al-mofhariz

BOOK REVIEW: Vanessa L. Ryan, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) ———————————————
Science and (the study of) literature are growing closer together.

From Stanford's Literary Lab and a recent New York Times piece on the Digital Humanities to reading Austen in an MRI machine and so-called "Literary Darwinism," there's both controversy and a certain cache (and maybe even a little cash) in bringing scientific techniques and the study of literature closer together.

So what about the study of science and the study of literature? History of science, say, and literary history? The short answer is that it's happening in English departments, but not so much in History. Why? More on that below.

Work on the interplay between science and literature has been dominated by scholars of the Victorian novel. Gillian Beer, George Levine, Nicholas Dames, Judith Ryan – all are Victorianists who put literature into dialogue with…

We are working on the FOSS unit Magnetism and Electricity - another one of my favorite units! So far we have explored what is attracted to magnets using plastic bags full of materials.  Many of the materials are duplicates, only one is made of iron or steel and the other of another non-magnetic substance. 

We have begun exploring how to create a circuit using D-cells and light bulbs.  Students are learning new vocabulary such as energy source and energy receiver, circuits and filament. As part of this lesson we are introduced to Thomas Edison. 

Did you know that Thomas Edison did NOT invent the light bulb? He was an engineer - he found an existing problem and using through trial and error worked to find a better way. It was not until he met Lewis Latimer, an African American inventor that the modern  light bulb was improved to last more than a few days.  Thomas Latimer had created a filament that would not burn out quickly. Together they figured out a way to vacuum out the air, so tha…