Tamar the graduate

Yesterday was Tamar's graduation from 8th grade at Hilltown Charter School. We missed it, of course, being in Wyoming. Tamar will now go on to Northampton High School in the fall, which will be quite a change. She has been at Hilltown for her entire schooling thus far, and it has had a lot of  really great qualities - e.g., small classes, a strong sense of community, creativity, compassionate teachers that supported Tamar's partial hearing loss, a strong emphasis on the arts, etc. We always loved visiting there for Grandparents Day and concerts,  and inevitably felt that we would have loved going to a school like this! Tamar has loved Hilltown and I think she has thrived there. I hope NHS proves to be a good school for her also, but it is much bigger, organized in a more conventional way, more impersonal (I suspect). Max has been happy there, but Max is not Tamar.

Tamar doing the "Cartesian Diver" *  experiment at Hilltown while her Grandmother Doris watches

One of the many drawings Tamar did at Hilltown

A typical bulletin  board at Hilltown  - all the students finished the sentence "I am..." on a piece of colored paper

Tamar

*The Cartesian Diver Experiment
Fill a plastic water bottle with water, put in an eye dropper with just enough water in it so that it barely floats, and cap the bottle. Squeeze the sides of the bottle: the eye dropper sinks; let go, it rises!

How Does It Work?

The Cartesian diver, named after French philosopher and scientist René Descartes, works because of several factors. When you squeeze the sides of the bottle, you are increasing the pressure on the liquid inside. That increase in pressure is transmitted to every part of the liquid. That means you are also increasing pressure on the eye dropper itself. Squeeze hard enough and you will push some more water up inside the dropper. The air inside the dropper squeezes tighter as more water is forced in.

Increasing The Density

Now, water is much denser than air. So when you push more water inside the dropper, you increase its overall density. Once its density is greater than that of its surroundings, it will sink. Release the pressure on the bottle’s sides and you stop forcing water inside the eye- dropper. The air inside it will now push out the extra water again, and the eye-dropper will rise. That’s the Cartesian Diver!