Measurement of Gravity

After realizing that college level physics students didn't know who Einstein was, I decided to try something a little different with my next science experiment. I invited all the students who had signed up on the interested in math and science sign up sheets to an exclusive measurement of gravity.

We dropped five little water balloons, five crumpled balls of paper and five gigantic water balloons off the third floor of the library while timing how long the balloons took to fall. Splat!

We then took the data inside and graphed the results in Excel. (This was the first time many had used a computer to do calculations.) I helped derive a relationship for gravity from the time it takes to fall. We talked about who was the most accurate timer, who was the most consistent.

After two and a half hours they were still asking questions like:
"Why does everything fall down towards the Earth?"
"Why doesn't the moon fall down too?"

We're winning.

Book Party! in Ban Sivilay

. . . . . .

No doubt you are reading the title and thinking, "oooh books, now that sounds like a really exciting party."

Well, if you live in a Hmong village where there are no books, and some foreigners bring enough books for each child in your village to have one, you would throw a party too.

I was invited to tag along with a German couple that had sponsored a book party through the Big Brother Mouse organization in Luang Prabang. I knew I was in for something special when the villagers started chasing the van with huge grins as we drove into the school yard.

First we had a drawing lesson. Every child with one piece of paper and a pencil drawing cartoon faces. Then we sang songs in Laos. I think they were about the alphabet, but not really sure. Played games in the school yard and ate a snack. It was great fun. And then... Each student got to chose one book for themselves, probably the first book they have ever owned. They were completely absorbed with their new book.


. . . . . .

If you are interested in supporting this group I highly recommend you go to Luang Prabang and sponsor a book party for a village. Its an amazing experience. The Big Brother Mouse group also publishes books and is always looking for people to sponsor the publication of a new book.

Thank you Big Brother Mouse for letting me tag along!

Book Report: Mindfulness in Plain English

A book that is exactly what it says it is. Ever had so much on your mind you feel like you can't concentrate on a single one of them? You might be interested in this one.

I found it to be an exceptional book for someone like me with zero knowledge of what meditation is and what it isn't.

Water Balloon in a Bottle?

The idea was to create a stand-alone science experiment that could generate sparks of interest with all ages. Carol asked me one day if I thought it was possible to get an egg into milk bottle. The seed was planted... What sprouted was a contest to challenge kids to get a water balloon into a kethcup bottle.

I stole an empty ketchup bottle from my baguette friends and bought some balloons. We created a sequence of laminated cards with questions in English and Laos to lead students to the answer without giving it away.

Surprising how many kids would try the "it doesn't fit, I must need to push harder" method. But water balloons add a sense of danger... At least tens times a day the sounds of water splashing and giggling could be heard. Ultimately it was a great science success for the library.

Try it at home. Can you get an egg sized water balloon into a ketchup bottle? Not as easy as it sounds... What's the science behind it? The staff at the library was able to brainstorm four answers. How many solutions can you find?

Just read: The Skull Mantra

Several people have asked what I've been reading, so I will try posting an uber-brief summary of things I am reading and see how it goes.

An engaging murder mystery about the struggles of Tibetan people and life in a laogai, Chinese labor camp. The story begins with the discovery of a decapitated American body by a Tibetan work gang high in the mountains of Tibet. The plot follows the investigation of one of the slaves who is promoted to the investigator and has a myriad of twists and turns like every good murder mystery should... Sprinkles of history and politics of the region make it feel real.

I plan to make a trip to Nepal and Tibet in the coming months. That's why it was interesting to me...


If you are interested in understanding the plight of the Tibetan people and how purchasing things made in China supports a dangerous regime, I recommend browsing the website: www.boycottmadeinchina.org. Or download the pdf version of Buying the Dragon's Teeth.

Laa's Wedding

A wedding for one of my English students. Eat strange, delicious foods. Drink beerlao. Dance the lam vong lao. Repeat.

What really strikes me Laos weddings is how simple and much fun they are. The reception was held in the dirt road between Laa's house and her neighbor. A keyboard, an electric guitar, a microphone and a bunch of speakers. That's right, if people aren't willing to play instruments and sing there would be no music. I can only imagine trying this in the US, it would be dead silence... My favorite was a little old lady that didn't bother with dance partners and simply rocked out to every song.

The culinary treat for me this night was buffalo skin straight from the fire. You take a strip of buffalo skin and toss it in the fire. It resembles a rib from a cow except beneath the dry outer layer of skin you can feel squishy inside. After you remember that you tossed a strip in the fire you fish it out with a stick and scrape off the charred outside with a knife. A chewy, buffalo skin, aptly named Jerky Buffalao.

birthday parties

Not sure why every Buddhist monk I am friends with has a birthday in January... Photos from the monk birthday parties in January!

