Alternative Conceptions

This section is designed to look at each of the three lesson at IslandWood that teach glaciers, earthquakes, and cultural movements, and outline areas that students may have difficulty with and/or inhibit student understanding.

The following four items outline what the IslandWood audience may have difficulty with understanding, and should clarify simple misunderstandings:

The Erratic Walk (glaciers)

A Slice in Time (earthquakes)

What Would You Do? (cultural movements)

Time

Not all rocks are erratics, and although all rocks have a known provenience (an exact location), the process of glacial plucking carries many varying sizes, and the process of weathering and erosion may transform the rocks further since deposition.
The rocks mapped in this lesson are large boulders, and are not easily moved.

Despite the impression that they move quickly in the video, glaciers move slowly over the land. Glaciers move, depending on climate conditions between, upwards of fifteen meters per day, or 5000 meters per year (50 feet per day, or 3 miles per year) (Mayo 1984).

The intention of this lesson is to explore tangible evidence of glacial landscapes with inference.

Students need not understand plate tectonics, or the complexity of a subduction zone, but they must understand the basic mechanism of an earthquake. Every surface that rubs against another creates friction, and rocks, crustal plates, and faults are no different; an earthquake is movement caused by the release of this friction in the earth’s crust.
Although emphasis could be placed onto the types of earthquakes (i.e. deep, shallow, or subduction mentioned above), simple explanations of the three geologic principles are all that is needed.
Benchmarks have been established by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Science Education Standards, and the Washington Sate EALRs. Please consult standards more thorough guide to the corresponding matrixes.

It is a federal felony to disturb a known archaeological site, and the knowledge that we gain from this site and others includes a careful, methodical process to ensure that all parties involved do not distort the data.

Cultural sensitivity issues may arise if a Native American student is present, or when presenting how people used to live. It is important to note that the practice of archaeology (the method) makes assumptions about the way past peoples lived based upon the debitage (both naturally and culturally modified). It is also important to note that even though a shell midden is often associated with trash that may have been left behind, it may also have been an occupied living site — it cannot be referred to as a simple site for refuge.

The biggest difficulty in these lessons is the abstraction of time. The concept of deep time (beyond a known life time) in relation to the glaciers or the mega-thrust earthquake 1100 ybp are best understood as a long long time ago, but more recent than the dinosaurs. Several mnemonics exist to correlate time:

The football field: if we imagine formation of the earth as the length of a football field (100 yards), then life began on the 87 yard line, (Hamblin and Christensen 1995: )

The Geologic Column: scientists use this column to accurately measure the formation of the earth by naming distinct periods. For example, the most recent age, since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 ybp, is known as the Holocene. (Hamblin and Christensen 1995: ).

The Cosmic Calendar: the notable Carl Sagan developed the cosmic calendar, which condenses the formation of the universe and the earth into one calendar year. If the universe were created on January 1, the earth was formed on September 14 and life began on September 24. Dinosaurs appeared on December 24, and the first humans on December 31 at 10:30 pm. All of recorded history occurs in the last ten seconds, between 11:59:49 and 11:59:59 (Cross 1999).

For more information about time, and how long a billion is using seconds, use this time and origins power point (Dena 2001).

These pages were created by Matthew John Brewer on March 23, 2004 as part of the Graduate Program at IslandWood and fulfillment of the Independent Study Project.

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