Media Misinformation and the Court of Public Opinion

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/burns-lake-teacher-rayanne-charlie-suspended-1.3983727

Read the above story. Go ahead. I’ll wait…

HOLY COW! I can’t believe such a horrible teacher was ever allowed to hold a teaching certificate! Students were lined up and hosed down like fresh convicts at the maximum security prison. Worse, they were not allowed to opt out! How would you feel, if you hosed down during a mandatory activity with no prior warning and forced to miss math class to go home and change. Worse still, 2 students were injured! What kind of teacher does that woman claim to be, and above all what school would sanction or endorse such an activity?!

Except you aren’t getting the whole story. Certainly, from the cbc article it would seem that this teacher deserved every hour of her suspension. Reading the comments on the article shows that many people feel similar to my statement above, which they should, if the story played out as the cbc article entails. Schools do have a dark history of unchecked abuse, tolerance of bullying behaviour, and a value system that emphasized control and conformity above all else. From the visceral emotions displayed in the comments it appears that many Canadians grew up in through that history and still harbor resentment from those days… but that’s not the case here.

Fortunately for me, one of my fellow teacher candidates lived in Burns Lake and had the privilege of being in her classes. She was utterly shocked and appalled at the one-sided depiction of an acitivty she remembers fondly, and directed me towards a statement made publicly on facebook by the teacher’s daughter (https://www.facebook.com/indigoindigo/posts/10154741599151348):

“EDIT: Rayanne is not allowed to make any sort of public statement about all of this, so I’ve made this post public in hopes that people will share it far and wide!

OK. I’m not even going to share the original article here, as I refuse to amplify such biased and irresponsible journalism. I am just going to say that my mother Rayanne Charlie is one of the most dedicated, hard working, inspiring and talented teachers that I have ever met, or had the opportunity to learn from. She works tirelessly in her school and wider community to create positive and lasting change among rural youth and young adults, through her pedagogy and curriculum as well as facilitation of larger projects such as Roots of Reconcilliation, a yearlong intensive educating teachers, administrators and support staff as well as students on the impact of residential school systems on past, present, and future generations.

The article that came out today (on CBC and other digital publications) in regards to her recent 1 DAY suspension was sensationalized clickbait, making a tiny molehill into a giant mountain. I am sincerely disappointed in the reporters, editors, and the participating media organizations that such a poorly researched article was allowed to be published at all.

Ethical journalism 101 involves contacting your subject to inform them of the story, reaching out to directly interview voices on both sides of your angle, and supporting your angle with clear and thoroughly researched context for all of the facts – especially crucial in the age of digital outrage and viral news.

None of these things took place here.

This is a game that my family plays during our yearly camping reunions – everyone from aunts and uncles to little kids – in which if you get caught, you get a silly punishment. It’s been a family tradition that I grew up looking forward to every year since I was a little kid; and is always played in good spirits and in fun.

If you know my mom and would like to write to the CBC to lodge a formal complaint and provide your story of how my mom touched your life for the better, contact me and I will give you the relevant email addresses, and some advice on how to format your letter to ensure that it is properly heard and acted upon. Letters can be written on or off the record, your choice.

My mother has consistently inspired me to connect activism to community through the arts. She is the reason why I do what I do, and continues to have a huge impact on how and why I do it.

I am standing behind her 100%, and hope that more light will be shed on the overwhelmingly positive and impactful work that she has done. I encourage others to do the same.”

What follows that post is a collection of comments from numerous past students condemning the horrible and shoddy journalism and standing in solidarity with her daughter’s statement. As it turns out, this activity takes place nearly every year and has taken place for the last decade. The activity is NOT mandatory. Students can withdraw at any time or flat out refuse to do it and are explicitly told this in the weeks leading up to and at the start of the activity. In fact, students confirmed they received a slip reminding them to bring an extra change of clothes if they want to participate. The spraying is a silly punishment, and since the teacher participates in the activity with the students, the teacher is not immune from beign sprayed herself. The 2 injuries described were accidents which occurred when students were running on wet grass and concrete, and while they occurred under the teacher’s supervision was it really worth a formal suspension?

The way these events unfolded caught me completely by surprise. I thought that since the source of the article was from the freaking CBC that it would not present such a one-sided take on the issue unless that was what their investigation uncovered. Stories like this reinforce just how low journalists will stoop to fabricate an interesting story, playing on the emotions of those who have been abused in the past. More than likely, I think it may have been an upset or overzealous parent whose child may not have told them the whole story as to why they were soaking wet in math class. Then again, I wasn’t there, and I think this story and others like it prove why students need to be able to think critically about the news and media they consume. There are always 2 sides to every story, and we should not pass such harsh judgement until we are sure we have enough information to be justified in doing so.

There is so much love in the words of her students and her community. The fact that even one person may have demonized her because of this article is disgusting.

Who Decided We All Have to Read Shakespeare, Anyways?

What probably won’t come as a surprise is that it was the British government. What may come as a surprise is where and why. I had to research the topic for a class and created a video to compile what I had learned. The first English Language Arts lessons took place in India, in the 19th century. This was because the British were frustrated that they couldn’t speak properly to the countrymen they had just recently conquered and colonized, and decided to create a class of Indian citizens who were literate. Literate in the sense that they are fluent with the great English class literature, not that bass-ackwards malarky in their own myths, poetry, and scriptures.

Thankfully, what started as a tool of colonialism through time became a celebration of the English language, its great pioneers and authors, and the myriad of ways one can express themselves through words. Hopefully you find the history of one of my favorite subjects as interesting as I do.

