When I’m teaching, I live for teachable moments. Right now, I’m teaching my physics students about fluids—pressure and hydraulics, to be followed by buoyancy, gas laws, and Bernoulli’s Principle. However, today one of my students innocently asked, “Maybe you can explain something I’ve never understood. How can a boat float if it’s made of something denser than water?” So I rearranged the schedule on the spot.
When we get to buoyancy, scheduled for next week, I had planned to do a class activity in which lab groups are given a piece of aluminum foil to make a boat, and the contest is to see which boat can hold the most weight before it sinks. So I answered the student’s question with a slightly more abbreviated description of how buoyancy works, followed by the activity.
The students enjoyed it thoroughly. The winning boat carried a payload of 117 times its own weight, which I thought was pretty good for their having had no time to think about the problem in advance. And while the lesson was less well planned than it would have been if I had waited until next week, I think the spontaneity and relevance caused it to be much more effective.
Part of what prompted me to write about this activity is that one of my colleagues just came back from participating in a NEASC accreditation at another high school. Evidently, NEASC has jumped on the “data driven” bandwagon, and is recommending that the school in question work toward common lessons, common schedules, and common exams. Unfortunately, one of the things that gets lost when schools try to move in lockstep is the kind of responsiveness that allows me to teach buoyancy when the kids are receptive to it, instead of waiting until it comes up on the calendar. Teachers are supposed to differentiate instruction, in order to better teach to the needs of our students. However, a big piece of what makes differentiation work is the ability to be flexible with instruction, assessment, and the calendar. Students and teachers need to be able to be human, not interchangeable parts in some sort of Orwellian knowledge factory.
Orwellian knowledge factory would be a great name for a band.