James' World 2

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What was the hardest part about teaching during the pandemic?

Seeing students who already struggled not be able to get what they needed during that time. Before the pandemic, I could work with students one on one, have students work in pairs, or have students in more advanced classes come tutor students in entry-level classes. During the pandemic, all of this was taken away because we didn’t share the room with our students, and – at least in the initial stages of the pandemic – many of us didn’t have the skills to use comparable teaching strategies online.

How do you explain the recent drop in math scores?

Once schools shifted to remote learning during the pandemic, teachers didn’t have as many ways to keep students engaged. It was difficult to do hands-on activities and project-based learning, which are better for students who struggle in math.

Math teachers had to tell students what to do in mathematics, but this kind of direct instruction works for only about 20% of students. A lot of teaching math is visual. You need so much more space than just one screen. Teachers might use their words, hand gestures, whiteboards, graphs, diagrams, objects, physical movements, student work examples, and more. These actions and items build a comprehensive experience and build more of the skills that math students need since the students can look at several of these teaching aids at once. Online, the teacher is limited only to what can be seen on their screen or on one student’s screen at a time, which is vastly different.

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Math proficiency scores fell during the pandemic. fstop123 via Getty Images

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If there’s one thing most of us can be certain of it’s this: that our observed, physical reality actually exists. Although there are always some philosophical assumptions behind this conclusion, it’s an assumption that isn’t contradicted by anything we’ve ever measured under any conditions: not with human senses, not with laboratory equipment, not with telescopes or observatories, not under the influence of nature alone nor with specific human intervention. Reality exists, and our scientific description of that reality came about precisely because those measurements, conducted anywhere or at any time, is consistent with that very description of reality itself.

But there had previously been a set of assumptions that came along with our notion of reality that are no longer universally agreed upon, and chief among them is that reality itself exists in a fashion that’s independent of the observer or measurer. In fact, two of the greatest advances of 20th-century science — relativity and quantum mechanics — specifically challenge our notion of objective reality, and rather point to a reality that cannot be disentangled from the act of observing it. Here’s the bizarre science of what we know, today, about the notion of objective reality.

Objective reality

Put simply, the big idea is that reality exists, and it exists in a fashion that’s independent of anyone or anything that monitors or observes reality.

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On September 7, 1674, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, a fabric seller living just south of The Hague, Netherlands, burst forth from scientific obscurity with a letter to London’s Royal Society detailing an astonishing discovery. While he was examining algae from a nearby lake through his homemade microscope, a creature “with green and very glittering little scales,” which he estimated to be a thousand times smaller than a mite, had darted across his vision.

Two years later, on October 9, 1676, he followed up with another report so extraordinary that microbiologists today refer to it simply as “Letter 18”: Van Leeuwenhoek (lay-u-when-hoke) had looked everywhere and found what he called animalcules (Latin for “little animals”) in everything.

He found them in the bellies of other animals, his food, his own mouth, and other people’s mouths. When he noticed a set of remarkably rancid teeth, he asked the owner for a sample of his plaque, put it beneath his lens, and witnessed “an inconceivably great number of little animalcules” moving “so nimbly among one another, that the whole stuff seemed alive.” After a particularly uncomfortable evening, which he blamed on a fatty meal of hot smoked beef, he examined his own stool beneath his lens and saw animalcules that were “somewhat longer than broad, and their belly, which was flat-like, furnished with sundry little paws”—a clear description of what we now know as the parasite giardia.

With his observations of these fast, fat, and sundry-pawed creatures, Van Leeuwenhoek became the first person to ever see a microorganism—a discovery of almost incalculable significance to human health and our understanding of life on this planet.

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Illustration: Ariel Davis

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Astronomers have detected a gargantuan blast of energy from space that appears to be doing the impossible: Traveling seven times faster than the speed of light.

This is, of course, an optical illusion — a rare and mind-boggling phenomenon called superluminal motion, which occurs when particles come very close to moving at the speed of light. In this case, scientists detected a jet of energy blasting out of a stellar collision site at a staggering 99.97% of the speed of light — about 670 million mph (1.07 billion km/h), according to a study published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature (opens in new tab).

The jet in question is the result of a cosmic cataclysm that first made waves in the scientific community in 2017. That year, scientists detected a violent collision between two neutron stars — ultra-dense, collapsed star cores that pack a sun’s-worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city — located roughly 140 million light-years from Earth. The collision was so powerful it created ripples in the fabric of space-time; such disturbances are known as gravitational waves.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these space-time ripples in 1916, and it took scientists 100 years to find the evidence to prove it, following a collision between two black holes that was detected in 2016. The gravitational waves released by the colliding neutron stars in 2017 — a signal named GW17081 — were the first to be detected from a source other than black holes, proving that more than one type of cosmic catastrophe is capable of creating them.

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A jet of particles blasts out of a black hole at near-light-speed. A similar jet was just detected from a pair of colliding neutron stars, seemingly breaking the laws of physics. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)

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School district officials and a high school student in Michigan have drawn the ire of parents who allege that a painted mural contains LGBTQ propaganda, a depiction of Satan, and a message of witchcraft.

The painting covers a wall inside a teen health center at Grant Middle School in Grant, Mich., and was created by a local high school sophomore who won a competition.

The mural features caped characters, bunny- and bear-headed nurses, and smiling students dressed in brightly colored outfits. One student is wearing a blue T-shirt with pink and white stripes — colors found on the transgender flag. Another student is outfitted in shorts overalls with a rainbow-striped T-shirt and tights underneath. Parents have said that the rainbow stripes represent the colors of the pride flag. Two other students are dressed in tops with colors of the bisexual flag — pink on the top, royal blue on the bottom, and an overlapping purple stripe in the middle.

Among the drawings of the students, the artist added multiple smaller line drawings, including a mask, which some parents have complained is Satan, and a hamsa hand, which is considered a symbol for the hand of God in many cultures, but in this case, some adults have claimed it is a symbol of witchcraft. The mask and hand are both design elements that were not included in the artist’s original contest submission.

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