MOUNT VERNON — Earlier this week, the Mount Vernon Board of Education announced it was hiring an independent investigator to determine if allegations against middle school science teacher John Freshwater were true. Those allegations include the accusation that Freshwater burned a cross on the forearm of a student while conducting an experiment using an electrostatic device.
Former Mount Vernon Middle School science teacher Jeff George told the Mount Vernon News for a story Thursday that static electricity experiments were typical parts of the curriculum when he worked along side Freshwater in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Freshwater has yet to talk directly with the News about allegations or his experiment, we are uncertain of the exact device in question. However, George said that in his lessons he used Telsa coils and the Vandergraph conductor, a smaller version of a device found at COSI that sends your hair in all directions when touched.
The News talked with Cindy Harvel, a physics professor at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, about such experiments and she even demonstrated the use of a Vandergraph generator.
“The Vandergraph generator is just a device that is helping us to learn just a little bit more about electromagnetic energy,” Harvel said.
When used as a source of energy for a group experiment, such as performed in Freshwater’s class, the Vandergraph generator passes a small amount of electricity from the initial participant that lessens as it passes from one person to the next.
“When we have a whole group of students in here, we talk about how resistance helps to balance out the electrons. I’ll have one student touch it and they’ll get the shock and the second student will touch that first student’s hand. The shock will be a little bit less. The next student a little bit less. We eventually get to the place where everybody in the classroom is holding hands and that last person will generally feel nothing, especially if it is a damp day out,” Harvel said. “We use that to show the principal of resistance and the more the resistance there is in the circuit, the less each person actually feels the shock.”
Harvel went on to say that if she felt the experiment would in any way harm her students, she would not do it in her classroom.
According to Harvel, even though equipment designed for use in educational labs are safe to use in the classroom, anything in those labs can cause harm if used improperly.
“Any science material can be misused; any science material. Think of all the chemicals in a chemistry laboratory. But used in the proper hands, it’s a wonderful tool for learning to get your students excited about science,” she said.
