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Author Archives: Mr. Bigler
Escalating and De-Escalating
One of the things I have the hardest time watching at school is when a teacher or administrator starts challenging a student over some infraction, and the student doesn’t immediately capitulate. +2-4
Egg On My Head
Today two groups of students successfully dropped raw eggs onto my head from the roof of the school as I walked underneath. Last week another group of students did the same thing. +2-4
Students Taking Charge of Their Learning
One of the things I appreciate about this year’s students is the way they take charge of their own learning. +3-7
Self Esteem
Most teenagers are fragile. Their self-image is often built on a shaky foundation and altogether too often hinges on things their friends, parents, teachers, and other might say by chance. +80
Happy Parents
Parents’ Night was last Thursday. I had a long line for the whole evening–I seem to be quite a few students’ favorite teacher, and several of their parents wanted to meet me in person. +4-4
Physics in 5 Seconds
Every year I introduce inquiry labs and lab write-ups by giving my students a lab to do at home. They bring in the result and present it to the class and then they write it up in their lab notebooks. … Continue reading
“We’ve never had this problem before.”
That was my department head’s tongue-in-cheek comment to me on Friday morning when yet another student asked for her signature to switch into physics. Some of the students had successfully switched in. Some clearly did not have the math background … Continue reading
Physics Day 6: Everything You Need to Pass the Final Exam
Once in a while I’ll come up with and use a teaching idea that I think is going to fail, but I’ll do it anyway because I think it will fail in a useful way. This time I was wrong: … Continue reading
Grading and Grading Systems
I think the question that some people are trying to ask but
haven’t quite done so is, “How much should performance on one topic
affect the grade for the entire course?” Continue reading
Success Strategies in the Learning Center
I just gave my students a test on stoichiometry. As I was grading them, I noticed that all of the students who had taken the test in the Learning Center had identical wrong answers to the free response questions. One … Continue reading