and provide an atmosphere of friendship which makes DHS a great place to be. But these qualities grow with you as you leave the protection of the high school and enter a world which desperately needs you to continue living these qualities all your adult life.

I have identified seven areas that will put your leadership, service, scholarship and character to the test. I will take a few minutes to share these with you.


1. Protect the earth When I was in high school fifty years ago, 3 billion people lived on this earth. Over six billion people now live here. When you reach my age our planet will be struggling to support 12 billion. Our air is already at risk from man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Our water is being polluted at an alarming rate. Our planet is warming. You must find ways to help out. Buy a fuel efficient car, insulate your home, use alternate energy sources such as the sun and wind, buy energy efficient appliances and light fixtures. Eat food that is grown close to home. (20% of all fuel consumption today is used to ship food someplace else.) Learn to live within sustainable energy limits.

2. Tithe your religion and give alms You are in the top 1% of the world's economic stratosphere. Be generous to those who do not have the things you have. Give freely to your religion. Give alms to those less fortunate. Remember we are all of equal value to God.

3. Shun corruption and violence Violence, war and corruption will always be part our human existence. Shun these things. There will be people anxious to hand you a gun or strap a bomb to you. They will tell you this is how problems must be solved. Shun these people. Their solution has never worked and never will. You must find a better way.

4. Educate children Give the gift of knowledge and understanding to children. Support schools that teach children to read and write. Many of you are familiar with and help support The Citizens' Foundation which in the past ten years has build hundreds of quality private schools in Pakistan. Thousands of children are being raised from slavery and ignorance every year by the TCF. But millions more still live in ignorance and slavery. There is lots of work to be done here.

5. Pay your taxes Society cannot serve the common good without financial resources. Society without funded government results in anarchy, chaos and unbearable suffering for billions of people especially the poor. It will be one of your primary responsibilities to help provide these funds by paying your taxes.

6. Shelter the homeless Enable impoverished people to gain dignity and self sufficiency by helping them build their own home. Many of you have gone with our Habitat for Humanity club to Sri Lanka or to the Philippines and have helped to build clean safe housing for people who previously had nothing. Many more of you have helped raise the necessary funds to build these homes. You have sent substantial donations to Lebanon and Pakistan. Your generosity with your time effort and money has made a huge difference to these people. Many of you have found to your surprise that the biggest winners are yourselves.

7. Love your own- your culture, your religion , your family These things define who you are, where you come from and where you are going. Learn about your cultural heritage, food, costumes, dance. Value it. Teach it to your children. God gave you your religion to help you return to him. Be firm in your belief and faithful to your religion. There will be those who will tell you these things are not important. Don't believe them. Your family is your greatest treasure. This is where you find your identity. This is who you are. Your parents have born and raised you. They protect you. They educate you. Love and respect your parents and your siblings. Love your future spouse, protect and raise your children the way you have been raised.

After over forty years teaching high school chemistry and physics, Mrs. Reeves and I will be leaving the classroom and returning to our home in Honolulu. We look forward to being closer to our family. We leave Dhahran with the firm belief that you will live leadership, service, scholarship, and character and that because of you our world will be a safe place for your children and our grandchildren.

In the simple words of Tiny Tim -- God Bless us…everyone

NHS Induction Address
Dhahran High School
April 18, 2007

Click

Malcolm Gladwell recently extolled the power of thinking without thinking in his book blink. I think his next book should be called click, the power of running a computer without knowing what you are doing.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that you know how to perform an operation before you attempt it. Otherwise something will blow up. This fear of experimenting is the main reason why folks can't get things to work on their computers. But as far as I can tell, the modern computer and the software that runs on it is designed with a new idea in mind. When in doubt, just click. It doesn't matter that you do not know how to achieve a desired result. Just click until you get the machine to do what you want.
If you are in doubt about running a computer this way, watch any sixteen-year-old operating a program or fixing a computer. She clicks. Before you know it the computer is singing.
So what do you click to get things to work? Normally you click anything that might take you to a desired result. The menu bar is a great place to start clicking. Look at the menu to see what options the program can offer. Click and see what happens. Go to the control panel and click. See what things you can control on your machine.
Most changes can easily be reversed if you don't like the outcome. If you are unsure click cancel. Try to remember where you made the change. After a while you will get good at clicking in the right places. But you won't learn unless you first click.

The Great Ebook Debate

We find it so hard to give up our dream, our favorite fantasy. Who does not relish the idea of curling up before the fire, snow swirling in the window, reading a good book?

But wait... What if we play back the little dream. Try this... Who does not relish the idea of curling up before the fire, snow swirling in the window, reading a good ebook?

Ugh!

