Thursday, March 3, 2016

A Bad Day

Today was not a good day.  Sometimes teaching a subject in which you are uncomfortable can catch up with you.  Today was that day for me.  I was doing a lab with my students, dealing with standing waves.  I've never been comfortable with the math of calculating the waves, but I felt I was savvy enough to do the calculation and have it match what I should get.  Boy, was I wrong!  I did the math with what my students had discovered, and I kept getting huge numbers for the speed of sound!

Thankfully, my mom (wonderful mother that she is) came and helped me perform the lab again, and I learned that the PVC pipe that I had was much too long to hear the resonance!

Now I'm wondering if I should let the lab go, or repeat it with the correct sized pipe...

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