freshwater consumption

I'd like it to be a theme of my writing about teaching that I learn as much as any student in my class when I teach! It certainly is a fact. This semester has been huge for me because I'm teaching a subject I don't know much about (sustainability), and because I am teaching writing, which is a first (yes, in 25 years of teaching, I have never taught writing).

A few weeks ago I gave a (writing) assignment to estimate global freshwater needs by computing your own freshwater needs and extrapolating to the world. Then compare with estimates of global usage. My expectation: That a typical American college kid uses way more water than a typical person on Earth, and this would be a lesson about disparity. I wasn't wrong, but I also wasn't right either:

It turns out that global freshwater use is way larger than any estimate of your own personal water use, extrapolated to the globe! Isn't that odd? It's because global freshwater use is not dominated by household uses like laundry and toilets (which, by the way, don't need freshwater). It is dominated by agriculture. If you add in your own share of agricultural water use, a typical American uses way more than the average human! But it is hard to know or estimate this without significant engineering research.

There was one clue, however, in the essays I got: One student included the amount of water used to water a lemon tree in their dorm room. It was a trivial amount of water, so it was almost a joke. But then if you think about how much food we eat relative to the miniscule annual production of that tiny lemon tree, there is a little window into just how much water we must use for agriculture.

walk or take the elevator?

I'm just generally excited about getting back into the classroom after a long sabbatical. I'm thinking about problem-set problems for the Physics Majors. Here's what's in my head right now:

NYC has had a hot summer, with most buildings running air conditioning on a thermostat continuously. To save energy, NYU (and other large entities in NYC) asked their employees to conserve energy in various ways, some of which we might take issue with. Here's an uncontroversial one: You should take the stairs, not the elevator.

But is that uncontroversial? What considerations are required to figure out whether this policy would reduce or increase energy consumption? Obviously—if you take the stairs—you use less elevator energy, but then you drop a metabolic load on the building air-conditioning. Which uses more power in the end? Use a combination of web research and simple physical arguments to make cases, and identify weaknesses in your argument as you change assumptions. Things that matter include: Neither humans nor elevators are 100-percent efficient delivery vehicles for potential energy (in fact, can you see a fundamental argument that elevators must spend more than 50 percent of their energy generating heat?). Elevators are heavy but counter-weighted. Some buildings have very busy elevators, so your contribution to the elevator load is only the marginal contribution; in other buildings you are typically the only person in the elevator. Air conditioning systems have efficiencies limited by fundamental ideas in thermodynamics, but are probably much less efficient than the limits. And so on!

Thanks to Andrei Gruzinov (NYU) for starting me thinking about this one.

teaching physics teachers

I took a break from my no-teaching, all-research sabbatical to make a guest appearance this week in Jhumki Basu's course Recent Advances in Physics in NYU's education program. Her students are building new science units with help and ideas from current researchers. I presented not really my research, but some of my research techniques: estimation and approximation. No surprise there!

I showed on dimensional grounds that cars like the ones we currently drive will never do far better than 30 miles per gallon. 100 maybe. But never 1000. A nice result, with important implications, using only techniques that a high schooler could easily muster.

After I spoke, we discussed, and it was noted by one and all that despite the simplicity of the techniques, in fact estimation and approximation techniques are non-trivial and sophisticated. It is hard to incorporate them incrementally into the existing New York State middle- and high-school curricula. On the other hand, it is my (perhaps optimistic and/or utopian) view that if these things were the focus of quantitative education from day one, they would be easy to have mastered by the end of high school. Of course the teachers I was talking to are going into the system that exists; they can't start from scratch!

Many other interesting things came up, which I hope to blog about at some pont in the future, including students' lack of contact with machinery and hardware and electronics, and the idea (that I hold, but others don't) that education ought to give students skills and tools, rather than knowledge.