It's just not the same somehow...ebook...You can't be serious.

Well, you'd better get used to it. More than likely that is exactly what you will be reading and enjoying a good Brahms symphony too, all on your mobile phone.

Now lets come back to reality... When we read a "good book" we are actually reading a good paperback. How many trees have given their all for those retched paperbacks! The lighting is always on the page you are not reading, you have to pull on the book to keep it open...drop it and you loose your place. You have to scan back and forth with your eyes because edges the page is just out of the range of your bifocals. If you find a few spare moments to read, the book is at home...you are not. You seldom choose to read what you want because it is hard to find many of the books you would really like to sink your mind into. And those paperbacks are expensive, especially in the airport stores.

You read your ebook on the small phone or wireless PDA screen. It is always with you even in the bathroom, lighting is always perfect, text is sharp and clear, the page is always the right size to speed read and you never loose your place. If you don't know the meaning of a word, you can look it up. You can highlight or even draw in it without getting a librarian mad at you. You can beam it to a friend and both read it at the same time. You can look up stuff on the internet that the author is talking about, like the painting of the last supper when reading the Da Vinci Code. Best of all, if you want to read some special book you can download it, often for free, in about 30 seconds.

For that matter, why read at all? Nowdays we can just listen to a good book. So curl up by the fire with that idea!

Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Hey Dorothy, we are not in Kansas any more!

During the 2004-2005 school year, many new personal digital wireless devises have surfaced at school. Of course the most common is the mobile phone, many of which have blue tooth file sharing capability and built in cameras. Small Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are being used by some faculty and students to do a wide range of tasks including email, web browsing, e-books, music. The iPod music players have become popular this year. Finally laptops and tablet style computers are a common site in the library and common areas. These computers are also wireless and can transfer information from the Internet of from student files on the school server without the need to hook up to any wires. It all comes through the air on the school's wireless network.

The key to understanding why these devises are so useful for a student (and we are all becoming lifelong students) is twofold. They offer ready access to information and can store vast amounts of information.

The age of record players, tape decks, CD players, end even printed books is nearly over. No new mechanical devices will take their place. Books, music, movies and other information can now be obtained from internet libraries and music and video stores, through the air over rapidly developing wireless networks. Even today, while I am standing in the school hallway, I can download an entire novel to my tiny PDA in less time than it takes me to write this paragraph. We see several examples of these technologies in use. The iPod is perhaps the most popular example of this marriage of access and storage. iTunes are downloaded at very reasonable prices and stored in the tiny iPod device. The equivalent of hundreds of music CDs can now be stored in the memory chips in these devices.

This information is stored on high density media such as tiny SD memory cards. The iPod can store hundreds of music albums. The iPAQ PDA can currently store 2GB of information in a tiny SD chip. The 250MB SD memory chip I carry in my pocket contains a small e-book library consisting of eight modern and classic novels and poetry, the complete English version of the Qur'an, the entire new and old testament of the Bible, a dictionary, two music CDs, slide shows of several of our recent trips to Africa, and a movie of our cruise to Tahiti last summer.

A favorite format for the student learner is the "tablet" laptop computer. The machine is smaller and lighter than the regular laptop. It features a screen that rotates and data can be hand written onto the machine. The laptop and the PDA can take handwritten text and efficiently convert it into a font, which can then be printed on a school printer over the WiFi wireless network. The tablet computer has the advantage of being a good productivity tool. PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are all easy to create on this machine and they hook readily to the classroom projector for project presentation. Another favorite is the Pocket PC computer. The HP iPAQ is an entire wireless computer which fits in a purse or shirt pocket.

If you are thinking of investing in one of these technologies for your student learner, be sure that the machine is "WiFi compatible." Bluetooth will not hook up to the existing 802.11b wireless network. The machine must be able to connect to 802.11b to be fully productive at Dhahren HS.

Heatwave -- May 2005

Ode to the missing cable..

Din, Bin, RS232, USB
don't the english teachers know
the DVD won't project
without you.

Why do they send the machine back
with pride at their responsible act
without the cable that hooks it all up
and frustrate the next poor smuck.

Where do they go?
those controlers, cables and camera foot
so trustingly loaned to intellegent folks
as part of a working package.

Is there a black hole in every school
into which fall these minor parts
without which nothing works
renedering this stuff useless?

Why Chaos Corners?

My physics classroom has been known as "Chaos Corners" since I first began teaching in 1965. There is good reason for this. In those days projects abounded. Kids built and rebuilt ham radios and amateur rockets...junk was everywhere.

Now our projects are more based on NASA satellites and space missions and there is less clutter but, the name still fits.

This little BLOG is dedicated to rubbly physics teachers everywhere.