Paper Airplane Contest

We held the first-ever paper airplane contest in Luang Prabang! A poster was taped to the door and a 1 meter paper airplane was hung from the ceiling to advertise. About 20 kids showed up of which there was one girl, a couple of university students, and a handful of novice monks. Several kids had never made a paper airplane before!

The first paper airplane was named "Laos Airlines" and was a simple airplane with which some of the kids were familiar. The idea was to get over shyness and relax into a new learning environment. The first experiment was put a paper clip on the back or the front of the airplane and see what happens. The next experiment was to cut flaps into wings and tail of the plane and see what happens. Planes were flying every direction! I had typed up several airplane instruction sheets with names like Sua-Tiger to encourage different designs.

Next were the contests, the categories to be judged were: distance, speed, flight accuracy, landing accuracy, and the completely open-ended creativity category. The kids really got into building a plane to win the contests. There were prizes at stake! After the ensuing madness, a prize of two notebooks and two pens were awarded to each winner.

Getting kids past their shyness with foreigners and a new style of learning was easy. Language was the real barrier for me but I had my mad scientist assistant, Soulisuck, translate all the difficult concepts to Laos language. Getting kids to think on their own and be creative will be the ongoing challenge.

Carol, Alan, Linda, and Derin were the judges for the contests. Thanks for helping out, I hope you had as much fun as I did!

The Naughty Novice

A story by Tricia, a friend and fellow teacher in Luang Prabang.

This is a little story about a little lesson in life. The moral of the story is all is not as it seems. This is what happened.

I had been teaching English for a couple of weeks to novices in the Monk School in Luang Prabang, Laos. I had already realized that novice monks come in all shapes, sizes and personalities just the same as any class of adolescent boys. There are the quiet, reserved types, the enthusiastic learners, and the ones who couldn’t care less about learning English or were just too tired to care. It was a particularly challenging class at the time. There were seemingly quite a few novices in this class who had a very relaxed attitude about learning English and a few who were getting on each others’ nerves – or that’s how it seemed to me.

In the middle of this English lesson there appeared at the door a young Lao tour guide with his Western tourists at hand who stopped momentarily to observe the Australian teacher struggling with controlling this class of novice monks. Thankfully they didn’t stay long and didn’t witness the next scene. I began to smell smoke and as it was useless to ask where it was coming from as no-one would have understood me I looked for the evidence. A young novice had lit a piece of paper and had placed it in the open compartment of one of the old wooden desks. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this young novice had taken the “find something else to do while the teacher is talking” attitude just a little too far. But I knew better than to take the approach I would have taken if this classroom was back in Australia and this teenage boy was in ordinary clothes rather than the dazzling orange of his robes. So I tried as best I could to mask my first reaction of reproaching him in the usual Teacher way. I thought that I would hand this breach of discipline over to the young Monk who was helping me at the time with translation. His response was to laugh. I hope to take this approach back with me to my classroom in Australia – it would probably prove to often be the best reaction. However, not being that advanced in not taking things personally, I shot the novice a look of Teacher disapproval and a warning tutt-tutt.

Later that evening I came across the young tourist guide who had shown his tourists the Monk School that day. He commented on how hard it must be to teach the novices and so with a righteous attitude I told him the story of the novice who had done the naughty deed of almost setting fire to one of the desks. Again I received a response which was contrary to what I expected. He explained to me that he used to do this himself when he was at school. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear this confession as I had already tagged this cheeky young tourist guide as a bit of a larrikin. But the next part of the explanation did come as a bit of a surprise. The reason for lighting the paper was to smoke out the mosquitoes that breed in the dark places in these old wooden desks and not at all to cause trouble to the teacher. I’m sorry to that novice for thinking the worst and will try to remember in the future that all is not as it seems - particularly when you are in a foreign country teaching English to young novice Buddhist monks.

Justein

At the library everyone is plugged into photography and photoshop and they create a poster to introduce themselves. Just because I was a teacher didn't mean that I was exempt. So I asked my sister, the whiz photographer and photoshopper, to create a poster for me.

This is what she made...

I fell out of my chair laughing, but the real experiment was to see what the kids would think. University level physics students do not recognize the middle photo. Every day I get questions about it, "Is that you Grandfather?" Amazing that only one person has recognized the middle photo as a famous person, and even then could not say who it was or why he was famous.

Is there a need for science teachers in Laos?