Head of the Class

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The Amtrak train trip from Seattle to Sacramento took a relaxing twenty one hours. And the trip to Seattle added another three hours to the front end of the trip to make for a full one day to travel the entire distance south. But it isn't speed to the destination I am seeking, it's the trip itself. I had lunch as we ambled through Portland with two rude and odious women, not related but of mother and daughter in age separation. They spent lunch talking and swearing to each other, and more than once talked about me in the third person. I tried to say a few nice words to be polite, but they were not really worth the effort. I got the last laugh, however, because they asked about the time to their destination - Los Angeles. They couldn't figure out how they would get to LA by 9pm. I smiled and laughed hysterically inside, and then explained that their time of arrival was indeed 9pm, but tomorrow night! They didn't know the total trip from Seattle to LA was thirty six hours, they were thinking it was twelve hours. Once we left Eugene in the late afternoon, the sun was sinking and the mountains rising, the scenery was fantastic. The train stopped less often here in Southern Oregon simply because there are so few people living here, and so few stations. I had dinner with a nice mother and son from Chico in Northern California who had been in Portland to check out a culinary school. It seems as if the son will be attending next September. I arrived in Sacramento at 6am, after sleeping most of the night in a chair shivering under the air conditioning.

On my first full day in Sacramento Kris and I went to Berkeley for the sole purpose of going to lunch at Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is a famous restaurant that I had not heard about until just a few weeks prior when I had watched a documentary about good local sustainable food. The restaurant started forty years ago by Alice Waters with the intention of only serving food that is in season, local, all or mostly organic and above all fresh. And the meal was as delicious as all that. When food is this flavourful it does not have to be full of calories. I had California Sea Bass with carrots, zucchini and cilantro and Kris had pork cooked in milk with spinach. The restaurant was full, not a free table and reservations were required. We booked one month ago, the maximum time in advance to book a table. There, I bought a cookbook by Alice Waters "In the Green Kitchen," with techniques and recipes I can do. As I learn more about environmental issues, the more I appreciate the primacy of food to the planet's health and our health. The Chez Panisse Foundation was established fifteen years ago to support educational programs that use food to nurture, educate and empower youth. The edible schoolyard in collaboration with a local school provides one acre of urban land to grow an organic garden with an adjoining kitchen classroom.

Sunday, Kris and I drove to Napa Valley. We set out with only two or three vineyards in mind. The first was Domaine Carneros on the western fringes of Napa Valley. We took a tour, which included a brief walk outside to see the grapes and then much more time indoors tasting. This winery specializes in sparkling wine. The grapes are grown organically and water is used sparingly to stress the grapes, one reason why Napa produces such good wine. By 12pm, I had drunk my share and Kris's share of the bubbly. The tour was very crowded full of the beautiful and rich from San Francisco. We drove on to another winery that advertised a cave tour. We got to Pine Ridge vineyard on the eastern flank of the valley only to be disappointed that the cave tour was not available because of a private function. Nevertheless, I tasted some more wine. My favorite was a red Pine Ridge Onyx for $60 a bottle at the winery, I can't imagine what this would cost here in BC with all of our import and alcohol taxes. Pine Ridge vineyard is in a beautiful setting, set against the hills and off the main road of Napa Valley. We drove onto the Oakville Market for lunch. I can't see the point in speed tasting, I can't drink that much, nor can I remember tastes that well. After two wineries we returned to Sacramento.

The main reason for me going to Sacramento was to attend a summer course for AP teachers. I selected Sacramento out of dozens of locations across the continent in order to get a vacation in California, and I have accommodation. The course is primarily for aspiring Advanced Placement Physics Teachers like myself. This was a chance for me to redo some Physics I hadn't seen in more than twenty years, and to learn the curriculum for this course. I will be teaching AP Physics 12 next September for the first time, and there is plenty I need to learn. There were seventeen of us in this course, and I was the only foreigner. The instructor was from New York City, and he chose to teach this course here in California for the same reason I took the course in California - to append a vacation along with the Physics. Most of this week long course involved doing labs and presenting these labs, it wasn't a lecture. Each day we worked on one or two new concepts in groups of three, just how we would teach our students. Our instructor modeled with us how he teaches his students. There was actually very little actual chalk and talk and besides, who uses blackboards these days?

The first morning we played with toy cars to measure speed and time. I liked that we had to use a metronome for time rather than a stopwatch. If you think about it, this makes total sense because time is the independent variable, it just keeps on ticking and ticking and ticking independently of our actions, it always has and always will do. A stopwatch makes you think you can control time, to actually stop time, but I digress philosophically. On the second day we measured the mass of a penny using a moving pulley system in the most unconventional way, and we measured the rotational velocity of a flying pig. On the third day, we calculated the density of an unknown liquid by measuring the apparent weight of an object in air and the apparent weight of the object in that liquid. We also found out the terminal velocity of a falling coffee filter. And we found the centre of mass of an irregularly shaped object then set it swinging as a pendulum. On the fourth day we calculated how many excess electrons there are on a piece of sticky tape, and we found out the thickness of a human hair using a laser.

And then we came to the last day that was reserved for presentations. Two students were taking this course for credit and so their presentations were to be longer. And they were. For the rest of us, we were only supposed to make short presentations, but some of the participants were very ambitious, and so consequently they too made very long presentations. By the end of the session four of us had yet to present. I didn't get to show my fellow students my ideas for teaching tension in a string. I am quite proud of this lab, and I believe tension is something taken for granted, that everyone immediately understands what it is and how it works. This assumption is wrong. If two teams are in a tug of war, one team of healthy, strong and burly people and the other full of people like me, then which end of the rope has the higher tension?

I learned and re-learned a lot in this course, some of the course topics I hadn't seen since I was an undergraduate back during the Pleistocene epoch, and some of the topics I had never learned. My colleagues were all interesting to talk to, and I learned more from my small group with whom I had more contact than with the instructor, which is typically true of learning environments. In addition to the Physics, I learned some invaluable graphing calculator and MS Excel skills that I need to implement in my own classroom. They gave us two textbooks, an AP course book, and a study guide. I bought myself three more study guides, so I was heavily laden with books upon my return to Vancouver. But that return would have to wait for another week and a half.

The answer is that the tension is the same throughout the rope, both teams exert the same force on each other (Newton's Third Law); it's the force with the ground that makes the difference.

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Photos

Domaine Carneros
The place to go for bubbly