Arctic Wednesdays 2020: Week 1
Patricia Nickerson
Falmouth High School
Falmouth, Maine
Good morning from Falmouth High School. As I write this I am nervously anticipating my trip up to the summit tomorrow. Having visited the White Mountains to hike in the summer and fall, ski in the winter and suffer the relentless black flies in the spring, I am continually awed by the majesty of Mount Washington in any season. As a kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s, my idea of a mountain was Rib Mountain in Wausau, Wisconsin (elevation 1923 ft.) My mom would pile too many kids (no seat belts) in the back of a two-door Maverick and drive us up for a picnic and to climb the fire tower. It felt like a long drive up to the top, and the view from the top of the fire tower (60 ft tall) seemed pretty impressive.
Moving to Maine in 2001 provided me with the opportunity to pile my own kids into the back of my car, seatbelts now required, and take them into the mountains. I think our first family hike up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail was in 2005 when our boys were 8 and 12 years old. We tried to visit almost every summer, and inevitably we chose the hottest, most humid day of the season to do our hike. Some years it took the promise of root beer at the summit to get up the headwall. I am pretty sure it will not be hot or humid tomorrow. As I type the forecast is for temperatures around 30 to 40 below with wind chill and winds gusting to 100 mph. Not sure I am ready for that but I trust the experts who will be our guides!
I teach a senior math elective at Falmouth High School in Falmouth, Maine. The course is titled Quantitative Reasoning, and our current unit is Statistics. Earlier this week, I shared data from the MWO website and students learned how to use spreadsheets to calculate measures of central tendency, make graphs and look for patterns in the distributions. Students will complete a project later this month that uses data from the MWO website to create appropriate graphical displays as a visual description of two different data sets and will give a numerical summary for each set of data they choose to investigate. They will also write a summary comparing the two distributions, referencing both the graphical and numerical summaries.
I have scheduled a follow-up video conference call for a few days after my trip with one of the education specialists at the observatory. I have asked him to tell students some of the history of the observatory and to explain how analog instruments are still used to collect the data. There will also be a time for students to ask questions. I am looking forward to observing what questions the students will ask. I hope this experience will make the statistics unit something that students remember long after they have forgotten the formula for standard deviation.
Falmouth High School
Falmouth, Maine
Good morning from Falmouth High School. As I write this I am nervously anticipating my trip up to the summit tomorrow. Having visited the White Mountains to hike in the summer and fall, ski in the winter and suffer the relentless black flies in the spring, I am continually awed by the majesty of Mount Washington in any season. As a kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s, my idea of a mountain was Rib Mountain in Wausau, Wisconsin (elevation 1923 ft.) My mom would pile too many kids (no seat belts) in the back of a two-door Maverick and drive us up for a picnic and to climb the fire tower. It felt like a long drive up to the top, and the view from the top of the fire tower (60 ft tall) seemed pretty impressive.
Moving to Maine in 2001 provided me with the opportunity to pile my own kids into the back of my car, seatbelts now required, and take them into the mountains. I think our first family hike up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail was in 2005 when our boys were 8 and 12 years old. We tried to visit almost every summer, and inevitably we chose the hottest, most humid day of the season to do our hike. Some years it took the promise of root beer at the summit to get up the headwall. I am pretty sure it will not be hot or humid tomorrow. As I type the forecast is for temperatures around 30 to 40 below with wind chill and winds gusting to 100 mph. Not sure I am ready for that but I trust the experts who will be our guides!
I teach a senior math elective at Falmouth High School in Falmouth, Maine. The course is titled Quantitative Reasoning, and our current unit is Statistics. Earlier this week, I shared data from the MWO website and students learned how to use spreadsheets to calculate measures of central tendency, make graphs and look for patterns in the distributions. Students will complete a project later this month that uses data from the MWO website to create appropriate graphical displays as a visual description of two different data sets and will give a numerical summary for each set of data they choose to investigate. They will also write a summary comparing the two distributions, referencing both the graphical and numerical summaries.
I have scheduled a follow-up video conference call for a few days after my trip with one of the education specialists at the observatory. I have asked him to tell students some of the history of the observatory and to explain how analog instruments are still used to collect the data. There will also be a time for students to ask questions. I am looking forward to observing what questions the students will ask. I hope this experience will make the statistics unit something that students remember long after they have forgotten the formula for standard deviation.
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