Its a slow day at work today, all the year 11s have pretty much left, there are a few around but they just want a text book.  It means that for the whole day I have 1 request to do, which is just a trolley of text books and I set that up yesterday.

So today I am pretty much free to do those little things that I never get around to, one of them if fixing the van de Graaff generator.  It was not difficult, just a new belt and the fuse changing in the plug, but it does need now I have to play with...... I mean test it.

I love playing around with them, making sparks and getting your hair to stand on end.  I know with health and safety that many teachers now avoid using them.  On of my favourite teaching I have observed uses them when ever he can, making long chains of pupils on plastic stools with one end touching the dome and the last person at the other side of the room.  When the last person is earthed the end of the chain gets a really big jolt.  I am not really sure about the safety implication of this but the kids love it.

My personal favourite is to stack loads of little foil tray on top.  The ones you get from mince pies are perfect (so to do it you have to eat load of yummy mini pies).  Then when you switch it on that charge gathers on the trays and they repel each other flying off into the air one after the other.

Science can be fun.  I think sometimes it has a bad reputation that science is just about working from a book.  For some classes I think that is true because they can not be trusted to be near chemicals, for the good pupils I think fun experiments do still happen in schools.  I do not think the introduction of the Btec will help, to me it is just a way of schools making sure it gets very high pass rates, as there are no exams and pupils can be told what to write in order to get a pass.  We should be encouraging pupils to go into separate sciences.