Red Cabbage pH Indicator Activity

Here is a wonderful activity for all ages that can be used as an introduction to acids and bases.

Acidity and basicity are a property that many chemicals possess. We use them to refine oil, bleach textiles, in our industry, in our food, in our house, and in our bodies. The way the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) produces energy is by utilizing an acidic gradient across a membrane. The effects of acid mine drainage and acid rain on the environment can be devastating.

Acidity and basicity can be measured by chemicals called “pH indicators”, which measure how acidic or basic a chemical is on a scale called the pH scale (pH stands for power of hydrogen). The scale goes from 0-14, and substances are acidic if they have a pH less than 7 and basic if they have a pH greater than 7. Acidic substances release hydrogen into solution whereas basic substances absorb it. The scale also operates like the richter scale used to measure earthquakes – an acid of pH 3 releases 10 times as much hydrogen into solution as an acid of pH 4, and a base of pH 13 absorbs 100 times as much hydrogen as a base of pH 11.

To create the red cabbage indicator, simply buy a red cabbage and boil it in a couple litres of water for approximately 15-30 minutes. The longer you boil it, the stronger your indicator will be. I recommend creating 2 litres of concentrated cabbage juice and diluting it by a factor of 10 when using it in class. This is not necessary but will make your juice last much longer.

Collect a bunch of household chemicals, or better yet, ask your students for suggestions on what to collect for the experiment. Not every chemical will induce a color change but the majority of soaps and cleaning supplies will. Allow your students to make predictions about what will happen based on what they know about the household chemicals. Be sure to pre-load information about the traits of acids and bases (acids taste sour, corrode metal, bases taste bitter, feel slippery, etc). This activity can be done at any grade level, and you can even use a crude color scale to identify the pH of your materials.

Picture from: http://www.discoveryexpresskids.com/blog/test-ph-levels-with-red-cabbage

Balloon Flame Tests

Everybody loves this demo.

I actually learned how to do this because my senior year chemistry teacher for better or for worse trusted us to do demos. Naturally, we all picked one that involved exothermic reactions, if you catch my drift.

Invariably once you get into astronomy you’re going to get asked how we know what the cosmos is made out of. We simply took a look at the cosmos through spectroscopic telescopes and observe the lines of color that appear. Each element has its own spectral “fingerprint” we can observe, and you can show this in a more exciting way with exploding hydrogen balloons mixed with a small amount of powdered material. The explanation is pretty physics-y, but I’ll try to explain it simply.

Molecules are collections of atoms which are bonded by electrons. The electrons exist at a basic energy level relating to their distance from the center of the atom. When a molecule absorbs the appropriate amount of energy (in the form of a packet of light energy, or photon), the electron becomes “excited” and raises itself to a higher energy level. This level is usually unstable, and the electron “falls” back to its previous level. In doing so, it releases an amount of energy equal to the gap between that high energy level and the lower energy level. Since the energy of that photon is determined by its frequency, and frequency is related to wavelength, each molecule will release a photon with a unique wavelength of light. In our case the energy used to excite the molecules will be heat from the combustion of hydrogen, but the combustion of methanol in a spray bottle also works. Look at the difference in the color of the flames between a solution of sodium ions and strontium ions.

Special thanks to Gordon Gore for this glamour shot.

There are a number of ways to collect hydrogen, a couple of which you can incorporate into science lessons. You can either create hydrogen and oxygen through the electrolysis of pure water (the ‘ole car battery and the two pipes trick, or you can get a kit online), or by dissolving a pure metal in hydrochloric acid. I usually use aluminum because its dirt cheap, but zinc dissolves more readily. I’ll walk you through the process.

1. Weigh out about 7 grams of zinc pieces or finely torn aluminum foil, and place this into a pre-stretched balloon.

2. Pour 100mL of 6M hydrochloric acid into a 150-mL Erlenmeyer flask. Set this up on a lab stand at a tilt so you can stop the metal salt from falling into the acid.

3. Put a pinch of metal salt into the balloon. Strontium, lithium, sodium, potassium, copper, and iron produce colorful results.

4. place the metal pieces into the flask and quickly stretch the balloon over the mouth of the flask while holding the bulb of the balloon in place so we don’t get premature reactions.

5. When ready, pour the dry metal out of the balloon and into the flask. When bubbles stop forming, pinch and tie off the balloon. If you’ve done this my way, you should have a collection of hydrogen in the balloon with a small amount of metal salt.

6. In late High School, you may be able to ask them to calculate the wavelength of light that would be emitted and make an educated guess on the colour. For other grades, provide the dominant wavelengths and give students a chart that maps out wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and ask them to make a guess.

Did the colours line up with what they expected? Always ask students to reflect on what they have done. Here are the balloon explosions for plain hydrogen, strontium nitrate, and sodium carbonate. The photo doesn’t do it justice, but you can plainly see the red light of strontium and the brilliant orange of sodium. Copper chloride produces a green flame, potassium compounds are more purple, and powdered iron produces yellow sparks.

SAFETY CONCERNS: Acid and explosions are bad for you; always wear gloves, labcoats, and safety goggles when performing this procedure. Hydrogen production can be doen in a fume hood but the explosions may damage it. If possible, perform activity behind a safety screen, make sure all students are sitting at the back of the class, far from the demonstration. Metal salts may react unfavorably with the hydrochloric acid, so be careful that none ends up in the flask.