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Author Archives: Mr. Bigler
An Argument Against Heterogeneous Grouping
In my experience, kids want to be in classes that move at their pace, including the low-level kids. +5-1
Combatting Cheating
At the beginning of the year, I choose a number between 0 and 1000 to two decimal places and write it on a piece of paper. I offer 100% on the first test to any student in the room who … Continue reading
High-Level Thinking Skills
As we approach the end of the school year, I find myself getting more and more frustrated about my students’ struggles with high-level thinking. Every year, it seems like they’re less and less able to figure out how to solve … Continue reading
Understanding vs. Getting The Right Answer
In a post on the ChemEd-L email discussion list, Harry Pence wrote: There is a common assumption that if students can do the calculations, they understand what the calculations mean. I didn’t always find this to be true. This is … Continue reading
Summer Assignments in AP Chemistry
I always make my students a promise: that I’ll never give them “busy work”—that I’ll only give as much homework as I think it takes to master a particular skill. Of course, I point out that this means that any … Continue reading
If At First You Don’t Succeed…
There’s a Murphy’s Law-style saying that goes, “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.” When it comes to teaching a high school lab science course, I would say that the opposite is … Continue reading
Teaching Graphing
Some day, one of my students will write a book entitled, Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Math I learned in Chemistry Class. Somehow, in The Emperor’s New Frameworks the post MCAS world, being able to read a graph … Continue reading
Feedback from College
One of my students from last year came in this afternoon to ask a couple of questions about topics she was a little confused about from her freshman general chemistry class at BU. After we talked about her questions, we … Continue reading
How To Get Students to Pass Tests Without Knowing Anything
Last night in my adolescent psychology class, one of the other teachers was describing how he prepared his students for an upcoming test. His review covered two full class days, and it basically amounted to him giving his students all … Continue reading
Clinging to What We Think We Understand
Einstein once said Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed. +20