Category Archives: Anecdotes

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

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Presenting at ChemEd 2011

My workshop proposal for this summer’s ChemEd 2011 conference has been accepted, so I will be presenting a workshop entitled Converting Existing “Cookbook” Laboratory Experiments to Inquiry Format at this year’s conference. +5-1

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Learned Confidence

…is the closest phrase I can come up with that could be the antithesis of learned helplessness. +2-3

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Helping Teenagers to Be Nice

One of the legacies from my mom is that I try to be unfailingly positive with my students, and I encourage and expect the same from them. I have a set of classroom signs that I post all around the … Continue reading

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Peel & Eat Kleenex Follow-Up

Almost four years ago, I posted the original Peel & Eat Kleenex: I Double Dog Dare You! story. A couple of weeks ago, I told the story to my department chair. Being a scientist, she decided that she needed to … Continue reading

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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

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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

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Students and Parents

This is kind of a stream of consciousness post. The school year has been in full swing now for long enough to start to get to know and understand several of my students as people rather than names in a … Continue reading

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Untold Stories

I work at being the kind of teacher my students are comfortable with and are willing to talk to if they need to. One way I develop and foster this comfort level is that one of my first assignments to … Continue reading

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Spending a Saturday Morning With Students

Five of the students from my AP Chemistry class participated in the Avery Ashdown High School Chemistry Examination Contest in Boston yesterday. +4-1

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