Get Schooled

By TinaTeach

August 24, 2006 04:09 PM | Link to this

Not quite what you’re looking for but I finished a lesson with my French class where I taught the solar system about 3 weeks ago. During this class today, while they are working on independant projects I rolled onto the AJCs main page and saw the story. I immediately read the first few paragraphs to my kids and they demanded that I take my small plastic model of the sloar system and break Pluto off the end of it!

By Karen Armsby

August 25, 2006 09:04 AM | Link to this

What is a planet really? Instead of dropping Pluto I think that the scientists should have added the names of the other regular orbiting bodies, whether they are asteroids or blown out chunks from planets, i.e. complile a list of all orbiters of our sun and rank them by size and origin, which would expand the understanding of our solar system. Poor Pluto fka planet.

By Nel

August 25, 2006 02:00 PM | Link to this

I keep my kid’s class projects and have one from last year of the solar system. I told my child that it is now a collectors item because Pluto is a planet no more. Guess some folks will be getting super rich reprinting all those reference/text books.

By luvs2teach

August 25, 2006 02:29 PM | Link to this

This has been great for me - in the wake of a relatively quiet hurricane season, it’s given my Earth science classes something interesting to talk about!

It’s really not “new” news - about 5 or 6 years ago, the curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York made headlines because he grouped Pluto with other “TNOs” or trans-neptunian objects and not with the planets.

We’ve known for a long time that Pluto was weird - and that’s what I teach. It’s size is weird, relative to the gas giants. It’s composition is unlike the gas giants or the rocky inner planets. It’s orbit is weird - it’s tilted about 17 degrees from the ecliptic - it even is inside Neptune’s orbit for a portion of time. From 1979 until 1999, it was actually the 8th planet - not the 9th - and we did OK with that change.

People get frustrated with science and scientists, saying “Why can’t they make up their minds?” It’s not that - as I tell my kids, science is fluid, dynamic, changing. New discoveries and new technologies force us to re-evaluate past ideas.

This won’t change how I teach the solar system - I’ve always taught that Pluto was unique and strange - this just confirms it!

I will need to re-work the old classic mnemonic, though:

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine…what?