Physics Lesson: Things Aren’t What They Seem

A snapshot in time

Think that image you see in the mirror is you in real time? If so, you’d be wrong. As our fifth graders can tell you, when it comes to physics, things aren’t what they seem. That image you see in the mirror is you some infinitesimally small fraction of a second ago.

As part of a lesson on light and distance, fifth graders traced each other’s shadows on the playground. When they came back a few minutes later, they observed changes in the length and position of their shadows, a function of the movement of the earth relative to the sun. The earth, teacher Joseph Schneider notes, spins at 822.13 mph in our neighborhood (more than 1,000 mph at the equator).

“We tried different games with our shadows,” Joseph says. “We tried to detach from them (jumping will do the trick), touching your real hand to your shadow hand (which is harder than you think), and trying to disappear completely in someone else’s shadow.”

The students learned that light travels at 186,000 miles per second and that we’re about eight “light minutes” from the sun—93 million miles. (A light year is 6 trillion miles.)

“The most critical idea conveyed in these discussions is that light travels very fast, but not infinitely fast. A great many of the stars we see are ‘ghosts’—long-dead, collapsed, or exploded husks whose light continues to reach us until we catch up, temporally speaking, with the star's death.

“As soon as the students grasp the concept that sunlight is eight minutes ‘old,’” Joseph continues, “we can scale that down to any distance—even a couple of feet. Two people conversing don’t perceive each other as they actually appear, but only as they have appeared. And considering our other senses, whose respective stimuli travel at the merest fraction of the speed of light, we process nothing in real time. Everything exists to us sometime in the past.

“We can then begin to appreciate the fallibility of sense perception (like that image in the mirror), and perhaps begin asking deeper questions about the value of what we're able to perceive relative to what we can't. The illusion of the physical world as we experience it begins to crack.”

Be Calm: Stop, Breathe.

When my dad yelled "Calm down!" he didn't mean "Find a quiet place within yourself' or “Let’s just stop and breathe together.” "Calm down!" was his code for "Stop!" or "Do what I'm saying." However, by the time he shouted “Calm down!” his own stress was like a force-field fueling my brother, sister, and me to continue in whatever mischief or state of not listening we were enjoying.

My dad grew up before the word stress was used to describe a psychological state of tension, worry, or just pure overwhelm. He didn’t realize that he would actually have to quiet himself mentally and physically if he wanted to really help us calm down, as his aggravated state kept us from hearing him.

It can be a stretch even today to wholeheartedly believe that soothing ourselves internally will help have quieting effect on an upset child. However, I still remember years ago seeing an episode of the TV show The Supernanny, where she watched a five-year-old and his mother fight ferociously. The boy was so over-stimulated and upset, he was kicking and hitting his mother.

Supernanny Jo asked the mother to hold her son and breathe deeply with him. It worked, and the mother and son attuned to each other with each intake and long expiration of breath. They started speaking reasonably. Today, the understanding that an adult’s emotional state affects a child’s is widely understood—and so is the important role of breathing.

“Let’s stop and breathe!” I hear adults gently urging children to pause and take few breaths as casually as they might remind a child to put on a jacket in the wind.

There’s music about calming and breathing. Our school song Quiet as a Cloud uses a slow, almost hushed melody and beautiful images from nature to bring children into a state of inner harmony. I remember seeing a Room 5 video of children holding up their hands and singing “Peaceful and Calm” as they traced up each finger and breathed in and down the other side to breathe out.

Learning to calm ourselves through breathing takes repetition best done while a child is already feeling calm. Then later, when upset occurs, we can practice the slow breaths they have already learned.

We have shifted away from asserting “calm down” as a correction and framing it rather as a healthy choice that we can learn to create together.

Kindergartner’s Great-GrandfatherWas a Dr. King Ally

Edward Crowther and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. On Friday Room 8 kindergartner Eva showed her class a photo of her great-grandfather, Edward Crowther, with Dr. King. Edward was the grandfather of Eva’s mother.

A well-known figure in civil rights circles, Edward was proud to count Dr. King, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Bobby Kennedy as his allies in the fight against racism. In 1967 Dr. King invited him to give the keynote address at an anti-racism conference in Geneva, and Bobby Kennedy flew to Switzerland to meet him.

Born in England, Edward was ordained an Anglican priest in 1957. Posted to South Africa, he became prominent in the anti-apartheid movement and was ultimately deported for his activities.

After South Africa, he embarked on a worldwide speaking tour, then moved to the U.S., where he became assistant bishop of California, earned a doctorate in psychology at UC Santa Barbara, and was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

In his later years, Edward continued to participate in civil rights demonstrations, spoke at the United Nations, and wrote books on apartheid, the church, and psychology. He continued to see patients in his psychotherapy practice in Santa Barbara until shortly before his death in 2021 at the age of 92.

Eva shows the photo she shared with her class of her great-grandfather, Edward Crowther, with Martin Luther King Jr., along with a book her mother, Kimberley, used when teaching first grade.

Eva's mother, Kimberley, who taught first grade here for seven years and now substitute-teaches in the lower elementary grades, remembers her grandfather as being “very charismatic. He was intelligent, had a great sense of humor, and always had a strong presence in a room.”