Why are still teaching that?
A few weeks before the end of I had a conversation with a colleague about thermometers.
I had been to the doctor the previous day, and remarked that the nurse was using a digital thermometer to measure my temperature.
Yet my colleague was getting reading to teach.. yep you guessed it, a lesson on using old school thermometers.
It’s there in the curriculum but the people who measure temperatures on a daily basis aren’t using the tools we are teaching now.
Which leads me to wonder how much old school technology is sitting there in the curriculum that we continue to teach because ‘that’s we we’ve always done…’
What are teaching now that will likely be obsolete in the next 10 years?
Teaching the Teacher 
Hmmm…. I would have thought that there is a dual purpose to teaching how to use old school thermometers. The overt purpose is learning how to take a temperature, but the underlying one might be to develop a sense of what happens to metals under various conditions. Old school thermometers demonstrate the expansion and contraction of metals very well indeed.
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Not in this context – just a straight reading of a line. Which yes shows measurement and scale but to get an idea of expansion and contraction – go big. My students were impressed when I stuck a warmed bottle in the freezer – how did that happen?
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